The pencil and the prison of ‘indoctrinated’ Ideas

By any measure, Mehedi Haque knows his craft. For years he has drawn political cartoons for New Age, one of the few newspapers that retained a dissenting editorial identity under Nurul Kabir during Sheikh Hasina's long authoritarian rule. 

While much of Bangladesh's media landscape bent toward power, New Age continued, within obvious limits, to ask questions many others would not.

Mehedi worked within those limits. His political cartoons appeared intermittently, but they appeared. They reflected an awareness of repression that many in the profession preferred to ignore. 

At a time when editors crowded around Hasina at press conferences with embarrassingly deferential questions—including why she had not received the Nobel Peace Prize—Nurul Kabir's newsroom still attempted to preserve the basic instinct of journalism: skepticism toward power.

It is precisely for that reason that Mehedi cannot be dismissed as a willing accomplice of authoritarianism. He was not among the many journalists who effectively transformed newsrooms into extensions of the state's public relations machinery during Hasina's fifteen-year rule.

That is what makes his recent works so revealing.

The problem is not that Mehedi lacks courage or intelligence. It is that he illustrates something along the lines that shaped much of Bangladesh's secular urban intelligentsia under a dictatorial indoctrination. The habits of thought cultivated during years of authoritarian rule survived the collapse of that regime. 

Institutions changed faster than instincts did. One does not spend a decade and a half inside an ideological ecosystem without absorbing some of its assumptions.

That legacy is visible in the way Bangladesh continues to be interpreted through binaries constructed during the Awami League era. Those binaries became so deeply embedded that even many critics of the government unconsciously adopted them. The vocabulary of authoritarianism outlived the authoritarian state itself.

It would be difficult to believe that Mehedi somehow failed to witness what unfolded under Sheikh Hasina: years marked by allegations of widespread extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances, mass arrests and unprecedented corruption. Nor could he have overlooked the bloodshed of July 2024 or the violence directed at religious minorities and dissenting voices.

He knew. Like every ‘politically conscious artist' in Bangladesh, he also understood the price of depicting those realities too directly.

The imprisonment and torture of cartoonist Ahmed Kabir Kishore demonstrated what happened when satire crossed the state's invisible red lines. That lesson did not need repeating. Every cartoonist understood it. Every editor understood it. Silence, in many cases, was survival instead of an approval.

The more troubling question concerns the society that surrounded that silence.

Had Mehedi faced the fate of Kishore, would Bangladesh's influential secular left-leaning establishment have sustained its outrage? Or would it, like so many other abuses during those years, eventually have been rationalized as an unfortunate but necessary sacrifice for political stability and economic development?

That was the real achievement of authoritarianism. It was not merely that critics feared the state. It was that much of society gradually stopped defending those who challenged it.

The Roman emperor Commodus, in the movie Gladiator, declares that he would destroy Maximus's reputation before taking his life. Modern authoritarian systems often pursue something similar. Physical repression is only one instrument. Moral isolation is another.

A dissident can survive prison. It is far harder to survive when the country's intellectual establishment decides that defending him is no longer worth the inconvenience. And that context matters when evaluating Mehedi's recent work.

He is fully entitled to describe the interim government’s period as Bangladesh's darkest political moment if that is his judgment. He is entitled to argue that Islamist forces have become more visible or more influential under the Interim Government. Political cartoonists exist precisely to make provocative arguments.

The question is not whether he has the right to draw those cartoons. The question is why those particular dangers dominate his imagination while others recede almost entirely from view.

Mehedi understands, perhaps instinctively, that publishing a cartoon targeting docile and ‘tabooed’ political actors does not carry the same risks it would have carried under Hasina. He may still face threats from violent extremists; Bangladesh's history of attacks on secular writers and bloggers makes that possibility impossible to dismiss.

But there is a fundamental difference.

Under the previous regime, criticism invited the machinery of the state itself. Today, whatever criticisms may be made of the Interim Government, the institutional equation has changed. A cartoonist no longer confronts the same certainty of state retaliation simply for satirizing those in power.

That difference matters.

It also explains why cartoons targeting figures such as [PM] Tarique Rahman could appear immediately after August 5 without provoking the consequences that would almost certainly have followed under the previous government.

Another inconsistency appears in Mehedi's portrayal of accountability after July 2024.

He suggests that little meaningful progress has occurred. Yet the post-uprising authorities invited the United Nations Human Rights Office to conduct an independent investigation into the July killings—an extraordinary step in Bangladesh's political history. Sheikh Hasina's political dominance ended. Judicial proceedings followed. 

Whether one supports or opposes those proceedings, they represent developments without precedent in modern Bangladesh. One may also debate their fairness or effectiveness. One cannot reasonably pretend they never happened.

Likewise, horrific crimes such as the killing of a Hindu garment worker or the desecration of a Sufi shrine deserve unequivocal condemnation. But isolated atrocities become analytically misleading when presented as evidence of a country's defining condition rather than as exceptional crimes demanding prosecution.

Political cartoons compress reality into symbols. Their power lies precisely in simplification. Their weakness lies there too.

Mehedi's latest cartoons depicting an Islamist takeover ultimately reproduces a narrative that has circulated for years through Awami League messaging and significant sections of the Indian media: that Bangladesh's political alternatives consist only of secular authoritarianism or the Taliban.

It is a familiar binary. Under that framework, anyone opposing the Awami League becomes, by definition, an Islamist. Political distinctions collapse and ideological diversity disappears. Complex coalitions become indistinguishable from religious extremism.

That was one of the central propaganda achievements of the Hasina era. Its persistence after her departure suggests that some of its most durable victories were intellectual rather than political.

Mehedi Haque remains free to draw whatever he wishes. Political cartoonists should enjoy that freedom without qualification.

And the rest of us remain equally free to argue that, in this instance, his pencil has not escaped the frame constructed by the very political order it once sought, however cautiously, to resist.

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Faisal Mahmud is the Managing Editor of Daily Waadaa