You can sue Salman. You can’t sue a perception

Imagine you have built the studio of your dreams on a disputed piece of land. Perhaps you got the place cheaply. Perhaps the owner offered an attractive deal precisely because the land came with the sort of paperwork that requires lawyers and several cups of tea.

Then, one night, “armed goons” arrive and wreck the place.

The civilised response, presumably, is to remain calm. You gather the deeds, leases, agreements, mutation papers and whatever else Bangladesh’s formidable bureaucracy has produced. You arrange them chronologically. 

Perhaps you make a Powerpoint presentation. Then you proceed politely to the police and explain that something rather unfortunate has happened to your studio.

But Salman Muqtadir made Ovodro Prem. One should perhaps not expect Powerpoint. So, he did what Salman Muqtadir does best…he went live on Facebook.

There, with his customary dry sarcasm, he displayed the wreckage of his Brownfish Studio and blamed the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, invoking extortion and the political culture surrounding it. He even broke through the social-media fourth wall by addressing Home Minister Salahuddin Ahmed, effectively telling him not to worry: this was Bangladesh, these things “happened,” everything was “perfectly normal.”

The irony was not particularly well concealed.

There was, however, an awkward detail. Salman apparently did not know who had vandalised his studio. Nor, according to Salahuddin’s subsequent account, had Salman said that anyone had directly demanded extortion money from him.

This is where the story becomes more interesting than another night of smashed furniture in Dhaka.

Salman has more than four million Facebook followers, a considerable number of them young. This is a generation that discovered only two years ago that Facebook posts, videos, memes and livestreams can spill out of the phone and into the streets. So, when someone with that audience makes an accusation against the ruling party, evidence suddenly becomes rather important.

BNP supporters were predictably furious. Some went as far as suggesting a gigantic defamation suit, figures such as $100 billion were thrown around, against Salman for making what they considered an “unsubstantiated allegation” that damaged the party’s “reputation.”

But here lies the difficulty…Salman Muqtadir is not really BNP’s problem.

The problem is that millions of people did not require much persuasion to understand what he was insinuating.

There is an old Friends joke that explains the predicament rather better than a political-science seminar could.

The six friends are sitting in Central Perk discussing something when Joey, characteristically, is not paying attention. He suddenly hears the word “marriage”, turns to Ross and asks why he is getting married again.

Ross tells him they were not discussing his marriage.

Joey, slightly embarrassed, explains that he heard “marriage” and naturally assumed Ross was getting married again. By then Ross had been married three times. His matrimonial record had become such a dependable source of comedy that Joey no longer required context. One word was enough.

This is approximately where BNP should start worrying.

You do not need Jamaat-Shibir, the NCP, “Gupto”, the Awami League or anybody else to conduct an elaborate propaganda operation. Find a politically uncommitted Bangladeshi, utter the word chandabaji — extortion — and see which political name comes to mind first.

The answer may be unfair. It may be based on anecdote, rumour, political prejudice or social-media amplification. It may have nothing whatsoever to do with Salman’s studio. But that is precisely the point.

Perception does not wait, let’s say, for a charge sheet.

Only a day before the Brownfish episode, another ugly incident took place at a 50-year-old maternal and child health and vaccination centre in Mirpur. The facility was demolished late at night by a large group. Once again, BNP’s name surfaced in the allegations surrounding the incident.

That does not establish BNP responsibility for either episode. Nor does putting two incidents beside each other magically turn allegations into evidence.

But politics is not a criminal court. Reputations are rarely assembled case by case, with exhibits marked A through Z and witnesses cross-examined under oath. They accumulate. A complaint here, a video there, an allegation somewhere else; eventually a word acquires an association.

That is the danger.

The temptation for a government is to attack the messenger. Demand evidence. Threaten defamation. Point out inconsistencies. Perhaps tighten the law governing online speech — say, through a sharper version of the old digital-security architecture wearing the newer clothes of the Cyber Protection Act.

None of this solves the underlying problem. You cannot legislate an association out of somebody’s head.

And no government seven months into office wants chandabaji becoming part of its political brand, least of all one headed by a prime minister who has made public displays of restraint and personal decency an important part of his governing style.

There is little point producing a laundry list of those gestures. Bangladeshis have seen them.

The harder question is whether personal conduct at the top can compensate for disorder, indiscipline or predatory behaviour attributed to people operating much further down the political food chain.

Sheikh Hasina left Bangladesh with many political inheritances, and one of the more corrosive ones was the insistence that the leader could remain above the sins committed beneath her: others were responsible; the centre was pure; unfortunate things happened, but never quite because of us.

Bangladeshis have heard variations of that argument for too long.

A government cannot secure the greater good merely by practising good manners at the summit while appearing unable to control what happens at street level. Nor can every embarrassing incident be answered indefinitely with the defence that the perpetrators were unauthorised, misidentified, expelled, infiltrators, opportunists or simply nothing to do with the party.

Sometimes those explanations will be true. Eventually, however, repetition itself becomes politically expensive.

That is why suing Salman, shouting at Salman or proving that Salman did not possess watertight evidence misses the larger point.

BNP’s problem is not what Salman Muqtadir said after his studio was vandalised. Its problem is how quickly people understood the joke.

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Faisal Mahmud is the Managing Editor of Daily Waadaa