Dhaka's secular claims gets soaked in blood as another Bangladeshi blogger is killed

Bangladesh’s blogger community has suffered its fourth casualty this year with 40-year-old Niloy Chatterjee being hacked to death on Friday afternoon by five machete-wielding assailants at his apartment in the North Gorhan area of Dhaka. [caption id=“attachment_2383508” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Murdered Bangladeshi blogger Niloy Chatterjee. Image courtesy Niloy Chatterjee’s Facebook page[/caption] The Hindu reports that he “was killed by unidentified assailants inside his fourth-floor flat at North Gorhan in the capital Dhaka around 1:45 PM on Friday”. The newspaper adds that Niloy, who lived with his family, was an activist of the Ganajagaran Mancha, a platform demanding capital punishment for the 1971 war criminals. An organiser of the Science and Rationalist Association of Bangladesh, Neel “feared for his life after the killing spree started in Bangladesh earlier this year”, reports India Today. Before joining the Ganajagaran Mancha, Niloy — who blogged under the name Niloy Neel — had completed his Masters of Philosophy from Dhaka University in 2013. This is the fourth instance in an increasingly violent trend of secular bloggers being brutally murdered for their views. Ananta Bijoy Das In May, fellow Gonojagoron Moncho member Ananta Bijoy Das was hacked to death by four masked assailants in the Subid Bazar area of Sylhet city. A Dhaka Tribune report stated that the 32-year-old was attacked on 12 May at around 8:30 am when he was on his way to the bank at which he was employed. Washiqur Rahman Babu Described by The Daily Star as a “staunch critic of religious fundamentalism” 27-year-old Washiqur Rahman Babu was killed in similar fashion on 30 March. He was attacked by three cleaver-wielding youths in Dhaka’s Tejgaon Industrial area at around 9 am. The report quotes his fellow online activists as saying that his “Facebook posts often triggered backlash for his freethinking and stance against religious bigotry”. Avijit Roy  Bangladeshi-American blogger, author and engineer, Avijit Roy was killed on 26 February, while his wife and fellow blogger Rafida Ahmed Bonya was severely injured. According to Dhaka Tribune, the 42-year-old and his wife were attacked by two cleaver-wielding assailants near the Teacher-Student Centre of Dhaka University at 8:45 pm, following which he succumbed to his injuries in hospital. Mukto-Mona, a blog that champions “Science, Rationalism, Humanism and Freethinking” was founded by Avijit and counted Ananta among its contributors. An entry published on the blog two days before Niloy’s murder contained the following chilling assessment of today’s Bangladesh titled ‘ Following Saudi Arabia blindly’: “(The)US is debating over which one is worse: ISIS or Al-Qaeda? Pakistan is shuttling between Good Taliban and Bad Taliban. We in Bangladesh don’t have any such problem. We judge ourselves how far ‘Arab’ we have become”. In a BBC interview on 5 July, when asked about whether Bangladesh was a secular country, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina claimed that religious harmony had been “ensured”. Based on the audacious murders of these bloggers, she has a long way to go before those words translate into practice.