The Final Posts of a Murdered Blogger

The Atlantic

 “No one with a free mind can limit themselves within the walls of narrow-mindedness,” Ananta Bijoy Das wrote hours before his death.

"Earlier this week, as he left for work, Ananta Bijoy Das was ambushed by four masked men outside his home in Sylhet, Bangladesh. Armed with machetes, the men—suspected Islamist militants—hacked Das to death in broad daylight on a busy street in the country’s fifth-largest city.

"Das’s crime was that he blogged. A writer critical of religious fundamentalism and enthusiastic about science, his fate matched that of two other men, Avijit Roy and Washiqur Rahman, who were killed in similar fashion in Bangladesh in February and March, respectively, for writing on and promoting secular themes in a country where 90 percent of the population is Muslim.

"Das’s work has been described as the least controversial of the three. “He had written about superstitions, but he wasn’t among the writers that would hurt the sentiments of religion,” one of Das’s friends told The Guardian. The friend added, however, that the frequency of death threats against Das had surged following the killings of Roy and Rahman." . . .

Das was a citizen of a nominally secular state. But that state has been failing to safeguard free speech and demand accountability for machete-wielding fundamentalists. Das wasn’t the first blogger killed; he was the third in three months. Bangladeshi politics are polarized between secular and Islamist camps, and, according to the BBC, the government has recently been cracking down “on civil liberties and freedom of speech … affecting both religious fundamentalists and those who argue for free speech and for faith to be separate from government.”