Recently I came across a few sentences while skimming through the comments posted as reactions to a news report in the social media, Facebook. The report is about how a person, who was apparently a leader of the student-people movement, revealed himself as the president of Islami Chhatra Shibir’s Dhaka University unit. The comment claimed that Islami Chhatra Shibir occupied cyberspace in Bangladesh from the very beginning of the movement.
This writing is neither about an analysis of the ideologies followed by the Islami Chhatra Shibir, the student wing of Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami, nor about judging that ideology. The point is something else.
Newspapers reported in January 2021 that the governing Awami League of the time was planning to create a huge number of 100,000 cyberwarriors to “fight negative propaganda” against the party and the government, spreading information of the government’s “ongoing development spree” and the spirit of liberation war online.
The party was thinking of producing “cyberwarriors” in 2021, some 13 years after the people of Bangladesh came across a new coinage - Digital Bangladesh - back in 2008 through the AL’s election manifesto. The process started after the party’s general secretary Obaidul Quader underscored the necessity of online activism at a meeting.
By May 2021, media reports said that the party had by that time created such a force of 45,000-strong, who had kept “everything under control online”. One of such reports quoted AFM Bahauddin Nasim, a central leader of the Awami League in this regard.
But some of the media reported in July 2024 that the Awami League’s “cyberwarriors” had not just failed to do what they were supposed to, actually they were no match against “the forces they were fighting against”.
Leaders of Bangladesh Chhatra League became vocal at this point during the movement of Students Against Discrimination about the abject failure of the much hyped “cyberwarriors”. At least one of the former BCL leaders, Akheruz Zaman Takim, tagged former state minister for information and communication technology Zunaid Ahmed Palak in his status on Facebook. The post claimed that the “cyberwarriors” were actually made by picking up the activists of Islami Chhatra Shibir from various educational institutions including the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET).
A party that always talked against Islami Chhatra Shibir, not only was unaware of being infiltrated by the ICS activists, but also it actively picked up those activists for higher training, it seems!
However, the state minister, like a “seasoned politician” made a call for shunning political vengeance during “this time of national crisis” (actually the party government’s crisis) and stressed on “forging unity”.
Nothing of this worked; the movement became stronger and turned into a mass uprising as people from all walks of life joined it and the government fell on 5 August.
After 24 days of the fall of Sheikh Hasina-led Awami League government, Prothom Alo carried a report on 29 August - Awami League’s coordinated bot network on Facebook exposed.
According to the report, before and after the 12th Jatiya Sangsad election (took place in January this year), fake Facebook profiles were used on behalf of the AL to post comments on the Facebook pages of various media and opposition parties. Those fake Facebook profiles were operated by means of a bot network (automated system). They made identical comments on various posts and the same comments were posted from various profiles.
Travesty of the fate is that the bot network was unearthed as six months after the election, the “users” were still criticising BNP and were expressing their expectations for a successful and fair general election! The comments also said that the election will be held under the government in power.
2.
Since the fall of the Awami League government, media reports galore about the corruption that took place during the increasingly growing iron-fisted regime in 15 years at a stretch, from 2009 to 5 August 2024. Many of the reports indicate that the topmost leader was aware of the corrupt practices. But the party leaders probably forgot the adage - what goes around comes around. They allowed corruption in abundance and those gargantuan vile acts seeped into the party’s project to create “cyberwarriors” that led to the party’s inevitable failure in online activities.