Death by Blasphemy

I’m writing this post today because I think I know that barring natural causes or a horrific accident, I’ll probably be alive reading the response that you so considerately are going to write in the comments section. But it is not so for a lot of other bloggers and by ‘other’, I mean bloggers in Bangladesh who don’t know whether they’ll be alive to see their message reach their readers or not. They don’t know if they are safe even within the sanctity of their homes.

Image Courtesy: The Hindu.

Two bloggers are already dead in our neighbouring nation because they apparently wrote blasphemous stuff on their blogs. They were supposedly atheists who wrote critically of religion. I’m not sure of the content of their writing but the answer to anything is never violence. It’s not that things cannot be solved that way, but it is nobody’s right to inflict it on another.

Obviously, it is wrong to write hateful things about other religions and their leaders and so on and so forth but the punishment for that cannot be death. Causing mass agitation and public anger can be argued to have severe consequence but death for anything without the due process of law is something I believe no brand of religion would condone.

Freedom of Expression is a basic right that cannot be taken away from anyone and those radicals who seek to do so cannot claim to be doing it on religious grounds. These people need psychiatric treatment and a thorough explanation of how civilized society is supposed to function.

It is not that I’m supporting the bloggers without knowing what they wrote. It is easy for a writer to become a terrorist and even if an assumption is made that they wrote something that could and did hurt religious feelings, I think the due process of law in Bangladesh could have taken care of the matter. In any case, writing anything against anyone is no reason for violence and it certainly didn’t make these two bloggers legitimate targets.

Radical behaviour has become quite the norm, not only in one country but across the board. Fanaticism is rampant In India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, the entirety of Middle-East Asia, Northern Africa and Europe as well. Tolerance and co-habitation seem to be ideas of the past as different coloured flags are followed by the same weapons, murdering people with the same colour of blood.