On January 20, 2014, The Daily Star published a piece by two of its senior journalists, Shakhawat Liton and Inam Ahmed, eviscerating Begum Khaleda Zia. The article, titled “Dangerous insinuation, distortion of facts,” accused the former prime minister of lying in a public speech, patronizing militant outfits, and stoking communal fears for political gain. The tone was prosecutorial. The framing left no room for ambiguity. Khaleda Zia was a danger. Her words could not be trusted.
Eleven years later, Khaleda Zia died. And Shakhawat Liton wrote her obituary.
In The Business Standard’s tribute published December 2025, Liton cast the same woman in a different light. Her 1991 election victory became a “catalyst for change,” ushering in economic reforms, trade liberalization, and expanded girls’ education. Gone was any mention of the covert arrangement with Jamaat-e-Islami that Liton himself had once condemned in an op-ed for Pakistan’s Dawn newspaper. Gone was the accusation that Khaleda Zia had appointed a known 1971 peace committee collaborator to the presidency. The prose glowed where it once burned.
The politician had not changed. The facts had not changed. The political weather had.
Three weeks ago, Tarique Rahman took his oath as Prime Minister at the South Plaza of the Jatiya Sangsad. His BNP won 209 of 297 declared seats, a landslide that ended the interim period and returned Bangladesh to elected government for the first time since the July 2024 uprising. Jamaat-e-Islami took 68 seats to become the principal opposition. The student-led National Citizen Party entered parliament with six. And now, as a new government assembles its 49-member cabinet and begins to govern, the question that should concern every journalist in this country is not who holds power. It is whether we will, once again, serve whoever does.
Loyalty that shifts with the wind
The two documents at the heart of this story follow the same cast of characters across two decades and two newspapers. Shakhawat Liton and Inam Ahmed built their careers at The Daily Star, Bangladesh’s most influential English-language daily, before moving to senior positions at The Business Standard, where Ahmed now serves as editor and Liton as deputy executive editor.
During the Awami League years, their reporting constructed a sustained portrait of Tarique Rahman and former state minister Lutfuzzaman Babar as figures at the center of corruption and political violence. Drawing on court proceedings, investigation files, and witness accounts, they described Hawa Bhaban as a parallel power center where Tarique Rahman exercised authority through informal channels. They traced how Babar’s name surfaced in connection with militant networks and political violence, including the August 21, 2004 grenade attack on an Awami League rally. They portrayed corruption as a system involving banks, shell entities, and international jurisdictions.
The reporting was detailed and sourced. It relied on judicial records and investigation findings. And it arrived under a government that had every interest in seeing these stories told.
When the Awami League fell on August 5, 2024, multiple sources allege that several of these same articles vanished from The Business Standard’s website. The evidence that once seemed so urgent, so necessary for public accountability, became inconvenient under new political realities.
Meanwhile, Inam Ahmed had served as secretary general of the Editors’ Guild led by Mozammel Babu, a body widely viewed as partisan and aligned with the Hasina government during its final years. This was not a case of a journalist caught in the crossfire between competing loyalties. It was proximity to power, formalized and institutional.
The missing context that tells the story
What makes the 2014 attack on Khaleda Zia instructive is what it left out.
Liton and Ahmed accused Khaleda Zia and her BNP government of patronizing the Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh, or JMB. They did not mention that JMB was established in 1997, during an Awami League government. They dismissed her claim that the ruling party bore responsibility for post-election violence against the Hindu community. Eight days before their article ran, BBC Bangla had published a report of their Bangladesh Sanglap program in which Awami League leader Asaduzzaman Noor admitted that members of his own party had carried out attacks on minorities. “I admit it,” Noor said. “Such an incident has occurred somewhere.” Liton and Ahmed did not reference this admission.
This is selective emphasis at its most corrosive. The individual facts in each article may survive scrutiny. The framing does not. When you present one side’s claims as dangerous fabrication while burying evidence that supports them, you are not reporting. You are prosecuting on behalf of an unnamed client.
The mirror image problem
The temptation here is to see this as an Awami League problem, a story about journalists who served Sheikh Hasina’s government and attacked her rivals. But the pattern runs both ways. Khaleda Zia’s BNP years produced their own stable of compliant editors and obliging headlines. Every government in Bangladesh’s history has found willing partners in the press — journalists who traded independence for access, advertising revenue, or simple survival in a political environment where the wrong editorial line could bring the state’s full weight down on a newspaper.
The Awami League version was more sophisticated. It operated through formal institutions like the Editors’ Guild. It benefited from the global prestige of English-language media. It wrapped its persecution of press freedom in the language of combating extremism and defending liberation values. But the underlying transaction was the same one BNP offered its favored editors during its own tenure: serve us, and we will protect you. Cross us, and we will remember.
This is the double bind that has trapped Bangladeshi journalism for decades. Newspapers that should function as the loyal opposition — holding power accountable regardless of who wields it — instead function as rotating mouthpieces. The masthead stays the same. The target changes. The method is identical: selective sourcing, strategic omission, and the framing of contested political claims as settled fact when it serves the interests of whoever sits in Dhaka.
What honest journalism looks like
None of this means that Tarique Rahman deserved no scrutiny. The Hawa Bhaban allegations, the grenade attack case, the financial trail through infrastructure contracts: these are legitimate subjects for investigative reporting. No serious journalist would argue otherwise. Khaleda Zia’s government record, her political rhetoric, her alliances: all fair game. And now that her son leads the country, every decision his cabinet makes deserves the same skeptical attention that any responsible press would give any government.
The problem was never the subject matter. The problem is the timing, the selectivity, and the servility.
Honest journalism would have reported on Hawa Bhaban’s alleged corruption when the Awami League was in power and continued reporting on it when the Awami League fell. It would not have deleted articles from its own website when the political winds shifted. It would have included the BBC Bangla report that undercut its own narrative. It would have noted that JMB formed under a different government. It would not have written an obituary that erased everything it once considered vital to the public record.
Honest journalism treats the facts as fixed points and the government as a moving variable. What we have seen in Bangladesh is the opposite: the government treated as the fixed point and the facts arranged around it.
The test begins now
On February 17, Tarique Rahman stood at the South Plaza of the Parliament Complex and pledged to preserve, protect, and defend the constitution. He spoke of law and order and anticorruption measures. He told the nation that those who voted for BNP and those who did not have equal rights to this government. These were fine words. They deserve to be measured against action.
And this is where Bangladeshi journalism must prove it has learned something from the past three decades.
The BNP now commands a two-thirds majority. Jamaat-e-Islami sits in formal opposition with 68 seats. The NCP holds six. The July Charter, approved by 60 percent of voters in the referendum, outlines constitutional reforms including a bicameral parliament, term limits, and strengthened judicial independence. Every one of these developments demands rigorous, independent coverage from a press that answers to the public and not to the ruling party.
Will the newspapers that once attacked Tarique Rahman under Awami League patronage now flatter him under his own government? Will the outlets that praised Hasina’s economic record for fifteen years turn their forensic attention to BNP’s promised ten million jobs and family card program? Will the opposition parties — including Jamaat and the NCP — receive fair coverage of their parliamentary role, or will they be framed through the lens of whatever narrative the new government prefers?
These questions are not abstract. They describe choices that editors and reporters across Bangladesh are making right now, in March 2026, as the new political order takes shape around them.
The newsrooms we love deserve better from us
I write this as someone who loves Bangladeshi journalism. The Daily Star, The Business Standard, Prothom Alo: these institutions matter. They employ talented reporters who do difficult work under dangerous conditions. Mahfuz Anam’s staff faced mob attacks in December 2025. Journalists across the country risk their safety every day to report stories that the powerful would prefer stayed buried.
That courage makes the servility harder to bear. When talented journalists bend their work to suit the government of the day, they betray their own best instincts. They betray their colleagues who take the real risks. And they betray a public that needs honest information to govern itself.
Bangladesh just held what international observers called one of its most peaceful and credible elections in decades. Nearly 60 percent of 127 million eligible voters turned out. They chose a new parliament across party lines: BNP, Jamaat, NCP, independents. They approved a constitutional reform charter. They did their part. The question is whether the press will do its.
We serve the truth. We speak truth to power. We do not serve power’s whims.
That sentence is easy to write and hard to live. But this is the moment. The old binary of BNP versus Awami League that defined Bangladeshi politics for 35 years has shattered. A new parliament with new faces and new parties has taken shape. If Bangladeshi journalism cannot find its independence now, in the most open political space this country has seen in a generation, then it never will.
The throne will always find new occupants. The question is whether we will find journalists who refuse to kneel.