International Mother Language Day is observed today to promote awareness of linguistic and cultural diversity and multilingualism.
The date February 21 corresponds to the day in 1952 when students from the University of Dhaka, Jagannath University and Dhaka Medical College demonstrating for the recognition of Bengali as one of the two national languages of then East Pakistan (present Bangladesh), were shot dead by police in Dhaka.
"The idea of February 21 language movement by our ancestors was to establish a Bangladesh where there will be freedom of speech, expression and free thought. But at present that very idea which later on snowballed into the liberation war in 1971, is under threat from fundamentalist forces like Jamat," leading blogger Imran H Sarkar, who was one of the main architects behind the 2013 Shahbag protests, told PTI.
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According to Sarkar, the attack on free thought and liberal minded intellectuals started just after the Shahbag movement in Bangladesh in February 2013 when protests had rocked with demands of capital punishment for war criminals of 1971.
"The first blogger was killed in February 2013, and in 2015 four other bloggers were hacked to death who were critical of the rise of fundamentalism and were demanding severe punishments for the 1971 war criminals," Sarkar said.
The elimination of bloggers started in February 2013 with the killing of Ahmed Rajib Haider followed by American- Bangladeshi writer Avijit Roy in February 2015 followed by Washiqur Rahman in March, Ananta Bijay Das in May and Niladri Chattopadhyay Niloy in 2015.
"There is a need to defeat the fundamentalist forces and