1 Politics of restraint: The media and the Chittagong Hill Tracts 1 Hana Shams Ahmed Freelance Writer Introduction: problems of Bengali nationalism This chapter explores the problematic relationship that exists between the Bangladeshi state and its periphery, in particular the Chittagong Hill Tracts (hereafter CHT) and the degree of involvement of the media in constructing the discourses that encompass this relationship. The CHT is a borderland area and therefore volatile and marginal. As van Schendel points out ‘borders need to be constantly maintained and socially reproduced through particular practices and discourses’ (van Schendel, 2005: 11). In a region that can be characterized in a number of ways: as the ‘periphery of the periphery’ (van Schendel, 2001: 4), as ‘marginal, remote and irrelevant’ (van Schendel, 2005: 1) or perversely as a protective barrier against the ‘other’, in this case the suspected territorial ambitions of India, the CHT region has come to represent a vector for abusing and misdirecting Bangladeshi nationalism. The particular practices that have been deliberately misrepresented by the media are the protagonists in the conflict in the region (especially post-1997), the systematic abuse of human rights and the militarization of the region to such an extent that CHT is the only militarized area in Bangladesh. The discourses describing these practices are varied and often contradictory, ranging from the official, which set out the reasons for the central control of the region to those of the human rights organizations who characterize Bangladeshi state behavior in CHT as a form of ‘armed occupation’. Straddling these two discourses are those of the Bangladeshi media, which has been, at various times excluded from the region or given limited access, but has always been urged to ‘exercise restraint’ (van Schendel, 2005: 13) in reporting the region’s affairs. Whether they have been restrained or not, they have managed to construct ambivalent discourses that, on one extreme, conform to the narratives of nationalism that coincide with the official view while 1 Published in, ‘Bangladesh’s Changing Media Landscape’ by University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh and Intellect Books, 2014. (Url: http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/B/bo12321267.html )