Nilesh Haldar
Dhaka University
A two-day photo exhibition titled Rising Hills, Beyond the Frame recently opened at the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy, displaying images of daily life, economic hardship, and resilience among indigenous communities in the Chittagong Hill Tracts. Organised by the Manusher Jonno Foundation, it brought together participants from the United Nations Development Programme, UN Women, the European Union delegation, and government officials.
Speakers at the event spoke openly about the poor roads, water shortages, and limited healthcare that continue to affect hill communities decades after the CHT Peace Accord, and one international speaker pointed out that visual storytelling helps give voice to communities that remain chronically overlooked. That single remark gets at the core issue this article explores: indigenous culture in Bangladesh tends to attract attention only through occasional cultural events and donor funded projects, rather than through consistent mainstream journalistic coverage.
A Pattern of Episodic Visibility
Mainstream Bangladeshi media coverage of indigenous communities tends to follow a familiar rhythm. Attention spikes briefly around international observances, cultural festivals, or land conflict incidents, then fades almost entirely until the next notable event comes along. This pattern reflects what media scholars call event driven coverage, where a community becomes newsworthy only when something dramatic or ceremonial happens, rather than being treated as a subject deserving ongoing, contextual reporting.
Everyday concerns such as chronic healthcare gaps, educational access, or land rights disputes rarely get sustained follow up once the initial story fades. The exhibition itself, though a positive and necessary initiative, illustrates this dynamic well: it took a donor funded cultural programme, not routine news reporting, to bring these communities’ lived realities before a wider Dhaka audience.
Inclusivity and the Ethics of Representation
This pattern raises real questions about media inclusivity. Ethical journalism calls for a society’s full diversity to show up not as occasional colour but as a routine part of the national conversation. When indigenous communities appear in media mainly as subjects of cultural spectacle, through festival photographs, craft features, or tourism pieces, coverage risks turning living communities into aesthetic backdrops rather than presenting them as citizens with real political, economic, and social concerns.
This amounts to a subtle but consequential form of exclusion, since it lets audiences feel culturally informed while remaining largely unaware of the structural challenges these communities actually face. Genuine inclusivity in media ethics demands proportional and continuous representation, not just symbolic acknowledgment on designated observance days.
As the national academy responsible for promoting fine and performing arts, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy occupies an important but limited position in this landscape. By hosting the exhibition, the Academy provided institutional legitimacy and a prestigious venue for indigenous stories to reach policymakers, diplomats, and civil society figures.
This is meaningful, since state cultural institutions rarely dedicate space to hill tract communities in ordinary programming. However, the Academy’s role remains largely custodial, and event based rather than editorial. It can showcase culture when invited partners organize programmes, but it has no mandate or mechanism to influence how newsrooms cover indigenous affairs on a daily basis. Its contribution, while valuable, cannot substitute for structural change in how journalism itself treats these communities.
Gaps in Ethical Code and Law That Need Urgent Attention
The deeper problem sits upstream of any single institution, in the legal and regulatory environment that governs how indigenous identity can even be discussed. Government circulars have previously directed media outlets, academics, and broadcasters to avoid the terms indigenous or adivasi when referring to Bangladesh’s ethnic communities, pointing instead to their constitutional designation as tribes, small ethnic groups, or ethnic communities rather than indigenous peoples.
This creates a direct tension between international standards, such as the criteria laid out in the International Labour Organization’s Convention 169, which emphasize self-identification, and the domestic terminology imposed on journalists covering these communities. When newsrooms are effectively discouraged from using the language communities themselves prefer, ethical reporting on identity gets constrained before a single story is even written. Bangladesh’s existing press and broadcast ethical codes, meanwhile, offer little specific guidance on covering ethnic minority communities beyond general fairness principles, leaving reporters without clear standards for coverage that is consistent, respectful, and properly researched. Nor is there any requirement, formal or informal, for editorial diversity that would ensure hill tract and other minority voices appear in ordinary news cycles rather than only during designated cultural moments.
Closing this gap calls for two immediate steps: revising press guidance to let communities be described using terminology of their own choosing, in line with international self-identification standards, and building specific minority and indigenous representation criteria into national media ethics codes, so coverage becomes a standing editorial responsibility rather than an occasional act of charity performed at cultural venues like Shilpakala Academy.
