Once the military rule ended, the witnesses who had accused Ms. Hasina recanted, claiming their stories were extracted under duress; these retractions were reported in The Daily Star. Even so, over time, my father came to regret his judgment in deciding to run the original story without corroboration; on Feb. 3, on the occasion of The Daily Star’s 25th anniversary, he went on a late-night talk show and said as much.

The following morning, the airwaves were awash with his “confession.” The son of Prime Minister Hasina, Sajeeb Wazed, called for my father’s arrest on charges of treason, alleging that he was the cause of Ms. Hasina’s incarceration. Since then, scores of lawsuits charging my father with criminal defamation and sedition have been lodged in courts all over Bangladesh.

This is only the latest chapter in the state’s targeting of The Daily Star and Prothom Alo. In March 2015, The Daily Star published a photograph of a recruitment poster produced by the banned Islamist group Hizb-ut-Tahrir with the caption “terrorism rears its ugly head”; Ms. Hasina told Parliament that the paper had “helped the radical cause” by printing the photograph and the state would “move against” those who had published it. In August, a sudden drop in advertising from the telecoms sector was widely believed to have been ordered by state intelligence.

And now this. Doubtless, the publication of unverifiable reports based on “confessions” made by people in custody — though a common media practice in Bangladesh — should be questioned, and this could be an excellent opportunity to revise journalistic practice. Instead, the state is exploiting the chance to double down on its suppression of free speech.

When something like this happens to someone you love, it is difficult not to focus on his immediate safety. Yet the harassment of my father is not about the government’s ire against one man, but about the stifling of the independent media in Bangladesh and the general narrowing of critical space.

Ms. Hasina herself has now gone on the record that she, too, believes the rumor that my father was behind her arrest. Rather than investigating the intelligence task force, which coerced the confessions, or the judicial process that led to the case against Ms. Hasina, or the officials involved in her arrest, the government has brought down the full force of the state on a newspaper.

My father sent a text message to me in London the other day. “I’m being sued for 17 billion dollars,” he wrote. “This is more than the total budget of the country at independence.” I hear the smile behind the words. I also feel the sadness behind the smile.