After all, common sense suggested that the government would hardly let reporter Alex Perry into the country nor grant him the access that a cover story would necessitate unless it had received assurances that the story would be a positive one, something confirmed by the smugness of the government officials "leaking" the good news.

Time has certainly kept its side of the bargain. For a government that is obsessed with its image in the international arena, this week's cover story must have come as sweet vindication.

It was not always thus. Time magazine, indeed this very same Alex Perry, had in 2002 written a piece called "Deadly Cargo" in which he depicted Bangladesh as a safe haven for Islamic terrorists, including al-Qaeda.

The alliance government banned that issue of Time magazine and ruling alliance leaders went on record to refer to Perry's piece as a "fictitious thriller" and a "figment of [his] imagination."

It is a good thing that neither Time nor Perry appear to hold grudges.

In 2004, the government again had a similarly infuriated response to the Time magazine piece "State of Disgrace" that painted a certainly one-sided but in truth depressingly accurate picture of the extortion, toll collection, and other lawlessness rampant in Bangladesh.

The foreign ministry poured scorn upon the piece and issued a rejoinder, suggesting that it had been a politically motivated hit-job aimed at undermining the country, and pointing the finger of accusation across the border:

"The timing of the report, the sources quoted, its narrow focus and harsh conclusions point to a highly motivated report. It follows upon the heels of another slanted story "Deadly Cargo" by Alex Perry [there he is again!] which sought to smear Bangladesh as a radical Islamic fundamentalist state. Is it an odd coincidence that both the correspondents were based in New Delhi?"

What has always been interesting about the government response to negative stories in the international media is the rather far-fetched belief that the stories are some kind of diabolical conspiracy against the government hatched by its enemies.

It is not enough to accuse the publications concerned of shoddy or sensationalistic coverage, which in fact is often the principal reason behind poor or incomplete reporting, but it must also accuse them of being part of a coordinated plot to discredit the government, and by extension, the country.

Why Time magazine, or The New York Times or the Far Eastern Economic Review for that matter, would be part of an anti-Bangladesh conspiracy has always remained unclear.

Hopefully, the recent cover story will have at least have had the effect of removing Time magazine from the alliance government's enemies list.

The cover story coincides, more or less, with the one-hour BBC World debate on Bangladesh that is being screened for the first time tomorrow evening, and for once, Bangladesh seems to be the hot ticket in international news, that too in a good way.

I hope that both the report and the debate will cause more people around the world to take a closer look at this vibrant country of close to 150 million.

Perry's cover story seems to me to be a reasonably accurate depiction of the country. I think that he does a decent job of capturing the contradictions of the country: the buzz and bustle of economic vitality and the sense of the country on the verge of going places that co-exists with the corruption and the bitter divisions and the tens of millions struggling to make ends meet.

I am not quite so sanguine as Perry is about the extremist threat and would not be so quick to absolve the ruling alliance of the less than honourable role that it has played in the rise of the militants.

But whatever the murky background that Perry chooses to quickly pass over, the fact that Bangladesh, contrary to enthusiastic reporting in the international media, is not on the brink of an Islamic revolution is a story that the world needs to hear, and to the extent that the Time magazine piece makes this clear, it is to be commended.

There is, of course, much to criticize in the piece, from the opening paragraph, with its comical portrayal of the intrepid state minister of home affairs being roused from slumber in the middle of the night and springing into action like some television super-cop, to the "he said-she said" reporting of the accusations traded between the government and the opposition without any effort to inform the reader which accusations are in fact true and which are not.

I do not think that a reputed publication should give politicians (or anyone else for that matter) the platform to make statements that are either not true or not credible, but since Time magazine, and indeed all western media, routinely extend this courtesy to the Bush administration, it is perhaps to be expected.

But the short-comings of the piece are short-comings in reporting and typical of the slap-dash approach of western journalism, not short-comings of bias. It is an important distinction. Time magazine is not now on the pay-roll of the BNP any more than it used to be on the pay-roll of the AL.

Interestingly enough, though, the Time magazine cover story coincides with a public relations blitz that the government has undertaken in recent months.

The "image of the country" (meaning the image of the ruling alliance) has long been an obsession for this government which is why it has always identified the media who have had the temerity to report on issues of corruption and extremism as public enemy number one.

To this end, the government has made restoring the country's image in the eyes of the international community the top priority in the run-up to the elections. As the Time magazine piece suggests, the government has had a fair degree of success in getting influential constituencies who had a more jaundiced view of the country to give Bangladesh a fresh look.

Another example of success on the public relations front is the 180 degree turn-around in some sections of the Indian media in the aftermath of the prime minister's recent trip to India.

There is nothing intrinsically wrong with public relations campaigns. The problem, however, lies in the fact that the government seems to think that improving its image internationally is the same thing as actually addressing the needs of the Bangladeshi people, and will help its electoral prospects here at home.

Even more troubling is the danger that the government will start to believe its own propaganda and that this will distract it from taking care of all the very real problems that it has to deal with on the home front.

There is a recent example from just across the border of an insulated and out-of-touch government that got carried away with believing its own propaganda and the hosannas from abroad but did nothing to address the concerns of the only constituency whose good opinion really matters, that of the voters.

It is important, of course, to stand in good stead internationally, and we all benefit from an enhanced national image, but this will do nothing to paper over the problems the government faces domestically. The government needs to focus on substance, not image. Electricity, prices, fuel, fertilizer, the boro harvest: in the run-up to the election, these are the issues that the government needs to be focused on more than its image outside the country. Just ask Atal Behar Vajpayee.

Zafar Sobhan is Assistant Editor, The Daily Star.