On Saturday, 26 September, the Jatiya Samajtantrik Dal (JSD), a socialist party, was holding its central representatives’ meeting at its headquarters in Gulistan, in the heart of Dhaka.
The JSD says it had notified the Dhaka Metropolitan Police commissioner, the deputy commissioner for the Motijheel division and the local Paltan police station in writing on 23 and 24 September. The party Added that they have copies bearing “received” stamps and signatures. The police say they know of no such application.
What happened next raises a question larger than the fate of one political meeting.
Before the police operation began, activists from the local units of Jubo Dal, Swechhasebak Dal and Chhatra Dal—the BNP’s youth, volunteer and student wings—surrounded the building. Rabiul Islam Nayon, a central joint general secretary of Jubo Dal, told reporters that information had reached them that morning through their “network”, that they informed the authorities, and that the authorities then arrived.
The JSD says its members were attacked. Jubo Dal denies attacking anyone. Several videos circulating on social media appear to show participants being physically assaulted in the presence of police, although the available footage does not by itself establish the full sequence of events.
The police then moved in. Nearly 300 people were taken to the police station in prison vans. Among them was Abu Jafar Surjo, a former president of the Dhaka Union of Journalists.
The Motijheel deputy commissioner explained the action in one sentence:
“We took them to the police station for their own safety.”
That sentence should make us pause.
If the people inside the building needed protection, who posed the threat?
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Who has the right to assemble?
The first question concerns Jubo Dal.
Under what law can one party’s affiliate besiege the lawful meeting of another?
Article 37 of the Constitution guarantees every citizen the right to assemble peacefully and without arms, subject to reasonable restrictions imposed by law. Political activists do not acquire an additional power to decide which political meetings may take place and which may not.
The Code of Criminal Procedure gives a private citizen a limited power, in specified circumstances, to arrest a person who commits a cognisable, non-bailable offence in the citizen’s presence. That is a power to make a lawful arrest; it is not a general right to surround or prevent people from leaving a gathering or a place.
No such provision gives private individuals a general right to blockade or hem in a gathering of hundreds of people. If those inside the meeting were deliberately prevented from leaving, a separate question arises under the Penal Code: could such conduct amount to wrongful confinement? The answer would depend on the facts and on whether the statutory elements of that offence were satisfied.
The issue is therefore not simply whether Jubo Dal activists intended to cause violence. The more fundamental question is whether a private political group can physically prevent another lawful political organisation from meeting.
Jubo Dal says it did not take the law into its own hands. But if its activists received information through a private “network”—which may suggest that the network was monitoring the JSD office—and then surrounded a JSD political meeting before summoning the police, that is precisely what taking the law into one’s own hands means. The distinction between political mobilisation and the private enforcement of political authority then becomes difficult to ignore.
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The second question concerns the police.
The deputy commissioner says the people inside were detained “for their own safety”. But if their safety was at risk, why were they the ones taken away? Those inside, holding a meeting, were put into prison vans, many of them in handcuffs.
And who created that risk ? Those surrounding the building. There are no reports that they were similarly detained. The crucial question is why those inside the building were detained rather than those who had surrounded it. If the police acted in response to political pressure, that would raise serious questions about the independence of the state from partisan influence. If they acted to prevent violence, they must explain why the people inside the meeting were treated as the source of the danger.
The Constitution asks the police to protect citizens’ right to meet. The state has a duty to protect a lawful assembly. If a crowd threatens that assembly, the obvious constitutional question is whether the state should restrain the threat rather than remove the people being threatened. That is the heart of the matter.
The issue here is not whether the police may intervene when violence is imminent. They plainly may, subject to law. The issue is whether Police intervention protects the citizens, protects their right to lawful assembly or effectively terminates it. If the latter becomes normal practice, a dangerous precedent is created: a political group may surround a meeting , and the state may respond by removing the people inside.
That would turn the right to assemble into a right that exists only so long as nobody objects to its exercise.
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The police also cited the chanting of “Joy Bangla” (“Victory to Bengal”). The slogan, associated with Bangladesh’s 1971 Liberation War, lost its status as the official national slogan in December 2024. But the question remains: what law prohibits a citizen from uttering it? No court has ever banned it.
A further argument has been made. If Awami League supporters were present at the JSD meeting, it has been suggested that the JSD could itself be liable for “harbouring” them.
There is an important distinction here.
It is true that this is Hasanul Haq Inu’s JSD, a long-time ally of the Awami League, and that Inu himself served as Information Minister under Sheikh Hasina. But a history of political alliance does not, by itself, make a lawful party meeting unlawful.
For the sake of argument, assume that the ban on the Awami League’s activities is legally valid. Even then, the Anti-Terrorism Act distinguishes between different forms of conduct:
Section 8 addresses membership of a banned organisation;
Section 9 concerns organising meetings or publicity on its behalf; and
Section 14 concerns knowingly sheltering a person involved in terrorist acts.
The relevant question, therefore, is not simply whether someone with a history of association with the Awami League attended the meeting, but whether the specific statutory elements of offence were satisfied.
What has been prohibited is the activity of an organisation. That does not automatically make every person who once supported, belonged to, or was politically associated with that organisation a criminal. If a former supporter attends a meeting of another lawful party, what exactly is the offence? Is it membership? Current activity? Knowledge? Intent? Or simply political association?
The distinction matters.
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There is another problem: is there one law, or are there different laws?
If organisers are to be held legally responsible for the political histories of everyone attending their meetings, that principle must apply equally to every political party.
If an activist or supporter stays away from his or her own party’s programmes and attends a meeting of another lawful party, where is the offence committed by the host party? And if such attendance can constitute an offence, why should the JSD be singled out?
In April, NCP convener Nahid Islam publicly said that members of the Chhatra League, the banned student wing of the Awami League, could join the NCP provided they had not been involved in crimes. In January, a Chhatra League leader’s move to the BNP in Pirojpur district was widely discussed in the press and on social media. In July, in Lakshmipur district, Jamaat-e-Islami, now the main parliamentary opposition, welcomed a local Awami League leader into its ranks with flowers.
These examples do not, by themselves, establish that any party has committed an offence. But they raise a question of consistency. If political parties are legally legally obliged to vet the political past of everyone who enters their meetings or joins their ranks, then neither the BNP, Jamaat nor the NCP is free of that liability. The point is not that one party’s conduct excuses another’s. It is the opposite: the same legal standard must apply to everyone.
If attendance by a former Awami League supporter makes a meeting unlawful, then the law must explain why. If it does not, political affiliation becomes a substitute for evidence. There can be only one standard: for everyone, or for no one.
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The police themselves said that JSD members among those detained would be released and that others would face action after verification.
In other words: round up 300 people first, then work out who belongs to which party. Under the rule of law, an offence is identified first, and arrests follow.
During the Yunus-led interim administration, the BNP itself argued that no political party should be banned by executive order and that such a decision belonged to the people. Jubo Dal’s Nayon has also credited firm directives against mob violence issued by BNP chief Tarique Rahman for preventing something worse from happening. Yet with those directives in force, the party’s own affiliates surrounded a lawful party’s meeting, and the police came and took away the people attending it.
Bengali has an old expression for a lawless land: moger mulluk. Over the past two years, a more pointed expression has gained currency, and it seems to fit what happened in Gulistan: mob-er mulluk—the realm of the mob.
First, the mob surrounds its target.
Then the state arrives to finish what the mob wanted done.
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By Sunday, police had released 249 of the 278 people they said they had detained. The journalist Abu Jafar Surjo was freed after approximately 15 hours in custody. Depending on the report, between 26 and 29 people remained in detention.
Police said that no case had been filed and that, as of Sunday afternoon, none of the detainees had been brought before a court. Home Minister Salahuddin Ahmed said the raid followed intelligence that members of the banned Awami League had gathered to plan sabotage. He also said that the phones of 27 detainees would be subjected to forensic examination and that cases would follow if evidence were found.
Those developments answer some questions, but not the central ones.
They do not explain how Jubo Dal activists came to surround a lawful political meeting. They do not explain why the police took away those inside rather than those surrounding the building. And they do not resolve whether a lawful party can be held responsible merely because someone with a particular political history attended its meeting.
The continued detention of some people raises a further constitutional question.
Article 33 of the Constitution requires a person arrested and detained in custody to be produced before a magistrate within 24 hours, and restricts continued detention beyond that period without a magistrate’s authority.
Calling the process “verification” rather than an arrest does not, by itself, answer the constitutional question.
If people remain in custody while their phones are searched, with no case filed and no court involved, the sequence appears to have been reversed. First, people are detained. Then evidence is sought. That is precisely the inversion that this episode raises.
Under the rule of law, the state should investigate a crime and then hold those against whom there is lawful and sufficient ground for detention.
It should not hold people first and search for a reason afterward.
Dr. Ashfaque Anup is an affiliate academic of King’s College London. He also serves as the Director of Bengaliness Research Initiative (BRI).