Bangladesh, Current Affairs, Democracy, Opinion, Politics, Uncategorised

What the raid on the JSD office in Dhaka reveals about Bangladesh

Ashfaque Anup

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? * 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…

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When Law Absolves Violence: Transitional Justice and the Manufacture of Innocence

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This essay critically examines the Interim Government’s proposed indemnity for so-called “July fighters,” challenging its legal, moral, and philosophical foundations. It argues that the invocation of constitutional immunity, historical precedent, and “transitional justice” functions less as a framework for accountability than as a mechanism for pre-emptive absolution. By exposing the false equivalence drawn between the violence of July and the Liberation War of 1971, the misapplication of Article 46 of the Constitution, and the selective appropriation of Arab Spring and South African precedents, the piece demonstrates how legality is being moralised to shield violence from scrutiny. Ultimately, it contends that justice in periods of transition cannot be secured through indemnity that silences victims, forecloses investigation, and rewrites memory, but only through an honest confrontation with wrongdoing, even when committed in the name of resistance.

Law as Moral Architecture in Times of Political Rupture This intervention does not proceed from the standpoint of legal practice or doctrinal arbitration. It approaches law as a normative and political instrument, one that distributes moral recognition, assigns legitimacy, and shapes collective memory. The concern here is not whether indemnity can be technically enacted, but what kind of moral order it constructs when enacted. This piece is prompted by a public statement issued by the Law Adviser to Bangladesh’s Interim Government, Asif Nazrul, in which he announced the preparation of an indemnity ordinance granting immunity to those described as “July fighters.” In the statement, disseminated through his official Facebook account and subsequently reproduced across national media, the proposed indemnity is justified on constitutional grounds, specifically Article 46, and framed as a legitimate instrument of transitional justice, with references to the 1971 Liberation War and post–Arab Spring precedents. [1,2,3,4] Taken together, these claims do not merely describe an impending legal measure;

they advance a normative reclassification of political violence itself. It is this reclassification, its assumptions, implications, and dangers, that the present critique seeks to interrogate. The proposal to grant indemnity to so-called [5] “July fighters” is being advanced as a measure of transitional justice, grounded in constitutional authority and comparative precedent. Yet upon closer examination, the proposal rests on a series of category errors, legal, historical, and moral, which together amount to a dangerous transformation of law into a mechanism of political absolution. This critique argues that the proposed indemnity framework does not merely risk injustice in individual cases; it reconfigures accountability itself, producing a hierarchy of legal subjects and institutionalising impunity under the guise of transition. References are used here not as appeals to authority, but as illustrations of recurring patterns in how societies attempt, and often fail, to reconcile power with justice. From Exception to Erasure: How Immunity Becomes Impunity Immunity in law is not a moral reward;…

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Defending History: The Authentic Voice of Bongobondhu in The Unfinished Memoirs

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Conspiracy theories alleging The Unfinished Memoirs was ghostwritten by 123 officials are baseless, confusing it with a separate archival project. Bongobondhu's 1967-69 jail notebooks, verified by facsimiles and corroborated by media, confirm his authorship. These claims lack evidence and aim to undermine a vital historical text chronicling Bengal's fight against oppression. Mujib's legacy remains authentic and unassailable.

Claims that Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s The Unfinished Memoirs was ghostwritten by 123 officials are baseless. The text is rooted in Mujib’s 1967–69 jail notebooks, preserved in facsimile, corroborated by contemporaneous media, and consistent with his nationalist politics. The conspiracy confuses Mujib’s autobiography with an entirely different archival project. Such disinformation is not an innocent mistake—it is a calculated attempt to weaken Bengal’s memory of its liberation struggle. Did Sheikh Mujibur Rahman really need 123 ghostwriters to tell the story of his childhood, his activism, and his dream of a free Bengal? The very idea borders on the absurd. Yet in the turbulent wake of Bangladesh’s recent political upheavals, a wave of conspiracy theories has emerged claiming that The Unfinished Memoirs—a cornerstone of Bengali nationalist history—was fabricated by former IGP Mohammad Javed Patwary and a team of officials. These claims, amplified by sensationalist media and echo chambers online, are not harmless speculation. They are disinformation designed to erode the foundations of

Bongobondhu’s legacy. As someone committed to historical truth, I argue that these accusations crumble under scrutiny. They rest on a deliberate conflation of two entirely separate bodies of work, lack any substantive evidence, and collapse in the face of overwhelming documentary, textual, and historical proof that the memoirs are indeed Mujib’s own words. The Source of the Rumors The allegations originated from documents allegedly uncovered by Bangladesh’s Special Branch of police in August 2025, suggesting Patwary and his team were rewarded with cash and apartments for ghostwriting Mujib’s autobiography. A legal notice has even demanded an official probe into whether Mujib wrote the text at all. But this narrative unravels upon closer inspection. The supposed “evidence” confuses The Unfinished Memoirs with a very different project: the 14-volume Secret Documents of the Intelligence Branch on Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. That series—published under Sheikh Hasina’s oversight—compiles 48,000 pages of declassified Pakistani intelligence files. Patwary and his officers played a technical role: scanning, transcribing,…

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Critical Review of the “US-Bangladesh Agreement on Reciprocal Trade”

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This paper critically examines the leaked draft of the U.S.–Bangladesh Reciprocal Trade Agreement, revealing it to be a deeply asymmetrical arrangement that compromises Bangladesh’s regulatory sovereignty, economic autonomy, and geopolitical independence. Under the guise of market access and tariff relief, the agreement imposes sweeping U.S. oversight across digital governance, labor law, defense procurement, environmental regulation, and data control. Rather than fostering mutual benefit, the proposed terms reflect a strategic restructuring of Bangladesh’s legal and economic infrastructure to serve U.S. commercial and strategic interests. The analysis situates this deal within the broader context of post-colonial dependency and calls for urgent public scrutiny, renegotiation, and activist resistance.

1. Introduction In July 2025, a confidential draft of the so-called U.S.-Bangladesh Agreement on Reciprocal Trade was leaked. At first glance, it appeared to be a bilateral deal to facilitate trade flows between the two countries. However, on closer inspection, the document revealed something far more consequential: a complex and far-reaching framework that, if ratified, would embed U.S. influence deep into Bangladesh’s economic, legal, and digital infrastructures. Drafted amid political instability and under an unelected interim government, this agreement must be understood not merely as a trade pact, but as a coercive tool of structural realignment: one that reorients Bangladesh’s legal, economic, and geopolitical frameworks to align with U.S. priorities, without public consultation or democratic mandate. This paper offers a critical examination of the agreement, exploring its key provisions, underlying logic, and broader implications. It further contextualizes the agreement within a lineage of similarly coercive international arrangements and concludes with strategic recommendations for activists, policymakers, and civil society actors committed

to protecting Bangladesh’s sovereignty. 1.1 Security Classification • Marked CONFIDENTIAL, with “Modified Handling Authorized.” • Declassification set for 4 years after enforcement/negotiation closure. • Suggests it is either a draft or pre-ratification version. • Legal effect is not yet public—yet expectations and timelines for Bangladeshi compliance are clear and immediate. 2. Critical Analysis of the Agreement The agreement, sprawling across 21 pages, is organized into six major sections: taxation, non-tariff barriers, digital trade and technology, rules of origin, commercial and national security terms, and investment and services. While billed as reciprocal, the obligations it places on Bangladesh far outweigh those asked of the United States. 2.1 Tariff & Non-Tariff Barriers One of the most striking aspects of the draft agreement lies in its treatment of tariff and non-tariff barriers. Bangladesh is effectively being asked to lower customs duties specifically on U.S. goods, potentially undermining the country’s ability to protect its local industries through strategic tariffs. Even more troubling, however, is…

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From Shahbagh to Karbala: Rhetoric, Revisionism, and the Return of the Mob [1]

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In Mahfuz Alam’s hands, the word “mob” becomes a political mirror — reflecting only those struggles that threaten the new order. From Shahbagh to the People’s Courts, he retrofits secular justice movements into spectacles of irrational rage, while carefully omitting the rise of Islamist forces now embedded in power. His rhetoric isn’t argument — it’s choreography, built from contradictions and cloaked in abstraction. But the real danger isn’t what he says — it’s what he replaces: memory with manipulation, ethics with performance, revolution with revision. When Mahfuz speaks of Karbala, he isn't invoking resistance — he's rehearsing a morality play for a regime in need of a conscience.

“Mob means an opportunistic group that nurtures vengeful, directionless, revolutionary pretensions.” — Mahfuz Alam, Special Adviser to the Chief Adviser Let us begin with Mahfuz Alam’s own postscript — a sentence that reads like it’s been pulled from a thesaurus and passed off as philosophy. It is intended, one assumes, as a capstone to his moral framing of Bangladesh’s so-called “July revolution.” But this single line — vague, self-congratulatory, and strategically abstract — is far more revealing than its author might have intended. It does not define the mob; it betrays the mob of meaning. In Alam’s universe, a mob is not defined by who they are or what they do — but by who they threaten. And so begins the rhetorical sleight-of-hand: a redefinition of history, morality, and memory, with the aim of shielding the Interim Government’s foundational moment from scrutiny. But in trying to separate July’s student uprising from mobocracy, Mahfuz performs a quiet substitution: he lifts the

moral crimes of the present and lays them upon the past. The Mob Is Always the Other Who does Mahfuz include in his invented taxonomy of mobs? It’s instructive: • The 1971 violence against Biharis. • The early repression of anti-Mujib student voices. • Fifty-three years of attacks on religious minorities — but with no attribution. • The People’s Courts. • The ‘96 People’s Stage. • October 28 • Shahbagh. This is not analysis. It is a political Rorschach test — what shows up as “mob” in Mahfuz’s inkblot are the struggles that confront the forces he is now aligned with. Especially chilling is his treatment of Shahbagh — the spontaneous secular uprising that demanded justice for war criminals. In Mahfuz’s telling, it becomes “mob justice,” no different from communal riots. A movement rooted in the memory of the 1971 genocide is flattened into a faceless frenzy, and those who chanted for accountability are smeared as enemies of law and…

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