I am writing this at a time when several incidents from the past few weeks have come into sharp focus. The incidents are different. But when placed side by side, a pattern begins to emerge. And I find that pattern deeply troubling.
The first incident took place at Dhaka airport. Three adult women, despite having valid passports, tickets, and the necessary documents, were prevented from leaving the country. Why? Because they were unmarried, they were not travelling with a father, brother, or husband, and immigration officials apparently decided that, under those circumstances, they should not be allowed to travel abroad.
The matter eventually reached the High Court. The question is simple: should an adult woman’s right to leave the country be determined by Bangladeshi law, or by the personal moral judgment of an official sitting at an airport desk?
An official may personally believe that an unmarried woman should not travel abroad alone. But once he sits in a government office, his personal preferences should count for nothing. At that point, there should be only one standard before him: the law. Yet what we saw was that the law was not enough.
Another incident on the Dhaka Metro Rail is also worth discussing. A player was travelling on the metro wearing shorts. A police officer stopped him. In the video that circulated, the officer can be seen speaking to him in a condescending manner and telling him that his clothing was “indecent.” Yet there is no rule prohibiting passengers from wearing shorts on the metro. Police later formed an investigation committee.
What the incident revealed was that a police officer believed he had the authority to impose his own idea of decency on a citizen. Again, the same question arises: who decides what is indecent? The law, or the police officer standing in front of you?
Then there is the attack on the Radda MCH-FP Centre in Mirpur. More than a hundred people entered a health facility in the capital and vandalised it for hours. Property was looted. An excavator was brought in to demolish parts of the premises. A Prothom Alo investigation named several people connected with local BNP politics. Police later made arrests, recovered stolen property, and an officer-in-charge was removed.
The ruling party also forced one of its members of parliament from a reserved women’s seat to resign over allegations of involvement in the incident. That action deserves recognition. But the central question lies elsewhere. How did hundreds of people gather in the capital, enter a health centre, vandalise it for hours, bring in an excavator, and carry out all of this without the state stopping them?
It does not take five minutes to demolish a building. It takes time to gather hundreds of people. Excavators do not fall from the sky. If, after something of this scale takes place, we simply say that several people were arrested later, then we are asking only half the question. Even so, the government, though belatedly, did not grant political immunity to one of its own MPs in this case.
Far-right activist Ataur Rahman Bikrampuri has written on his own Facebook account that his first wife was under thirteen when they married and that their first child was born within a year and a half of the marriage. In another post, he defended the marriage of a fourteen-year-old girl. Under Bangladeshi law, the minimum legal age of marriage for girls is eighteen.
If someone publicly admits to conduct that violates this law and then celebrates it, should no state institution ask why he broke the law and why he is encouraging others to do the same? This is a law directly connected to the safety of women and children.
We often blur the line between religious belief and law. Someone may offer a religious interpretation. Someone may argue that the law should be changed. Bikrampuri has every right to make that argument. But as long as the law exists, saying “my religious interpretation is different” does not make the law disappear. Nor should someone be able to break that law and boast about it on social media. Otherwise, what exactly does the rule of law mean?
The latest addition to this sequence of events involves UPL, one of Bangladesh’s best-known publishing houses. At its sales centre in Banglabazar, two young men went in and asked to buy Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s The Unfinished Memoirs. The staff brought out the book. The same two men then questioned why the book was being sold, claiming that it had been banned. It had not been banned. More people gathered. The shop’s shutter was pulled down and locked.
Two UPL employees were taken to the Faridabad police outpost. The people who shut down the shop were not detained. The people selling the book were the ones who ended up at the police outpost.
What makes the situation even more remarkable is that the officer-in-charge of Sutrapur Police Station told Prothom Alo that the employees had been released on the condition that they would no longer sell the book. Where did a police officer get the authority to impose such a condition? Does an officer-in-charge have the power to ban a book?
We still do not know the names of the two young men. Their full identities have not been made public. But if the police know who they are, what action has been taken against them? So far, that question remains unanswered.
When these incidents are placed side by side, at least two patterns become visible. The first is that, in several cases, police officers or government officials appear to have substituted their own moral judgments for the law, directly restricting citizens’ constitutional rights.
At the airport, an official decides whether an unmarried woman may travel abroad alone. On the metro, a police officer decides whether a man may board a train wearing shorts. In the UPL case, an officer-in-charge speaks of a condition preventing the sale of a book that has not been banned.
These are not minor errors. The people involved exercise state power. That is precisely what distinguishes them from ordinary citizens. An ordinary person may tell another citizen that he does not like his shorts. You can ignore him and walk away. But when a police officer says the same thing, there is a power relationship. A relative may tell you, “You are unmarried, do not travel abroad alone.”
You can ignore that relative. But if an immigration officer says the same thing, you may not be able to leave the country at all. That difference matters. Do we actually understand it?
The second pattern concerns the confidence with which people close to political power appear willing to take the law into their own hands. In the Mirpur case, media investigations named individuals connected with local BNP politics. In the UPL case, the officer-in-charge also said that those who went to the shop were local BNP people.
I am not suggesting that the BNP leadership centrally instructed anyone to attack a hospital or lock a UPL bookshop. There is no evidence of that. What we have seen so far suggests that these were local initiatives by political individuals or groups. But that is exactly where the problem lies.
A government cannot control what is going on inside the head of every local activist. Nor can a political party know in advance what every supporter will do. But a government can make one thing unmistakably clear: if someone uses a party identity to take the law into his own hands, there will be consequences. Is that message being sent?
Action was eventually taken in the Mirpur case. That is a positive step. But the question of why the incident was not stopped before it escalated remains. The UPL case raises an even more direct question. Two individuals shut down a shop selling a legal book, yet the police apparently took no action against them. Instead, the condition was imposed on the bookseller. This is where a slow or selective state response creates a larger problem.
Power does not operate only through formal government orders. It also works through signals. If a local political activist comes to believe that he can lock a shop and probably face no serious consequences, that is a signal. If an official comes to believe that an adult woman’s right to leave the country depends on his personal discretion, that is also a signal. Over time, such signals can harden into informal rules that restrict citizens’ rights.
In some of these cases, the government has taken action. In the Mirpur incident, for example, a ruling-party MP was forced to resign. In other cases, action has not followed. In the case of the publishing house’s sales centre being shut down, the police did not take action against those responsible.
Whether these failures result from intent or simple inertia can be debated separately. But one failure is already visible: the government has still not sent a sufficiently clear message that political identity, religious identity, a police uniform, or personal moral belief cannot replace the law, and cannot be used to curtail citizens’ rights.
The rule of law must stand above all of these. If the state fails to make that clear, the danger will grow quickly. The law may remain in the statute books, while on the streets the real rule becomes: might makes right.
That leaves me with one question in light of these recent events: in Bangladesh, who will have the final say, the law, or whoever happens to hold more power at a given moment?
Asif Bin Ali is a doctoral fellow at Georgia State University in the US. He can be reached at [email protected].
