SEXUAL violence against indigenous women in the Chittagong Hill Tracts is not only an act of individual perpetrators but is sustained through a wider system of state and media denial. The state’s institutions — police, public hospitals and local administrators — actively influence the legal proceedings. Cases are often not filed. Even when a case is filed, medical reports are manipulated, and investigations are delayed, and the case remains perpetually unresolved. Media working under direct and indirect surveillance of civil-military bureaucracy in the CHT rarely report on incidents of sexual violence. Justice by design remains inaccessible to the indigenous women.
Peace and conflict specialist Bina D’Costa (2014) documented 12 cases from 2011 and 27 cases from 2012 of violence against indigenous women in the Chittagong Hill Tracts, published by the Chittagong Hill Tracts Commission, which reveals a consistent pattern in the state’s response to sexual violence in the region. Her detailed documentation showed how victims are often attacked while carrying out daily activities — collecting firewood, going to the jum, or walking home from school. She documented many cases. In one of the cases the name of the perpetrator is Md Salam. On September 24, 2011, Zarina Tripura was raped by Md Salam, a man from her own union in Panchari. She was alone in her jum house with her baby when Salam arrived, asking for water and enquiring about her husband’s whereabouts. After learning that she was alone, he held a knife to her throat and raped her, threatening to kill her if she screamed. Neighbours later saw him fleeing with the knife in hand. Zarina filed a case under Section 9(1) of the Women and Children Repression Prevention Act, 2000. At the time of the publication of this report, which was three years after the incident of rape, the already identified accused was not arrested.
On February 1, 2012, sixteen-year-old Deepika Chakma was gang-raped by six Bengali settlers in Rangamati. The officer-in-charge in the local police station refused to file a rape case and suggested that the complainant file an attempted rape case instead. The officer said that he had received orders from ‘higher authorities’ not to register this case as a rape case. Her family faced intimidation from local officials, and the case was soon dismissed for ‘lack of evidence’. There have been alleged sightings of the main accused persons moving about in the area. The victim’s family members also alleged, as reported in Bina D’Costa’s research, that the medical report was fabricated and that the doctor in fact never examined her. In the report, she observes, ‘Impunity has been the single most important factor contributing to increased incidents of sexual and gender-based violence in the CHT. The biases of the administrative, political, and judicial systems prevent access to equality and justice by indigenous peoples and minorities’.
The systemic bias against indigenous women, as documented by Bina D’Costa, has been further substantiated by reports from the Bangladesh Indigenous Peoples Forum and the Kapaeeng Foundation. Many national and international indigenous rights organisations have repeatedly reported how police routinely refuse to file such rape cases in the CHT, citing ‘security reasons’. Public hospitals often manipulate, or are pressured to manipulate, forensic reports in rape cases. In a number of reported incidents involving army personnel, victims and their families reportedly have been approached by military or local administrative officials and warned to remain silent. Some families have reportedly been offered money in exchange for their silence, while others have been threatened with arrest under fabricated charges. Instead of providing legal support, women of indigenous victims are subjected to further state surveillance, as is evidenced in the rape and sexual assault of two Marma sisters in Rangamati in 2018. The protest against the rape of two Marma sisters allegedly perpetrated by men in uniform was violently repressed, and the legal case remained frozen. Ethnically chauvinistic bias in the state’s response to sexual violence against indigenous women is demonstrated in case after case.
Earlier this year, as I joined a protest in Dhaka demanding justice for Chingma Khyang, I recognised this persistent bias. On May 5, 2025, a 29-year-old Khyang woman named Chingma left home early in the morning for her jum field in the Thanchi area of Bandarban. When she didn’t come home after midday, her relatives and neighbours began looking for her and found her battered and bloodied dead body in a roadside ditch near the Thanchi–Likri border road construction area in Bandarban, close to another villager’s jum land. A day before she was raped and killed, as reported in the media, she had mentioned seeing three Bengali construction workers near the area where she went working and expressed some unease about them, according to the locals. Chingma was a mother of three, the youngest being only two years old. Law enforcement officers reportedly made a brief appearance at the site in the days following her death, but no suspects were arrested, and no progress reports have been issued since. Her family continues to wait, without legal updates or compensation.
On September 23, two months after Chingma Khyang’s death was beginning to fade from the public memory, an indigenous eighth-grade schoolgirl from Khagrachari township was allegedly raped on her way home after private tuition. Initially, the news got barely any attention from the national media. Only after indigenous organisations and students took to the streets demanding justice did the case gain some visibility, but even then, it was framed through the language of ‘unrest’. The focus of national reporting shifted quickly from the assault itself to the supposed chaos in law and order caused by protesters, portraying the indigenous public outrage and the death of three indigenous youth as part of a ‘pahari-bangali clash’ rather than a legitimate call for justice for a rape victim. Within a week, the medical report of the rape survivor was issued, claiming there was ‘no evidence of rape’.
What connects these cases is not just the violence itself but the process that follows, or rather, the absence of a process. In the CHT, the system is particularly designed to deny or make justice inaccessible to the indigenous women. In the CHT, the civil-military influence on the legal system tends to see an allegation of sexual violence against indigenous women as a ‘conspiracy’ and a ploy to create ‘regional instability’ or ‘hurt the national sovereignty’. In the process, the state machinery creates grounds to question indigenous women’s suffering and experience of sexual violence and make them invisible. And when the violence reaches the public sphere, the media performs the final act of disappearance. In the rare moments that these cases are covered, they are presented as brief, decontextualised crime reports: ‘a Marma woman assaulted’, ‘two men detained for questioning’, ‘investigation ongoing’. Eventually, the crime is forgotten, not because it was resolved, but because it was successfully shoved under the rug. This pattern mirrors what Judith Butler (2004) calls ‘the hierarchy of grievable lives’— a system through which some lives are publicly mourned while others are silently erased. Butler reminds us that ‘our capacity to recognise a life as a life is shaped by political frames that decide whose suffering counts.’ Butler examines how such frames render certain lives visible, valuable, and therefore grievable, while others, such as Muslim lives in Western media, are cast as disposable or less than human. The same logic operates in our own context, where indigenous lives are continually excluded from the dominant moral and media order that defines whose pain is publicly acknowledged. Needless to say, Chingma’s life hasn’t been one of the ‘grievable’ ones. Echoing Butler, I ask, do all lives deserve justice?
This selective empathy is sustained through a machinery of control that links the state, the military, and the settlers. If the justice system keeps failing to see, and the media keeps choosing not to look, then whose eyes does the nation use to define truth? The question is not only why justice is denied but also why denial feels so ordinary, so expected. When every institution performs its part in turning violence into paperwork, when every news report erases a face behind the word ‘unidentified’, how do we even begin to measure what has been lost? Each unfiled case, each manipulated medical report, each vanished headline is part of a long choreography that teaches us which lives are worth grieving and which can disappear without consequence. Isn’t this systematic denial, reinforced by media, a tool of slow ethnic cleansing, erasing indigenous presence through fear, humiliation, and invisibility, their lives remaining outside the nation’s moral and political concern?
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Isaba Shuhrat is a researcher and feminist activist.
