A SERIES of viral videos filmed and posted on social media platforms by the Dhaka University Central Students’ Union leader Sarba Mitra Chakma, enthusiastically evicting the poor, the homeless, and street vendors from the university campus, putting the cosmetic face of power at the DU campus on display. In the footage, Sarba Mitra can be seen confronting those living under the open sky — the people with mental illness, displaced workers, and vendors eking out a living — demanding to know whether they had permission to occupy this public space. The camera lingers upon their meagre belongings: a half-used bar of soap, tiny shampoo packets, and a few condoms, all broadcast for online consumption and transformed into emblems of shame, making them a symbol of humiliation and proof that the poor had somehow offended the aesthetic order of the university, as if poverty itself were an aesthetic offence. He even accused six- or seven-year-old children of being drug carriers while failing to question who controls those campus networks of narcotic trade. What might appear a mere campus incident reveals how power, governance, and morality are being reorganised under a neoliberal imagination of cleanliness and control. The eviction of marginalised and homeless people from Dhaka University goes beyond issues of cleanliness or safety, highlighting a deeper underlying issue of governance in which efficiency and order are prioritised over social compassion, thereby hiding underlying social injustices.
Before a sociological dissection of the event, we must ask, who are these people whose very existence is now rendered precarious? They are the city’s dispossessed, the psychologically challenged, the homeless, the itinerant workers, small vendors, and environmental refugees whom the state has stripped of all fundamental rights and abandoned to pavements to survive. In 2016, The Financial Express reported that the number had risen to over 280,000, while in 2024, The Business Standard reported that it had declined to between 10,000 and 15,000. This also reveals the politics of the statistics and how shifting definitions erase the poor, making them invisible in policy discussions and urban planning. Moreover, the Caritas 2025 survey shows that 91 per cent of Bangladesh’s marginalised groups and 94 per cent of street children remain excluded from social safety nets. In this case, the state’s failure is not just administrative; it is a deliberate technique of governance.
To the so-called DUCSU’s campus elites (the teachers and students), these bodies appear as unsettling blemishes on the campus’s idyllic moral landscape. The marginalised people being visible on the campus shatters the illusion of privilege; consequently, the elites frame eviction as protection that includes safety, cleanliness, and security, transforming eviction into a performative act of civic virtue. The left-leaning groups defended the fundamental right to life and livelihood of those whom the state has already made invisible, but DUCSU Ìýleaders dismissed them as mere agitators. ÌýIt is to note that after each eviction, their repeated return is a silent yet massive act of resistance, showing that exclusion cannot erase their essential presence and needs. The key question for student leadership to ask now is not how to remove them, but why marginalised individuals keep returning and what the long-term solution is. What moral failures of the state compel them to make the streets their only home?
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Campus as micro-site for state governance
DHAKA University, once idealised as the ‘Oxford of the East,’ now enacts a technocratic choreography of exclusion, a moral theatre where bureaucratic aesthetics masquerade as reform and the neoliberal technocratic imagination of violence and informal exclusion explains that the campus ‘clean-up’ spectacle, narrated by DUCSU through terms like ‘unauthorised vendors,’ ‘illegal mobile shops,’ and ‘outsiders threatening campus order,’ mirrors the bureaucratic lexicon of state apparatus managing urban poverty. This is what Nikolas Rose understands as advanced liberal governmentality, a rule through expertise, metrics, and self-regulation rather than overt coercion. According to Rose,this turns governance into a management tool devoid of morality, transforms ‘safety’ into measurable control, and ‘disorder’ into administrative deviation. Wendy Brown also reminds us that neoliberal rationality colonises the moral domain, naturalising inequality. As a result, informal economies like street vending and surviving without formal employment are often stigmatised and criminalised. The DU eviction here serves as a subtle rehearsal of state violence, in which governance masquerades as civility. DU’s student leaders and proctorial officials act as micro-technocrats, exercising governance for the state through surveillance, public shaming, and the rhetoric of safety, security, and order.
Neoliberal governmentality extends beyond markets; it governs through aesthetics. The ‘clean’ campus, like the ‘smart city,’ is a visual fantasy of order. David Harvey theorises that this is accumulation by dispossession: the seizure of informal spaces in the name of progress. Yet beyond economics, cleanliness operates as a moral technology, inheriting colonial residues that conflate purity with progress and dirt with disorder, rendering the poor hypervisible only to be erased, making it a spectacle of visibility preceding disappearance. The logic at play here is that what cannot be measured is expelled; what cannot be beautified is buried. This is the governmentality of aesthetics, a tool of governance through beautification, discipline through decorum. In evicting the poor, the university performs the state’s dream of modernity that includes efficiency, spotlessness, and silence for the visual harmony of middle-class modernity. The campus thus becomes a moral laboratory, a miniature of the aesthetic state, where order masquerades as ethics and exclusion becomes virtue.
The logic governing the eviction drive at DU has a genealogy that stretches far beyond the campus gates, it brings the Chicago Boys, Berkeley Mafia in Dhaka and connection itself to global technocratic network.The rationality shaping the campus eviction is part of the same global neoliberal governmental rationality, the imperatives of ‘order,’ ‘modernity,’ ‘efficiency,’ and a ‘competitive campus,’ which converge with neoliberal logics in Bangladesh. The Chicago Boys were a group of Chilean economists trained at the University of Chicago within the Chicago School of Economics. During Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship (1973-1990), they implemented deep neoliberal reforms in Chile, making it the ‘laboratory of neoliberalism.’ The ‘Berkeley Mafia’ refers to the group of Indonesian economists who studied at the University of California, Berkeley, and other US institutions and carried out similar policies as the Chicago Boys. Under president Suharto’s New Order regime (1966–1998), they promoted economic stabilisation, liberalisation, and opened Indonesia to foreign investment, helping to discipline and modernise the country’s economy while intensifying political repression. Under Pinochet’s military regime and Suharto’s dictatorship , Western-trained economists imposed free-market discipline under the banner of reform. Their neoliberal agenda entailed the ‘rolling back’ of certain welfare/state obligations, greater emphasis on market logic, individualisation of risk, commodification of social services, and, in many cases, a reordering of citizenship, labour, and space, resulting in extreme political suppression, economic models replaced moral debates, and dissent became inefficiency. The DU campus reproduces the same technocratic ethos of the Chicago Boys and the Berkeley Mafia, manifested as ‘illegal,’ ‘unhygienic’ and ‘unsafe’ in miniature form and becomes a discursive weapons that transform social difference into administrative disorder. In the name of modernisation, Dhaka University mirrors the global technocratic imagination that governs through the bureaucratisation of moral life.
According to Michel Foucault, the problem at DU we are discussing here is neoliberalism, a mode of governmentality — a technique that shapes individuals to govern themselves without visible coercion through market rationality. This is a broader disciplinary governing mechanism at work at an individual level, which Foucault called a ‘conduct of conduct.’ Dhaka University has become a training ground for this self-disciplining citizenry, and the eviction drive functioned pedagogically, teaching students that safety and order require removing the undesirable. Foucault called this the microphysics of power, where morality shifts to management. Safety, once a moral principle of care, becomes redefined as a tool of governance, conditioning citizens to accept policing, censorship, and surveillance as tools of order. The campus reproduces Bourdieu’s doxa of neoliberal reason — the uncritical acceptance of competition, efficiency, and self-discipline as civic virtues. Loïc Wacquant’s notion of neoliberal penality illuminates this further, depicting how social problems are concealed in disciplinary failures. The proctorial team and student union embody this apparatus: surveillance, show-cause notices, video evidence, and exposure become tools of soft coercion. Homelessness becomes irresponsibility; informality, deviance. Dhaka University’s disciplinary governance thus mirrors state policing, a governance through visibility and fear, not inclusion or care — a moralised rehearsal of sovereign power in miniature. This is governance through visibility and fear, not through inclusion or care.
The postcolonial feminist lens unfolds that these acts of governance through control the marginalized body. Evicting the poor is not just an administrative act, but a physical one, carried out through gaze, touch, and exposure. In one of the videos, Sarba Mitra, visibly amused, points to the condoms found among the homeless people’s belongings and quips in Bangla, ‘Eta to sukher sangsar!’—’They’ve made a happy home here.’ His tone blends ridicule and moral disgust, as if the poor were incapable of intimacy or dignity. ÌýWhat moral authority allows a student leader to rummage through another’s belongings and broadcast their private life online? In that moment, the homeless were stripped not only of shelter but of dignity, privacy, and humanity itself. A feminist reading also invites reflection on the paradox of complicity and marginality.
Sarba Mitra himself belongs to an Indigenous community, the Chakma community, long subjected to displacement and militarisation in the Chittagong Hill Tracts. Sarba Mitra being an indigenous student leader, introduces a layered paradox of agency, subjectivity, and complicity. As Gayatri Spivak reminds us, the subalterns are sometimes forced to speak in ways that reinforce the very structures that keep them silenced. When Sarba Mitra aligns with the state’s system of governance, they become visible not as rebels but through complicity, embodying governance rather than resistance. This paradox illuminates the entanglement of identity and power in neoliberal patriarchy, where subaltern agency is permitted only when it reinforces the dominant order.
So, what is the solution to it? To challenge this moral economy of exclusion, we must first reject the administrative fiction defining ‘street people’ and ‘vendors’ as problems rather than citizens with rights. They have rights to shelter, livelihood, privacy, and dignity. Dhaka University must halt the evictions without rehabilitation, adopt rights-based protocols grounded in consent and privacy, and propose policies to the government for a long-term solution beyond just logistics, unlearning violence. Ultimately, student leaders must move away from disciplining toward a caring, responsible approach rooted in empathy and community. Bangladesh’s current approach to governance with neoliberal emphasis and technocratic methods is influenced by global networks of market-oriented elites, similar to the Chicago Boys or the Berkeley Mafia, and must shift from surveillance toward solidarity, and from discipline toward empathy. This approach has reshaped how spaces, informal activities, and expressions of dissent are regulated. This model redefines politics through metrics, rendering dissent inefficient and informality illegible.
From a postcolonial feminist perspective, the forceful eviction at DU campus reveals how neoliberal governance marginalises individuals who are pushed out, controlled, and disciplined within neoliberal campus governance systems. This raises important questions about rights, belonging, and state control, extending beyond traditional detention to include broader social and spatial management. This incident highlights how state power, law enforcement, and governance control bodies and physical spaces, and how these are embodied in neoliberal principles. In DU’s case, recognising the precarious lives of citizens with rights and ensuring those rights are implemented can be the first step. The eviction by Dhaka University exemplifies how such rationalities penetrate everyday micro-spaces, where the focus shifts from care to controlling the marginalised, imitating the power relation between the state and citizens on a small scale at the DU campus, a site of micro-governance, being neoliberal technocratic imagination at play.
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Rozyna Begum is a socio-legal researcher and human rights activist.
