AFTER the July 2024 mass uprising, Bangladesh stands at a crossroads. For decades, its political and moral trajectory had been defined by authoritarianism, fear, and institutionalised repression. The interim government, born out of the people’s mandate, was expected to mark a rupture — to rebuild institutions, protect the vulnerable, and dismantle the structures of impunity that sustained the old regime. Education, justice, and civic security were meant to be the core of this reform. The rhetoric of ‘daay o doroder rajniti’ promised a politics of responsibility and compassion, signalling a break from the old authoritarian order. Yet, more than a year later, the lived reality across campuses and public spaces reveals a stark divergence from the promises of ‘daay o doroder rajniti’: protection is selective, compassion is rare in the face of far-right ideological violence, and vulnerability is systematically weaponised to enforce conformity. The government’s inaction in response to mounting assaults—ranging from campus attacks to violations of cultural and intellectual life — demonstrates that institutional silence itself functions as a political discourse, a form of governmentality that normalises exposure and regulates who may be shielded and who is exposed to harm, as evidenced in recent incidents across universities, public spaces, and sites of religious and cultural significance.
In the aftermath of the uprising, expectations were that the new political order would cultivate the ethics of life, that the state would protect rather than endanger, and listen rather than remain silent; however, the emerging reality suggests continuity. What we are witnessing today is not merely the residue of the old authoritarian order but the unfolding of a subtle form of governance — one that reproduces abandonment through silence and selective inaction.
Across Bangladesh, the pattern is visible: mobs gather in the name of morality or faith, cultural workers are threatened or attacked, dissenters are publicly shamed, and students are assaulted over allegations of blasphemy, while Bauls and Auliyas are being targeted in the name of ‘purity’, their hair forcibly shaved, their beards cut, and even graves have not been spared — the body of Nurul Haque, popular as Nura Pagla, was exhumed and set on fire to satisfy an imagined righteousness. Power in Bangladesh today operates less through formal decrees than through calibrated neglect. It manifests in the impunity of mob violence, in the desecration of graves and sacred sites, and in the pervasive climate of fear and collective numbness that saturates civic life. Meanwhile, the state, caught in the interregnum between authority and legitimacy, struggles to regulate the very forces that now exceed its control and occupies a space of structural uncertainty — a moment in which the old order has not yet been fully dismantled, and the new has yet to consolidate authority, recalling Gramsci’s insight that crises produce zones of contested power and vulnerability. Governance in this context assumes a necropolitical form — a management of death disguised as order. This necropolitical praxis represents the ultimate expression of sovereignty — the power to determine who may live, who must die, and who is left exposed to death (Mbembe, 2003).
The most troubling aspect of this shift is not only the violence itself but also its normalisation. The repetition of outrage and forgetting has turned public death into a spectacle and survival into a privilege. What was once the politics of control has become the politics of exposure — where certain bodies are left to be killed, discredited, or erased. This seems not chaotic but structured, intentional, a form of governmentality that sustains itself through moral panic, selective empathy, and institutional silence. These cases underscore how the state, though mandated to intervene, failed to act, thereby leaving civilians exposed to the mechanisms of necropolitical violence.
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Universities as sites of necropolitical exposure
IN A disturbing recent incident at United International University, a student, Monser Ali, was brutally assaulted and later expelled after allegedly making derogatory remarks about Islam, the Qur’an, and Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) during a private conversation with his roommate. The exchange, secretly recorded without his consent, was rapidly circulated online, sparking outrage across the campus. Within hours, groups of students mobilised, physically attacking him. At the same time, social media posts later revealed that the main assailant and sympathisers expressed anguish and frustration that Monser had survived, exposing a chilling normalisation of lethal intent. Instead of addressing the breach of privacy, the university’s disciplinary body moved swiftly to expel the victim, reinforcing a culture where moral panic replaces justice and where violence — both physical and symbolic — is legitimised under the banner of faith and purity. Institutional inaction renders Monser a socially disposable subject, whose vulnerability is codified through silence and omission, exemplifying necropolitical exposure (Mbembe, 2003). By failing to address the assault or the betrayal of trust, the institution effectively delineates which students are protected and which are exposed, converting private spaces of reflection into arenas of life-and-death stakes.
The ways in which students internalise this environment of surveillance and anticipated punishment reflect the logic of panopticism (Foucault, 1977). Knowing private conversations may be weaponised, students self-regulate, curtailing expression and eroding spaces meant for moral and intellectual growth. The campus enforces conformity not only through authority but also through peer-mediated fear, producing internalised discipline that operates independently of formal sanctions. Moreover, the discursive construction of morality and blasphemy transforms speech into a vector of social and political risk (Said, 1978). Transgression is determined less by law than by dominant moral narratives, with deviations rendered socially hazardous. The liminality of campus governance illustrates zones of contested power, where boundaries between legitimate authority and abandonment are blurred (Gramsci, 1971). The suspension of the victim, rather than the perpetrator, exemplifies how authority is exercised selectively, reinforcing precarity and normalising vulnerability. Campuses thus function as microcosms of broader societal struggles over control and the distribution of fear, spaces where governance mediates exposure to harm rather than ensures security.
Perhaps equally important is understanding the position of the young perpetrators. Their actions, though reprehensible, emerge from a deeply conditioned moral environment — one where violence is rationalised as an act of faith and where purity is conflated with righteousness. Their moral imagination is shaped not by democratic ethics or legal reasoning but by a pedagogy of fear and manipulated devotion. They, too, become casualties of necropolitical governance — subjects whose capacity for empathy and critical reasoning has been eroded by ideological conditioning.
In another unsettling case at North South University, a student named Apurbo Rad (formerly Apurbo Pal) — once known for his curiosity in class — found himself at the center of controversy after posting a video insulting the Qur’an. Apurbo’s trajectory reflects more than mere ‘blasphemy’: emotional rejection, familial estrangement, social alienation, and a rigid performative religiosity marked his transformation. Many professors and peers described him as mentally unstable, exhibiting erratic behaviour and deep loneliness. What should have prompted psychiatric or social intervention instead led to expulsion — an inversion of justice exposing the institutional absence of care and compassion. If mentally unstable, the state’s ethical responsibility is treatment and protection; if not, due process must determine accountability. In either case, power must not decide whose life is expendable.
What should have prompted psychiatric or social intervention instead was expulsion from the university — an inversion of justice that exposes the absence of institutional care and compassion. If mentally unstable, the state’s ethical responsibility is treatment and protection; if not, the due process of law must determine accountability. In either case, the power must not be exercised to decide whose life is expendable or not.
Similarly, last year at Dhaka University, 35-year-old Tofazzal, another mentally unstable individual, was beaten to death by a group of students in the guest room of Fazlul Haque Hall. Tragically, he was served food before being murdered, highlighting the grotesque normalcy of exposure and abandonment. These cases collectively demonstrate a recurring pattern: the state and institutions abstain from proactive intervention, leaving vulnerable subjects exposed while moral panic governs public imagination.
After the mass uprising, the interim government arrived, promising to rebuild institutions that had failed a generation. Education was central to that revival. Yet more than a year since the uprising, no Education Reform Commission has been formed — no framework to remake curricula, secure campuses, depoliticise hiring, or protect students and faculty from extralegal violence. In this void, universities have become liminal arenas where the politics of life and death unfold not only through physical assault but also through silences, expulsions, and moral hysteria — gradually eroding intellectual and affective safety.
With the interim’s reluctance — or perhaps conscious choice — not to institutionalise educational reform, a necropolitical logic emerges: care and empathy are withheld while control is maintained, exposing certain lives to disposability. Students like Monser, Aporbo, and someone like Tofazzal become instruments through which law and moral legitimacy are violated, yet their suffering remains politically insignificant. Governance assumes a reactive, punitive form, intervening only in crisis; it regulates death more efficiently than it cultivates life, reflecting Foucault’s analysis of biopolitics and the disciplining of life. Within this moral economy of fear, the system manufactures both transgressor and executioner, each conditioned by the same disciplinary logic that erodes empathy and forecloses dissent.
The continuity of these incidents reveals that education in Bangladesh has transformed from a humanistic praxis into a necropolitical domain, where moral panic supplants pedagogy and ideological policing replaces critical thought. As Gramsci would suggest, universities cease to act as sites of organic intellectual formation and become instruments of hegemony. As Said reminds us, institutional silence is never neutral; it legitimises domination. The result is an epistemic landscape governed by exposure and fear — a society that normalises abandonment while growing estranged from the ethics of care. Even after these alarming tragedies, the interim government did not act on the urgency of educational reform, revealing either deliberate neglect or strategic inaction, further entrenching a necropolitical order where life is regulated through exclusion rather than compassion.
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Necropolitical governance and far-right Islamist impunity
THE recent series of forced hair-shaving incidents targeting elderly fakirs in Dhaka, alongside the horrifying desecration of Nura Pagla’s dead body, illustrates a necropolitical strategy whereby ideological actors weaponise social norms to render certain lives — and even bodies posthumously — expendable. In these cases, the rhetoric of hygiene, cleanliness and purity is mobilised as a tool of social policing: bodily and moral hygiene are conflated, creating a discursive field where deviation from prescribed norms justifies public humiliation, coercion, or even lethal violence. Historically, cleanliness has long functioned as a medium of governance: from colonial public health campaigns that disciplined bodies in the name of hygiene to postcolonial state projects that deployed moralistic purity to control marginalised populations — the regulation of corporeal norms operates as both a biopolitical and necropolitical apparatus. Colonial interventions against cholera and plague imposed segregation, compulsory sanitation, and surveillance over daily bodily practices, disciplining populations along racial and moral hierarchies (Arnold, 1993; Bose, 1993). Postcolonial states have similarly leveraged moralised hygiene — whether regulating menstruating women in temples or marginalising sanitation workers — to define who is protected and who remains expendable (Chakravarti, 1998; Gupta, 2000). These practices reveal how the policing of corporeality is not merely about public health but a strategic distribution of care, protection, and exposure to harm, exemplifying the dual logic of biopolitics and necropolitics (Foucault, 1978; Mbembe, 2003).
The recent forced shaving of elderly fakirs’ hair in Dhaka serves as a contemporary manifestation of necropolitical praxis. In the name of cleanliness and hygiene, a group led by Mufti Sohrab Hossain Ashrafi forcibly shaved their hair and beards, framing the act as a service to society. Despite clear distress among the victims and public outrage, no arrests have been made, demonstrating selective enforcement that mirrors a necropolitical governance, where ideological alignment dictates the distribution of care, protection, and even respect for life itself. In contrast, in the Nura Pagla case, some perpetrators were arrested, yet even there, the dead body of the victim was desecrated and publicly paraded, highlighting the extremity of ideological impunity when moral panic and religious fervour converge.
These incidents are not isolated; they are embedded within a broader pattern of interim inaction, where far-right Islamist groups are tacitly enabled to weaponise bodily discipline and humiliation as social control. The interim government’s failure to act decisively — despite repeated visibility of these violations on social media — signals a necropolitical strategy that withholds accountability, thereby regulating which lives are expendable and which are deserving of protection. Here, governance operates not through equitable law enforcement but through conscious choice of avoidance, reinforcing both fear and ideological conformity while eroding the possibility of moral and civic recourse.
Over the past year, a series of alarming incidents, of which I analysed only a few recent cases here, reveals a persistent pattern of the interim government’s reluctance or strategic inaction in controlling far-right, ideologically motivated mobs. Despite repeated public visibility of these events, accountability remains selective, and legal or institutional intervention is conspicuously absent. What emerges is a necropolitical action in practice: governance that withholds protection, cultivates fear, and determines whose life, dignity, or body is expendable. The promises of the post-uprising period — ‘daay o doroder rajniti’, a politics of ‘responsibility and compassion’— have been utterly betrayed. Rather than extending care to the vulnerable or enforcing moral and civic accountability, the state’s inaction tacitly sanctions exclusion, humiliation, and violence. The government’s praxis illustrates a grim inversion of ethical governance: no compassion, no protection. Instead, abandonment, exclusion, and ideological alignment shape who lives, who suffers, and who becomes a site of insignificant death or disrespect. Such selective enforcement reproduces existing hierarchies of power and moral legitimacy, transforming law and policy into instruments of social exclusion rather than instruments of justice. It also signals a deeper epistemic violence, where the affective and intellectual vulnerabilities of marginalised subjects are systematically rendered politically invisible, reinforcing a culture of normalised disposability.
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Tina Nandi is a Bangladeshi broadcast journalist currently admitted to the Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies Program at Columbia University, New York. Tina Nandi is a former journalist.