Bangladesh's gamble with Islamist extremism

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17 hours ago

In medicine, certain diseases are called self-limiting. They burn out because they consume their own fuel. The pathogen spreads, triggers the body's defenses and is ultimately purged by the very symptoms it provokes.
Rotavirus diarrhoea is a textbook example. The virus replicates by destroying intestinal cells, unleashing a deluge of watery stools. But in that process, the body expels the virus en masse. Dehydration is the main danger, not the infection itself. Treatment is rehydration, patience – and restraint. No antibiotics. Just time.
Bangladesh's far-right political movements behave much the same way. They surge, intoxicated by their own fury, only to meet resistance that they themselves provoke. And the country's major political parties – especially the Awami League and the Bangladesh Nationalist Party – have long learned to treat this political fever with the clinical patience of a field medic: observe, hydrate, wait.
The rise of organised Islamist militancy offers a clear case. Though its first modern stirrings emerged under the Awami League with the 1999 bombing of the cultural group Udichi, it metastasised under the Bangladesh Nationalist Party government after 2001 – amid the global post-9/11 shift and under the pretense of countering leftist extremists.
The Bangladesh Nationalist Party dismissed early warnings as exaggerations, even fabrications by the media. This misdiagnosis allowed militancy to flourish.
Only when it struck the diplomatic core – wounding British High Commissioner Anwar Choudhury – and then spilled over into coordinated bombings across 63 districts, including attacks on the judiciary, did the ruling coalition respond with anything resembling urgency.
By then, the state was teetering. And yet, almost predictably, the very violence of the movement ensured its own undoing. What rose in chaos, collapsed in overreach.
This cyclical rise and fall of extremism is endemic. Bangladesh's far-right politics is a self-limiting disorder. It thrives on permissiveness, crests in destruction and invites a crackdown by triggering existential alarms.
Both major parties know this. They've come to rely on it. Far from developing proactive strategies, their default mode has become reaction, not prevention.
But this is a gamble – assuming that each flare-up will burn out before consuming the state entirely. The Rotavirus comparison only goes so far. In politics, dehydration doesn't just kill individuals. It weakens institutions.
And Bangladesh, increasingly, is running dry.
An exhausting game
The Awami League played this cynical waiting game. When secular bloggers were hacked to death one after another in the early 2010s, the government chose optics over action.
The murders were dismissed as isolated incidents, convenient provocations to be milked for political leverage. In some cases, officials even implied the victims brought it upon themselves. No serious investigative machinery was mobilised. No systemic preventive architecture was built.
Then came the Holey Artisan attack in 2016 – a massacre so brutal, so high-profile, that denial was no longer an option. Foreign engineers, pregnant women, and elite, Western-educated Bangladeshi youth were slaughtered in Dhaka's diplomatic zone.
The illusion of control evaporated. The state responded, as it always does, at the brink of collapse.
But what followed wasn't just suppression – it was transformation. The Awami League weaponised the crisis, turning public fear into institutionalised repression. They converted the war on extremism into a self-sustaining enterprise – a 'jongi bebsha', or militancy business.
Disappearances, secret detentions, and extrajudicial killings became not just tactics, but features of a new authoritarian order. The government aligned itself with the global trend of Muslim-demonising counterterrorism – offering itself as a regional partner to India's Hindu nationalist government and the broader Western security apparatus.
A politics of fear became its primary currency of legitimacy.
So when extremist mobs take to the streets again – burning homes, attacking minorities, issuing fatwas – the government watches, waits and measures. Because it understands the choreography. Let the violence swell. Let society panic. Then move in as saviour and surgeon.
The logic is tragically consistent. Far-right politics in Bangladesh is allowed to mature into crisis – not despite state interest, but because of it. It is profitable, both politically and geopolitically. And once the chaos peaks, it's contained – violently, if necessary – conveniently validating the very system that allowed it to fester.
In medical terms, diarrhoea purges the virus. But in politics, the purge takes human form: students, journalists, dissenters, bystanders. The 'symptom' is blood on the street.
Now the question is why do Bangladesh's leaders wait until they collapse? Why must every extremist wave reach a boiling point before the state reacts? Why are lives consistently sacrificed before power intervenes?
Uncomfortable truths
This is because, first, the expendability of life. In Bangladesh's political economy, human lives are collateral. Disposable. The slow violence of poverty, corruption, and infrastructural decay has already devalued public life.
A few dead bloggers? A handful of bomb victims? In the calculus of power, these are not crises – they are costs.
Second, opportunism. The ruling parties do not see extremism purely as a threat – they see it as a tool. A problem that can be turned into political capital. Whether it's a licence for surveillance, a justification for repression, or a means to discredit the opposition, the chaos is not only tolerated–it is curated.
The body politic, unlike the human body, doesn't heal. It mutates. It builds tolerance not to pathogens, but to violence. In Bangladesh, that virus is studied, harvested and sometimes – terrifyingly – incubated.
The deeper tragedy is that it often strikes the match. The Awami League has perfected the art of extracting power from chaos. Just as it once allegedly used rolling blackouts to justify lucrative quick-rental energy deals – some of which critics allege were artificially extended for profit–it has used early extremist violence to normalise disappearances, secret prisons, and the quiet burial of dissent.
What began as reactive measures soon became proactive performance: staged arrests, dramatised operations, manufactured enemies. A full-blown playbook of crisis capitalism emerged – never let a good crisis go to waste.
But the state alone is not to blame. It acts, in part, because we do not. Bangladesh's civil society – its public intellectuals, its media, its so-called conscious class – has become tragically consistent in its silence. We whisper about the violence. We look away from the disappearances. We tut-tut in drawing rooms after a tragedy, but only once it is too late.
Our inaction functions as permission. Our apathy sets the stage. And by the time the extremists are on the streets, or the security forces are kicking down doors, or the constitution is being quietly rewritten, it is already too late. The machinery is in motion.
Machiavelli, never shy about statecraft's darker corners, wrote of tuberculosis that 'in its early stages it is easy to cure but hard to diagnose; in its later stages, easy to diagnose but hard to cure'.
The same holds true for political disease. Early signs are ambiguous: a blogger killed, a speech silenced, a mosque sermon turned ominous. But when the diagnosis becomes clear to all, the cure demands blood.
This is the point at which Bangladesh now stands. We can no longer pretend not to recognise the symptoms. We have seen this cycle repeat, from the streets to the state and back again. We know how it ends: with new laws of surveillance, with bodies disappearing into black vans, with an electorate stripped of agency and a regime cloaked in manufactured consent.
So the burden now shifts – to us. If we know how this game is played, and if we continue to watch it unfold in silence, then we are no longer just observers. We are accomplices.