Features | Politics | South Asia

For More Than 20 Years, Bangladesh’s One Constant Has Been Political Violence

Violent clashes between rival parties, within their own ranks, and around elections have persisted through successive governments.

Along with joy, vandalism also took place around the country after Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s resignation on Aug. 5, 2024.

On the night of October 18, men chased Ripon Mia through Paiska in Bangladesh’s Narayanganj district and attacked him with sharp weapons. His family took him to hospital, where doctors declared him dead.

Ripon was a local leader of Jubo Dal, the youth wing of the ruling Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP). According to local BNP activists, a rivalry between two groups had recently worsened over whose names should appear on the guest list for a religious event.

“Several men chased my father and hacked him,” his daughter Shila told the media.

The local BNP president linked the killing to a struggle for political dominance. 

Earlier this year, two brothers died after supporters of the BNP and Jamaat-e-Islami (JI) clashed in the western district of Chuadanga on February 28. Police said an argument after the evening meal breaking the Ramadan fast escalated into violence. Hafizur Rahman died hours later; his brother Mofizur Rahman, a local JI leader, died in a Dhaka hospital on March 10. 

The BNP and the JI blamed each other for the violence. Police arrested three suspects after the family filed a murder complaint, including a local BNP official and a former leader of its volunteer wing. The clash came less than two weeks after the BNP returned to government. 

These recent killings have a longer history. Records from Ain o Salish Kendra (ASK), a Bangladeshi human rights organization, alongside academic research and news reports, trace more than two decades of political violence in Bangladesh. They show how clashes between rival parties, within their own ranks, and around elections have persisted through successive governments.

From January to September of this year, ASK recorded 94 deaths and 3,587 injuries in 467 incidents of political violence. That includes 112 clashes classified as BNP against BNP. Those clashes left 18 people dead and 1,215 injured. 

The figures cover part of the interim administration as well as the elected government. BNP chief Tarique Rahman took office as prime minister on February 17. 

Bangladesh has changed a lot in recent years. An uprising in the summer of 2024 toppled Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina after 15 years of authoritarian rule. An interim administration, led mostly by non-politicians, took over. Then came a national election and a political government. Yet through every one of those shifts, one thing hasn’t changed: Bangladeshis are still dying in fights over who controls things at the local level. This is not a problem that belongs to any one government. It has outlasted all of them. 

Records extending back to 2002 show violence between rival parties, within the party in power, and around elections. A party post, a business, a piece of land, or even a guest list for a social event can become the setting for a struggle over who commands a neighborhood.

The history also shows why the problem cannot be explained simply as hostility between the BNP and the Awami League (AL).

During 2002–2006, a period largely covering the BNP’s previous government, ASK recorded 284 internal BNP clashes and 55 deaths. Internal AL clashes accounted for 37 deaths. These figures appear in political scientist Rounaq Jahan’s 2014 study “Political Parties in Bangladesh.”

JI, an Islamist party now in opposition, was a junior partner in the BNP-led government of 2001–2006, with two ministers in the Cabinet. But the political alliance of the time did not prevent violence between party supporters. ASK figures reproduced in Jahan’s 2014 study recorded 134 clashes between the BNP and JI during 2002–2006, leaving eight people dead. The same period saw 42 AL–JI clashes and seven deaths.

The military-backed caretaker years of 2007-2008 brought a sharp fall in recorded party clashes. Inside the BNP, there were just eight clashes and two deaths. Inside the AL, there was one clash and no deaths. Clashes between rival parties also dropped to 32, with seven deaths, all in fights between the AL and BNP. In 2002-2006, by comparison, AL-BNP clashes alone caused 118 deaths. The period of 2007-2008 saw nine deaths in total due to political violence.

Yet fewer party clashes did not mean freedom from political coercion. The caretaker government operated under emergency rules. Human Rights Watch documented arbitrary arrests, torture, and custodial killings. Political activity was restricted. The conditions under which parties could gather and fight were changed. 

After the AL returned to government in 2009, internal violence rose again. Between 2009 and 2012, 799 internal AL clashes killed 97 people. The corresponding BNP figures were 229 clashes and 21 deaths. 

Note that these totals cover unequal time periods. The point is not to rank the various governments, but to point to the recurrence of deadly conflict within the party holding national power.

While local disputes are a recurring issue, national political confrontations proved much more lethal. In 2013, as Bangladesh approached a bitterly disputed election, ASK recorded 507 deaths from political violence. Its annual sheet categorized 185 deaths under hartal (strike) violence and another 85 under blockades beginning on November 26. 

Under the AL government, confrontations involving JI and security forces became particularly deadly in 2013. ASK’s original annual records list 37 deaths in clashes involving JI, its student wing Shibir, and police. Another 11 deaths were recorded separately in JI–police clashes. Other rows naming JI or Shibir carry further deaths: 13 in AL–JI–Shibir clashes, nine in AL–JI clashes, nine in Shibir–police clashes and five in AL–BNP–JI–police clashes, along with several smaller categories. 

Taken together, rows involving JI or Shibir account for 96 of the year’s 507 deaths. Of note, these categories describe the groups that took part in the fighting, without establishing who caused the deaths.

The following years saw fewer separately identified incidents involving JI and Shibir. In 2015, there were nine incidents and three deaths naming either group. In 2016, two incidents were listed, with one death. The 2017 table recorded one Shibir–police clash, leaving three people injured. Neither JI nor Shibir was separately named in the 2018 and 2019 tables. These gaps limit what the annual summaries can establish about the party’s involvement during those years.

Even when major political parties were not confronting each other in a national showdown, people could still die in contests among political allies. In 2017, ASK recorded 52 deaths in political violence. Its AL-against-AL category alone accounted for 29. That figure did not include the separate rows for clashes involving the party’s student and youth organizations.

Local elections were another recurring source of deaths. In 2016, ASK recorded 147 deaths in violence linked to elections for rural local councils, known as union parishads, which take place every five years. That accounted for most of the 177 political violence deaths recorded that year. In 2021, violence surrounding these council elections killed 113 people, out of 157 deaths recorded nationwide.

These numbers do not identify who carried out each killing. They do show how much violence occurred around the distribution of local offices, not just around parliamentary elections.

Research into the motives for violence helps explain the connection.

A........

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