Securitized Suffering: Violence, law and political widowhood in Bangladesh
As a Rob Lemelson Foundation Fellow 2023, I have conducted a total of three months of preliminary fieldwork in Dhaka while living in the city from mid-June to mid-September in 2023. My fieldwork during this time was divided between two primary sites: the Odhiker office in Dhaka district, where I conducted research with rights defenders and Mayer Daak2 activists, and court houses, where I conducted research with lawyers, political widows and the family members of the victims of police violence. Occasionally, I visited the houses of the victims’ families and the protest events in three Districts of Bangladesh: Dhaka, Brahmanbaria, and Noakhali.
Through participant observation and ethnographic interviews at these locations, I learned about different ways through which the suffering of political widows, terrorism defendants, and their families are securitized and managed. Using network sampling, I followed these leads and engaged with a wider variety of interlocutors and locations. To date, I have conducted 20 semi-structured interviews with political widows (8), terrorism defendants and their family members (6), human rights defenders (3), and lawyers (3). I have also conducted participant observation at a number of relevant sites, including the house of the organizer of Mayer Daak, two protest events, and a press conference event organized by Mayer Daak. While in Bangladesh, I also held an institutional affiliation with Brac University from 2019 to 2021, the top-ranked private university in Bangladesh. This allowed me to meet with scholars in anthropology, political science, history, and law, who provided crucial feedback on this research project.
In addition to preliminary fieldwork in Dhaka, I regularly participate in online group meetings and private discussions organized by Odhiker and Mayer Daak. I also continue to closely monitor developments in terror trials and legal battles through newspaper articles, blogs, and social media sites. At Odhiker, I worked as an unpaid human rights defender, participated in daily activities in documenting and categorizing human rights violations, and collaborating with political widows, victim families, and international agencies. I volunteered and attended workshops and training sessions they organized to train Mayer Daak activists. I observed the day-to-day activities of the rights activists of Odhiker to understand how they count the dead and rewrite human rights violation narratives, countering the government narratives. Working as a volunteer in the Odhiker office allowed me to observe the collaboration with victim families. I joined three sessions where they discussed the strategies to counter the government narratives on violence and to navigate everyday suffering. They also facilitated counseling sessions and collaborated with psychiatrists to manage pain and suffering.
At Courtroom, I worked as an assistant to a criminal lawyer. As an assistant, I participated in daily activities, including ongoing case management of terrorism, torture and disappearance, bail hearings, and trial sessions. I recorded how court officials not only authorize harassment of political widows, secret detention, and physical torture in judicial custody but also keep secret the official records of torture and dismiss the testimonies of political widows and the victims of police violence as inconsistent and exaggerated by framing them as ‘hyper,’ ‘brainwashed,’ and ‘mentally disordered.’
Based on this early research, I have developed four initial observations about the securitization of the suffering of political widows, terrorism defendants, and their families in Bangladesh: (1) legal practices and human rights activism, rather than curing suffering and ensuring justice, have become ways of living with suffering and trauma; (2) despite the state’s designation of the political activists as a “terrorist,” the latter received widespread support from all walks of life except the authoritarian regime; (3) The state violently utilize the law to silence political widows and the victim of police violence, leaving virtually no recognition of victimhood and emphasizing their status as criminalized. (4) the employment of large-scale security technologies, at once imbues the lives of political widows and terror suspects with the fear of persecution and also constitutes the material conditions of possibility for the same people to articulate a collective memory, political community, and moral codes to live through this suffering and fear.