What 2026 BNP can learn from 2002 BNP about talking law and order

In October 2002, marking one year in office during BNP’s second term, the then Prime Minister Khaleda Zia went on state television and radio and told the country that law and order had not improved as fast or as much as people had expected, and her government needed more time to fix it. She did not deny the crime wave that had swept the country in her first year, bluntly telling the nation that crime had “spread to every sphere of society like cancer” as a legacy of the previous administration, but promised that “this horrible period will soon come to an end.”

Twenty-four years later, with BNP back in office after another landslide, Home Minister Salahuddin Ahmed seems to have taken the opposite approach when addressing similar concerns. Asked earlier this month by a journalist about a widely felt deterioration in law and order, his reply was, “Our data does not say that.” Pressed further on rising murder figures—that, reporters noted, the prime minister’s own information adviser had already acknowledged—Salahuddin’s answer was to ask to see the document.

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This is the crux of what has gone wrong in Bangladesh’s law and order conversation over the past seven months: that the state’s custodian of public safety has chosen scorekeeping over candour, at precisely the moment when candour is most needed from those in power. To be clear, data is not the problem here, nor should the 2002 reality be held up as a benchmark for the vastly different world we live in today. What’s problematic, however, is the unaddressed gap between official data and the prevailing perceptions of safety, which needed a different kind of response.

Last month, the home minister promised “no criminal will remain at large within six months.” Earlier he had even declared the law and order situation was “fully under control,” insisting that banned parties had “no capacity to make any impact on (the) ground” other than “occasional social media peeping.” In the same month, he told parliament that whenever a crime occurs now, perpetrators are arrested “within 24 to 48 hours, or even less,” calling the improvement “visible.” Now let’s read these blanket statements against the ground reality from the last couple of days alone, because had those statements held water, we probably wouldn’t have reached this point.

On late Thursday night, more than 200 masked men armed with locally made weapons stormed the Radda MCH-FP Centre in Dhaka’s Mirpur-1 area, tied up two security guards, looted vaccines, cash and equipment, and razed the nearly 50-year-old facility with heavy machinery, hours before a measles-rubella vaccination drive was due to begin there. The centre served around 400 mothers, children and elderly daily. Police reportedly failed to intervene, while locals and BNP insiders alleged the involvement of a reserved-seat MP’s supporters in a factional land dispute. Four arrested men were reportedly hired day labourers, leaving unanswered questions about who organised and financed the attack.

Then, at around 6:30am on Saturday, 15 to 20 men, some armed with machetes, tried to storm a multi-storey building in Adabor’s Shyamoli Housing, which the same gang had earlier allegedly occupied for one and a half years and collected over Tk 1.56 crore in rent. Police raided the property in March and restored it to its owner. Saturday’s attack followed the owner’s refusal to pay extortion money, with CCTV footage showing the men demanding cash before hacking at the gate. Although the building manager called 999, police arrived about two and a half hours later.

On the same morning, 200 to 300 people allegedly attempted to grab 35 kathas of land near Rose Villa in Chand Udyan Housing at Mohammadpur, attacking people, vandalising property and looting valuables. Police have so far arrested 13 people in connection with these two incidents.

That Saturday night, at ECB Chattar, scores of armed men stormed the New Gini Properties housing complex, firing rounds before breaking down the gate and ransacking content creator Salman Muqtadir’s studio—smashing mirrors, tearing down air conditioners, looting hard drives and cameras—in an attack that police described as an ordinary land dispute and arrested five people so far.

Four separate incidents within roughly a 48-hour window indicate one unmistakable pattern: organised men act with impunity—some of them repeat offenders undeterred by an earlier arrest—when the political address is favourable, and the police either vanish, arrive too late, or mobilise instantly, depending on whose side is inconvenienced.

This is not simply “law and order deteriorating.” These incidents point to serious failure in preventing crime, responding to it, and ensuring that the law is applied equally. Max Weber’s foundational definition of the state is worth recalling here. For Weber, the defining feature of the state is its monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force—a monopoly it may delegate to other actors, but only “to the extent to which the state permits it,” and never fully surrender. Some of the recent incidents in Dhaka have revealed how this delegation is often run on partisan lines: coercion effectively handed to whichever local network currently enjoys ruling party patronage, while the police supply enforcement only when summoned by the right people, and stand aside or arrive too late when the summons comes from an ordinary citizen.

It has been more than seven months since Tarique Rahman’s government took office on February 17. No one really denies what it inherited: a police force demoralised and politicised through 15-plus years of Awami League rule, implicated in the killing of roughly 1,400 people during the July uprising, followed by an interim administration that saw its own surge of mob violence. But seven months is long enough that “we inherited this” stops being an explanation and starts becoming an excuse.

Ain o Salish Kendra (ASK) recorded 66 deaths and 2,854 injuries in 374 incidents of political violence between January and June this year, including nine deaths and 1,001 injuries in clashes between the BNP and Jamaat-e-Islami. The rights organisation also documented 61 deaths in jail custody and 11 alleged extrajudicial killings during the same period. Meanwhile, mob violence remained a major concern, with ASK recording 154 deaths between January and August.

These figures bring the argument back to where it started. Top officials may produce a spreadsheet showing that, compared with an earlier six-month period, the occurrence of this or that crime has declined, but such comparisons mean little to those who have already suffered, or to people living with a persistent sense of insecurity. In governance, public perception is not a distraction from reality; it very often is the reality a government must answer to. And in the age of AI and social media, public perception can be remarkably fragile, shifting rapidly despite what the data may show.

When citizens across the political spectrum say, independently and repeatedly, that they feel less safe, the ideal response is not a denial or an argument over the numbers. It is the candour that Khaleda Zia showed in 2002 (however imperfectly she then delivered on it)—an acknowledgment that the government has not done enough, and that there is still much more room for improvement.

Improvement, in the present context, would mean genuine police reform: not another round of transfers, reshuffles or cosmetic changes like changing the names or uniforms of a few discredited agencies, but establishing a professional, politically neutral, and truly accountable force that can act without pressure or fear. It would mean stronger investigations, intelligence-led policing, and faster emergency response. It would mean breaking politico-criminal patronage networks that enable criminals to operate with impunity and undermine public safety. Can the 2026 BNP government do that?

Jannatul Naym Pieal is a writer, researcher, and journalist. He can be reached at jn.pieal@gmail.com.

Views expressed in this article are the author's own. 

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