What we are witnessing in Bangladesh is selective liberalization rather than genuine pluralism: political space has reopened for some, particularly the parties that opposed the Awami League (BNP and Jamaat), but not for those whose identities were most systematically delegitimized in the years preceding the uprising.
Cultural Priming
Over time, repeated messages train us to feel certain ways about certain kinds of people, often without realizing it. These are often embodied reactions – cognitive reflexes that categorize people as Us/Them, shortcutting slower processes of critical thinking. Hearing a particular word — razakar, atheist, Islamist, blogger, mullah, homosexual, feminist — triggers in some people an almost automatic emotional response: fear, contempt, outrage.
This is cultural priming: the slow, cumulative process by which a society is conditioned to see a group of people not just as different or wrong, but as dangerous and undeserving of protection.
No single person or moment causes it. It builds up across years and decades, through sermons and editorials, through social media posts and political speeches, through jokes and slurs repeated until they feel like common sense. By the time violence happens, the ground has already been prepared. The killing or the mob attack feels — to those who carry it out, and sometimes to those who watch — not like a crime but like a natural consequence. In this way, the word blogger came to mean enemy of Islam in many people’s minds by 2013. That didn’t happen overnight. It was prepared. People were primed for this cognitive connection.
In this way, marginalized groups in Bangladesh, including progressive secularists, became threatened, and the secular space that might have protected them shrunk. The current precariousness of secular space is thus not simply a product of political decisions by Sheikh Hasina, Muhammad Yunus, or the BNP, or even previous governments. Instead, it reflects decades of cultural priming that has made secularists cognitively and morally unintelligible to a broad swathe of Bangladeshi society.
But cultural priming has also gone both ways, a fact that often goes unacknowledged, especially in the context of defending the rights of the non-religious and religious minorities. Both groups – Islamists and secularists, and in particular bloggers and social media activists – not only criticized but otherized to a degree that makes understanding and empathy nearly impossible. Each group views the other as an existential threat to Bangladeshi identity and way of life. To emphasize the symmetry is not to suggest moral equivalence. Indeed, the consequences have been radically asymmetrical. But acknowledging this symmetry, rather than focusing on who is to blame, is a prerequisite for understanding how the secular space collapsed.
The Political Landscape
Cultural priming does not happen in a vacuum. In Bangladesh, the state itself was a primary builder of the infrastructure that enabled this priming. When Sheikh Hasina was sworn into office in 2009, after her Awami League (AL) party won an enormous majority of parliamentary seats, she began consolidating her power, leading to a 15-year rule that became increasingly authoritarian and reshaping the political and societal landscape. During that time, she contributed significantly to the priming infrastructure that not only consolidated her power but also established deathways for segments of society, exercising her sovereign power over whose lives were worth protecting (Mbembe 2019).
Hasina routinely claimed that only she could control the rise of Islamists and radical Islam, and she remained firm against Jamaat-e-Islami, which she banned from participating in politics. But she did nothing to prevent the murder of bloggers, writers, academics, and minorities by radical Islamists. In fact, Islamist power expanded and strengthened during the Hasina years when AL accommodated Islamist demands and, regarding the killings, looked the other way.
Hasina made numerous concessions to Islamist groups, particularly Hefazat-e-Islam, whose power grew in the 2010s through its base of Qawmi madrasa students. She recognized the highest Qawmi madrasa certification as equivalent to a postgraduate degree, which earned her the title of Mother of Qawmi at an event presided over by Hefazat leaders. This equivalency — whatever its political motivation — further eroded the common educational ground on which democratic culture depends. That in itself is tragic for a democratic society.
During her rule, the institutions that are necessary for democracy were threatened and weakened. The educational system was undermined, journalists imprisoned, and dissidents censored or disappeared. Extrajudicial killings were rampant, and, contrary to popular perception, the majority of the victims were leftists, not Islamists. Freethinkers and dissidents were brutally killed with impunity. For secularists and progressives, most of whom had helped elect Hasina, this became a dark time.
The 2024 student uprising — with its calls for justice and change and a broader-than-usual societal representation protesting Hasina’s repressive reign — seemed poised to usher in a tidal wave of change. But aside from February 2026 elections — Bangladesh’s first fair election in over a decade — the political transition has not translated into greater freedom or safety for secularists, freethinkers, and religious minorities. In fact, what we are witnessing in Bangladesh is selective liberalization rather than genuine pluralism: political space has reopened for some, particularly the parties that opposed the Awami League (BNP and Jamaat), but not for those whose identities were most systematically delegitimized in the years preceding the uprising.
The precondition for genuine pluralism, rather than selective liberalization, is making the priming legible as priming. It begins with recognizing how various groups and parties contributed to constructing others as unintelligible — not only radical Islamists, but secular elites, progressive bloggers, and political parties across the spectrum. It requires seeing the cognitive reflexes, the rhetorical grammar, the boundaries that feel like common sense for what they actually are: constructed, historical, and therefore changeable. That is intellectual and cultural labor that no political transition can substitute for. It is slow, uncertain work. But it is the only kind that reaches the problem where it actually lives — in the reflexes, the vocabulary, and the moral imagination of a society negotiating who, exactly, counts as a fellow Bangladeshi.
The pattern of shrinking progressive secularist space did not end with Hasina. The interim government led by Muhammad Yunus continued it, expanding the ground for Islamists. Although Yunus’s cabinet drew from secular civil society backgrounds — human rights, environment, law, academia, and economics — it also included Islamist actors. AFM Khalid Hossain, affiliated with Hefazat-e-Islam, was appointed Adviser for Religious Affairs.
Yunus lifted the ban on Jamaat-e-Islami (imposed by the AL). Nearly 100 militants escaped from prison during this period, and 43 high-profile militants were granted bail. Meanwhile, the interim government proved unable to control mob violence: shrines were destroyed, and religious minorities, indigenous communities, and women were attacked. This mob culture has been normalized as a political and societal weapon — most notably used against those already marginalized.
Bangladesh has now held its first fair election in over a decade, with BNP in office and Jamaat winning a sizeable number of seats. But an election is one thing and gives no guarantee of political and societal change. Will the BNP continue the culture of polarization it cultivated during its previous term in power, or will it strive for a more inclusive Bangladesh? And if the BNP advocates for greater inclusivity, who will be included and who will be excluded? For secular progressives and minorities, these questions remain unanswered and urgent.
Cultural Priming — The Islamist Direction
The pivotal 2013 events are well-known to most Shuddhashar readers. As the Shahbagh Ganajagaran Mancha movement grew from demanding capital punishment for 1971 war criminal Abdul Quader Mollah to demanding the banning of Jamaat-e-Islami, Mollah’s party, enormous crowds gathered in Dhaka’s streets, organized by online activists. The Islamist backlash against them was swift and well-organized. Hefazat-e-Islam mobilized its madrasa networks and converged on Shapla Square, reframing the Shahbagh movement as an atheist movement against Islam.
Central to this reframing was language. Some bloggers had made offensive and contemptuous statements about Islam and the Prophet, and Islamists seized on these to tar the entire movement. The term blogger became synonymous with anti-Islam and atheist. This label spread rapidly through newspapers and press conferences, and eventually reached hit lists. Hefazat demanded strong blasphemy legislation carrying the death penalty and drew up lists of bloggers they claimed deserved to die.
The government’s response was telling. Sheikh Hasina rejected the call for a formal blasphemy law, arguing existing laws were sufficient, and simultaneously arrested and detained four bloggers for allegedly making derogatory posts about Islam, acquiescing to Islamist pressure. In effect, the government allowed radical Islamists to do the work of suppressing dissent as AL distanced themselves from protestors. The atheist label was thus doubly useful: for Islamists, it mobilized religious outrage; for the government, it provided cover for eliminating political inconveniences.
This language did not stay contained. It primed Muslim extremists and moderates alike to experience criticism of Islam as a personal and civilizational threat, and outrage turned into violence. Responding to the killing of writers, bloggers, and publishers, Sheikh Hasina warned that any writing that hurts religious sentiments will not be tolerated in Bangladesh. The targets expanded well beyond bloggers — religious minorities, women activists, and gay activists were increasingly cast as enemies of Islam in Bangladesh. The result was a killing spree that claimed not only so-called atheists but anyone who could be made to fit the category of anti-Muslim or anti-Islamic.
This priming did not dissolve when Sheikh Hasina was ousted in 2024. It was already embedded in the cultural and rhetorical landscape — in the vocabulary, boundaries, and associations that felt natural.
Almost immediately after Hasina’s departure, violence — and rumors of violence and who was to blame — spread in the country. Law and order were nearly entirely ineffective as police feared retribution from citizens who saw them as having carried out Hasina’s shoot-and-kill order against students and demonstrators. Dr. Muhammad Yunus arrived in this chaotic context and began assembling his cabinet and committees. But mob violence increased. Under Yunus’s leadership, several prisoners were released. Much of this was appropriate, since Hasina was well known for detaining anyone who opposed her. But convicted criminals were also released, including those who had targeted atheists and secularists. Among those released, two are worth noting for their role in constructing progressive secularists as killable.
Jasimuddin Rahmani, leader of the hardline Islamist organization Ansarullah Bangla Team, was convicted and sentenced to prison for killing blogger Ahmed Rajib Haider (2013) and other charges. Soon after his release in 2024, Rahmani stated that anyone who criticizes Islam or leaves the religion does not have the right to live. He praised the success of his campaign against atheists and non-believers, stating, “I declared: ‘Those who insult Allah’s Prophet have no place to remain on the soil of Bengal.’ …It was then that I called out: ‘O my youth!—Wherever you find them, settle the score with them right there!’ Their dues have been settled—precisely and completely. On the soil of Bengal, never again did any atheist dare to make derogatory remarks about Allah’s Prophet, or to utter words of insult regarding my Prophet. Nor did anyone dare to write a book about my Prophet—or even to publish a book concerning my Prophet.”
Shafiur Rahman Farabi, who was sentenced to life in prison in a case over the murder of writer-blogger Avijit Roy, was released on bail granted by the High Court. Farabi was widely known for issuing death threats to Avijit and other freethinkers on social media and the blogosphere. He posted updates on Avijit’s whereabouts along with proclamations that he’d be killed. Since being released, he repeatedly denies committing the murder, claiming his imprisonment was unjust. Nonetheless, he continues to say that atheists do not deserve to live. He is also inciting communal violence with derogatory remarks against Hindus and other minorities.
Other radical Islamists continue this violent rhetoric, including Salafi scholar Shaykh Dr. Muzaffar b. Mohsin, who actively leverages Facebook and reels to engage in debates. His talks encourage active engagement through verbal responses and audience affirmations. An Apr 24 April 2026, YouTube reel began by briefly stating — because there is no debate — that the infidel (kafir) should be killed with a sword, hacked down, or lynched. This almost-casual aside illustrates how killability (Mbembe 2019) is normalized not only through content but also by tone and framing.
Most of his reel was devoted to a long discussion about the question of whether an infidel should be treated with a funeral, a topic about which he claims there is debate. To his audience, he explained in detail that an infidel’s body should not be touched because it’s contaminated, and the body should be buried in the jungle, far from foot traffic, so that no one walks over it, and the ground leveled smoothly so there is no noticeable mound. In his discussion, Muzaffar makes it clear that the infidel’s death is ungrievable (Butler 2004), but that even in death the body may contaminate others.
Muzaffar, Rahmani, and other radical Islamist orators have constructed these groups as killable and ungrievable, as unworthy of both life and a funeral. They don’t need to be explicit in instructing followers to kill because they rhetorically assume it.
At the same time that these radical Islamists spread their anti-freethinker rhetoric, other actions reinforce this vision of who doesn’t belong in Bangladesh. Sufi shrines were destroyed; Hindus and Adivasis attacked. During the interim government, notable secular and cultural spaces also came under attack: Chhayanaut, Daily Star, and Prothom Alo. Women came under attack in public places, and harassment of women was rampant online. And most recently, a mob under the banner of Azadi Andolon in Shahbagh attacked a group of bystanders accused of homosexuality. The next day, another mob dragged Abdur Rahman Shamim, a Sufi pir, out of his shrine, hacked him to death, and vandalized his shrine over allegations of hurting religious sentiments after an old video had been circulated.
These acts accumulate by drawing a line around who does and does not belong in Bangladesh, adding to an atmosphere of fear for secularists, freethinkers, nonreligious, and progressives. They represent the continuation of a rhetorical infrastructure built over decades. During the interim government, this divisive rhetoric and violence were unrestrained, operating freely in a political environment where the AL forces that might have constrained them, however cynically, were no longer in power. Currently, there is no indication yet that the BNP leadership will take an initiative to change this environment.
Cultural Priming —The Progressive Direction
There is considerable evidence that cultural priming has produced conditions in which secularists are not merely politically marginalized but killable. What is less appreciated by progressives is how they also engaged in cultural priming by constructing Islamists and Muslims as unworthy of being taken seriously. This is not to say that both sides — their rhetoric and their goals — are morally or literally equivalent. Far from it. But understanding how secular space collapsed requires acknowledging and examining both directions of that priming.
The urban secular elite’s general attitude about religious rural Bangladeshis is one of difference and distance. Rural Bangladeshis, the majority of whom are Muslims, are depicted as uneducated, unfortunate, superstitious, and unworthy of serious engagement. Madrassa education was disparaged rather than seen as an opportunity to reimagine educational opportunities and connections for poorer communities, who tend to populate those schools.
A frequent target of critique is the hijab, conceptualized by progressives as a repressive symbol of misogyny, patriarchy, and tradition. As more women in hijabs became visible in universities, debates circulated around its permissibility and whether Bangladesh is becoming another Afghanistan. When more urban middle-class women donned hijab, the critique shifted from a symbol of rural, uneducated backwardness to a misguided fashion statement. But either way, the hijab inspired ridicule. Conflating their dress with oppression, they diminished women’s agency and intelligence, not recognizing that having women from diverse backgrounds in universities and public spaces is positive for a democratic culture.
Online, these views grew significantly more divisive and contemptuous, especially by those who considered themselves progressive atheists. Bloggers sought to expose apparent contradictions in Islamic teachings and practices. Some drew on the arguments of New Atheists to pit Islam against science, arguing that Islam is irrational, patriarchal, based on superstitions, and morally corrosive. They sought to expose superstition by revealing tricks performed by Muslim pirs for the faithful.
On social media, some posted nude pictures of women alongside attacks on Islamic practices. One posted an image of a sausage wrapped in bread, calling it a pig in a burqa. A common way to criticize Islam and expose its backwardness was to state that Muhammad had many wives. While some aimed to debate using logic or history, others clearly sought to insult and ridicule.
Individual bloggers enacted contempt in highly visible ways that confirmed for religious audiences everything they had already been primed to expect. The bloggers did not deserve the violence unleashed on them, but the performative edge of freethinking culture fed directly into the Islamist priming narrative.
The state also played a role in othering Islamists. Many progressive voters initially supported the Awami League for its stated secularism. When Hasina took office, she restored secularism in the constitution, fulfilled a campaign promise to try war criminals convicted of crimes against humanity in 1971, and she banned Jamaat-e-Islami. These actions were favored by secularists.
Hasina also capitalized on associating Islamism with terrorism. Internationally, she portrayed herself as maintaining zero tolerance for terrorism and militant organizations. Hasina invoked Islamist groups, including Jamaat-e-Islami, and counterterrorism efforts to justify her consolidation of power. During the 2024 student protests, she used an antiterrorism law to ban Jamaat-e-Islami again, and during the 2024 election, she also called the opposition party, BNP, a terrorist organization.
What matters in the context of this article is that Hasina advanced a progressive narrative equating Islamism with terrorism. For nonreligious people and religious minorities, this rhetoric reinforced a sense of distance from, and inability to relate to, Muslims.
This otherization was not simply critique — it was its own form of priming. It constructed religious Bangladeshis as not merely wrong but contemptible, potential terrorists, as obstacles to progress rather than fellow citizens with legitimate claims on national identity.
Asymmetrical Results
Both sides viewed the other side as contemptible, both sides primed, both rendered the other as incomprehensible. Recognizing that both sides engaged in a politics of exclusion is important, but it doesn’t account for the radically asymmetrical consequences of the priming.
Cultural priming constructs meanings, assigns identities, and makes concepts feel natural and self-evident, often through language and other ways of representation. Once a category is fixed in this way, individuals cannot easily escape it. Representation is always also a form of power — the power to define who belongs and on what terms (Hall). But when that power to define expands to the power to render someone killable, that’s where the priming engaged in by secularists and Islamists is no longer symmetrical.
Bloggers’ offensive posts were akin to what Mary Douglas described as contamination: dirt out of place, or the combining categories that should be kept separate, like a rainbow flag draped over the Kabbah, or nude pictures alongside critiques of Islam. This contamination is threatening in that it disrupts what Muslims would consider to be order. This may just seem offensive to a non-Muslim.
But to a Muslim who experiences this offense as blasphemous, the offender lands on a continuum from morally incomprehensible to killable. Moreover, other progressives who do not engage in offensive rhetoric are impacted as well. Because of the logic of the priming process, a large group of people — secularists, nonreligious, religious minorities, LGBTQ+, and feminists — become morally unintelligible to a large population of Muslims (see also Knight 2026). This is not because of what they personally said but because of their associations with those who did.
Islamist orators are the key mechanism here. By branding an entire group of people as nastik and kafir, they establish boundaries and expel them as killable. As expert orators, weaving together their speeches with religious authority, they do not need to wield a machete, nor do they explicitly need to instruct people to kill. When Shaykh Muzaffar explains, almost in passing, that the kafir should be killed with a sword, hacked down or lynched, the casual register is not incidental; it is the point.
The matter-of-factness signals that this is simply the correct established order. This rhetoric reflects what Scheper-Hughes terms a genocidal capacity — the human capacity to reduce others to nonpersons, to monsters, or to things that give structure, meaning, and rationale to everyday practices of violence (2003: 369). This genocidal capacity does not require a genocide to be active. Instead, it works by making certain deaths feel like natural consequences rather than crimes.
Conclusion
This is a particularly precarious time for freethinkers and minorities in Bangladesh. Attacks and violent rhetoric have increased, repressive legal frameworks remain in place, Islamist influence has expanded, and there is little effort or will — through legal mechanisms or societal ones — to rein any of it in. Bangladesh’s transformation remains incomplete and uneven.
And what of the youth movement that emerged in 2024 through the uprising? The NCP, which was organized by youth as an alternative to corrupt political parties, billed itself as a progressive, anti-fascist movement. However, it wasn’t long before anti-progressive stances emerged, especially when some NCP leaders announced they were allying with Jamaat just as Jamaat members were stating that women’s political leadership was not permissible.
This led to many women leaving NCP, asserting in a memorandum that an NCP–Jamaat alliance was not only a betrayal of the original party ideals, but also contributed to a growing risk of religion-centric social fascism in the country. The NCP–Jamaat alliance led some women candidates to drop out of both the party and the election, while others ran as independents. Whether the alliance revealed cynical opportunism or the members’ actual views, the result was the same: women who had been central to the uprising were expendable when electoral calculations were factored in.
This is what entrenchment looks like. It is not only radical groups motivated by violence who operate within Islamist political and societal grammar; it is also supposedly progressive opposition, including the self-described anti-fascists who led the uprising. Actors across the spectrum find working within that Islamist grammar to be inevitable, even natural. That is a manifestation of how thorough the priming has been.
How, then, to build a culturally and politically pluralistic society from an entrenchment that has made monsters out of fellow Bangladeshis?
Hasina is gone, and BNP is now in power, and some sectors — notably BNP and Jamaat — have been liberated. But this is far from pluralism; it could easily result in a continuation of the same system under new management. Genuine pluralism requires a commitment from the state, including the risks that come with it, including real elections that may produce unwelcome results. But policy changes are not nearly enough.
The precondition for genuine pluralism, rather than selective liberalization, is making the priming legible as priming. It begins with recognizing how various groups and parties contributed to constructing others as unintelligible — not only radical Islamists, but secular elites, progressive bloggers, and political parties across the spectrum. It requires seeing the cognitive reflexes, the rhetorical grammar, the boundaries that feel like common sense for what they actually are: constructed, historical, and therefore changeable. That is intellectual and cultural labor that no political transition can substitute for. It is slow, uncertain work. But it is the only kind that reaches the problem where it actually lives — in the reflexes, the vocabulary, and the moral imagination of a society negotiating who, exactly, counts as a fellow Bangladeshi.
Selected Bibliography
Butler, Judith. 2004. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso.
Das, Arunima Kishore. 2025. “Women’s Ongoing Struggles for Safety in ‘New’ Bangladesh: Human Rights under Siege.” Australian Journal of Human Rights 31 (1): 133–39. doi:10.1080/1323238X.2025.2533890.
Douglas, Mary. 1966. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Hall, Stuart. The Work of Representation In Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, edited by Stuart Hall, 13—74. London: Sage Publications, 1997.
Haque, Asheque. 2022. “The Quintessential Ideologue: Rahmani and His Sermons.” In The Politics of Terrorism and Counterterrorism in Bangladesh (1st ed.) edited by S. Parvez and M. Sajjadur Rahman. Routledge.
Knight, Lisa I. “Exiled Bangladeshis, the Digital Economy of Fear, and Social Disappearance” In The Long Reach of the Strong Arm: Evolving Forms of Transnational Authoritarianism edited by Mubashar Hasan and Arild Engelsen Ruud. 143-171. Palgrave Macmillan, 2026. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-032-04940-7_8
Mbembe, Achille. 2019. Necropolitics. Duke University Press.
Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. Coming to our Senses: Anthropology and Genocide In Annihilating Difference: The Anthropology of Genocide edited by Alexander Laban Hinton, 348-381. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520927575-017
