In Bangladesh, the Bawm Indigenous community is subject to an indefinite collective punishment, which operates through both spatial and temporal control.
In the hill tracts of Bangladesh, the violence is not always loud or noisy. It does not always arrive as gunfire or blaring torture. It might arrive with a delay, or in silence. There is a slow certainty that nothing will move forward. For families in the Bawm community, many lives are no longer measured in seasons in the jhum field, but in court dates that basically lead nowhere, in hearings that resolve nothing, in the prolonged absence of those taken away without clarity or with proper conviction.
On the night of April 2, 2024, between approximately 8:00 and 9:00 PM, an armed group identified as the Kuki-Chin National Front (KNF) carried out a robbery at the Sonali Bank branch in Ruma Upazila, Bandarban. Eight government-issued firearms were looted from the security personnel on duty. Less than 24 hours later, on the morning of April 3, similar attacks occurred in Thanchi Upazila, targeting local branches of Krishi Bank and Sonali Bank.
According to local residents, the attackers fled in locally used vehicles, firing blank shots as they escaped, reportedly in full view of nearby law enforcement. It must be noted that the incidents unfolded rapidly in a region where Bangladesh Border Guard (BGB) posts, police outposts, and army camps are located in close proximity to one another. For many, the speed and ease with which the events occurred raised troubling questions.
The departure from ancestral land carries consequences that are not easily reversible. In Indigenous life-worlds, land is not simply a resource; it is a repository of kinship and ritual. To leave, therefore, is to fracture a relationship with history itself. Houses are left behind without certainty of return. Sacred and everyday spaces alike become suspended, existing neither fully in abandonment nor in ongoing use. What remains in the villages is not just reduced population, but a landscape marked by absence — where social life continues in a diminished, fragmented form.
What followed in the days after can hardly be described as an effort to identify and apprehend those responsible. Villages fell into a tense silence as reports of raids, house searches, and arrests spread across these paras. It marked the beginning of a condition that would come to shape the lives of an entire community. By April 5, the Bandarban District Police confirmed that multiple cases had been filed under the Anti-Terrorism Act of 2009, the Special Powers Act of 1974, and various provisions of the Penal Code, naming ‘KNF terrorists’ as the accused. And on the ground, the suspect category gradually expanded beyond those directly implicated in the robberies.
On April 6, the former Minister of Home Affairs visited the affected areas and announced a coordinated joint operation. Under this widening operation, members of the Bawm Indigenous community — many with no apparent connection to the robberies — became the primary subjects of suspicion. Arrests multiplied, with raids becoming routine in the neighbouring villages. Detentions stretched on without clear evidence or due process.
Women, children, elderly individuals, students, jhum farmers, and government employees were among those taken into custody. In some cases, allegations of extrajudicial killings emerged, deepening fear while narrowing the possibility of accountability. It was not simply a matter of law enforcement responding to a specific crime. It increasingly took on the character of collective punishment, in which they did not limit the punishment to those directly involved but diffused it across an entire community.
Yet the violence of such measures cannot be understood solely through arrests or deaths. Village markets were shut down by the forces, disrupting local economies and effectively isolating villages from nearby trade centers. The sale of agricultural produce — particularly jhum crops was restricted. The jhum crops sustained many Bawm families.
At the same time, access to markets for essential goods was curtailed. For families already living with economic precarity, these measures severed both livelihood and survival pathways. Education was interrupted. Seasonal cycles of cultivation were disrupted. It became more visible over time. As weeks turned into months, and months into years, the future of the Bawm citizens around that area itself began to shift.
What is unfolding here can be understood as a form of collective punishment that operates through both spatial and temporal control. The violence is not only enacted through arrests or force, but through the reorganization of time, livelihood, and social relations. It is within this suspended condition that futures are not simply threatened, but actively foreclosed. Students lost the crucial years of their academic life, and some have lost their hard-earned employment. It might be hard to believe, but even emergency medical appointments required written authorization from army commanders.
This condition is further deepened by the crushing economic burden that accompanies prolonged legal uncertainty. For families of the detained, the pursuit of justice is materially exhausting. Securing legal representation, filing bail petitions, and attending repeated hearings often require travel from remote hill districts to distant courts, incurring costs that often exceed household capacities. The families are having to deplete their savings, and some are having to accumulate debts, maybe from informal lenders charging high interest rates, simply to sustain the fragile hope of release. Therefore, the legal system does not merely delay justice; it redistributes the cost of that delay onto those least able to bear it.
The effort to reclaim freedom becomes entangled with new forms of dispossession. Families are compelled to exchange long-term stability for short-term survival, eroding their ability to invest in education, healthcare, or livelihood. The future, already suspended, becomes actively indebted — tightening the conditions that make escape from this cycle increasingly difficult.
This condition can be further reflected through Veena Das’s conceptualization of how violence descends into the “ordinary,” becoming embedded in the textures of everyday life rather than remaining an exceptional rupture. Das reminds us that the aftermath of violence is not confined to spectacular moments of crisis but is instead absorbed into the routine practices of living, where it is “folded into the recesses of the ordinary” (Das 2007).
In the context of the Bawm community, the prolonged uncertainty of detention, the repetitive circuit through the courts, and the quiet restructuring of households reflect this process precisely. Violence here is not only visible in arrests or deaths; it persists in waiting, in disrupted kinship, and in the gradual normalization of insecurity.
Consider the case of a 19-year-old student, Partha Zual Bawm, who had completed her higher secondary education in Dhaka and was preparing for university admission. Like many of her peers, she moved between coaching centers and exam halls, carrying the familiar anxieties of competitive examinations for admission to a public university. She fell ill during her admission season, so she returned home for a few days to recover. During the arbitrary mass arrest operation in Bethel Para that April, she too was arrested. She has now spent well over 2 years in prison for no good reason. The admission cycle she was preparing for had come and gone. Her peers have moved forward; she remains suspended in an indefinite present.
Or take the case of Lal Tlanh Kim Bawm, who had worked for over a decade as a tutor at a local development organization. Alongside her job, she was pursuing a degree through distance education, sitting for her final examinations with the hope of eventual promotion. She did, however, pass the exam, but her career in that sector was already ruined, as she had been imprisoned for more than two years. The news of her passing arrived as a cruel irony — an achievement rendered unusable, a future foreclosed by confinement.
Then there are those whose absence restructures entire households. Tawn Tling Bawm was the sole provider for his elderly father, living with severe mental health challenges. With him being detained, the father survives precariously, dependent on the intermittent support of neighbors, often going without food. He keeps searching for his son, who used to manage the household finances and provide care for his father. His detention collapsed both.
These are not isolated tragedies. They form a pattern that reveals how collective punishment operates through imprisonment and also through the redistribution of vulnerability across families, generations, and social networks. While these are the stories of the families staying back, the impact extends beyond those who remain in the villages.
Segments of the Bawm population have been displaced from their ancestral homes, producing a profound form of rupture: depopulation. As reported by Netra News, records from the Mizoram Home Department indicate that more than 2,370 Bawm individuals from the Chittagong Hill Tracts have sought refuge in Mizoram over a period exceeding two years as of June 2025. This ‘mere migration’ reflects a forced unmaking of place where leaving becomes the only viable form of survival.
The departure from ancestral land carries consequences that are not easily reversible. In Indigenous life-worlds, land is not simply a resource; it is a repository of kinship and ritual. To leave, therefore, is to fracture a relationship with history itself. Houses are left behind without certainty of return. Sacred and everyday spaces alike become suspended, existing neither fully in abandonment nor in ongoing use. What remains in the villages is not just reduced population, but a landscape marked by absence — where social life continues in a diminished, fragmented form.
And for those who have crossed the border into refuge, displacement brings another layer of precarity. The future is deferred again, but this time in a different geography, where returns are not guaranteed. Meanwhile, for those who remain, the absence of large segments of the community reshapes the very structure of social life. Kinship networks thin out, collective labor systems weaken, and local economies contract further under the weight of reduced population and ongoing insecurity.
Now more than two years on, dozens remain imprisoned without trial, and thousands of them are displaced from their home following the April 2024 arbitrary operation. The scale and duration of these detentions and displacements raise fundamental questions about the very meaning of justice.
Over the last two years, Bangladesh has experienced significant shifts in its political landscape. Just a couple of months ago, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party emerged as the newly elected government after 15 years of the Awami League’s power and over a year of the Interim Government.
For the Bawm citizens, these shifts have brought little improvement. Their status remains unchanged; their cases remain unresolved. This continuity suggests that the issue is not tied to a single administration, but to some political and institutional logics that transcend electoral cycles. It is shaped by longer histories of marginalization, militarization, and uneven incorporation into the national body.
The Bawm community, like many Indigenous groups in the region, occupies a position that is at once included and peripheral — recognized yet surveilled, governed yet not fully trusted. The events following April 2024 intensify this position, transforming it into a more acute form of conditional belonging.
These abstractions come into focus in the lives that carry them. In a village in Ruma or Thanchi, this condition is not called “collective punishment” — it is lived as an endless negotiation with absence, debts, and delays. It is a mother calculating how to afford the next court visit, a child growing older between adjournments, a household reorganizing itself around a disappearance with no clear end.
Yet this is not a natural drift into hardship; it is a reality actively produced through coordinated operations, arbitrary detentions, and the slow and selective machinery of the legal system. The state, backed by a military presence, has imposed a regime in which uncertainty becomes a controlling principle.
What remains most striking is its quiet normalization. A delay becomes routine; an absence becomes expected; a diminished horizon becomes the imaginable one. And perhaps this is the most enduring violence of all — not that futures are taken abruptly, but that their disappearance becomes difficult to name. To insist on naming it is not only an analytical task, but a political one.
Image credit: Julian’s Creation
