Bangladesh: Thousands of BNP youth members demonstrate in Dhaka
Dhaka, May 28 (UNI) Thousands of youth activists from three major affiliate organisations of the BNP (Bangladesh Nationalist Party)—Jatiyatabadi Chhatra Dal (JCD), Jubo Dal, and Swechchhasebak Dal—convened in Dhaka's Nayapaltan to hold a mass demonstration demanding the restoration of political rights for young Bangladeshis.
The rally, themed 'Establishing the Political Rights of the Youth', marks the climax of an eight-day campaign spanning four divisions. The procession was kickstarted by cultural performances and recitations from the Quran, as crowds began gathering in early morning hours.
Participants from Dhaka, Sylhet, Faridpur, and Mymensingh flooded the capital, parading with party flags, banners, and portraits of BNP founder and the country's former leader, President Ziaur Rahman, BNP Chairperson and former PM Khaleda Zia, and the party's Acting Chairman Tarique Rahman, reports The Daily Star.
A massive stage was erected opposite BNP's central office served as the rally's focal point, with loudspeakers installed across the area to reach the massive crowd. The mass political procession brought all traffic to a halt in the capital, as key intersections became rally points broadcasting speeches live from the stage.
'This is more than just a political programme,' said SM Jilani, President of Swechchhasebak Dal. 'It's a youth awakening. We expect over 1.5 million participants.'
BNP Acting Chairman Tarique Rahman was set to join virtually as chief guest, alongside senior leaders including Khandaker Mosharraf Hossain, Abdul Moyeen Khan, Amir Khasru Mahmud Chowdhury, and Salahuddin Ahmed. His speech is expected to outline the party's roadmap for youth political empowerment.
'Young people can no longer speak freely or vote,' said JCD leader Abu Afsan Mohammad Yahiya. 'This rally transforms our silent frustration into a united voice.'
Abdul Gaffar, a Chhatra Dal activist, echoed the urgency: 'There are 3.5 crore voters aged 18 to 33. Without their right to vote, there is no democracy. We demand elections under a neutral government—and we demand it now.'
The BNP's youth rally in Dhaka underscores its demand for a non-partisan interim government, amid growing feelings of political and youth disenfranchisement. This comes in the wake of the party's growing hostilities with the Yunus administration due to its lack of an election roadmap, and many of its unfulfilled promises. UNI ANV SSP
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The Wire
20 hours ago
- The Wire
Refuge Without a Name: South Asia's Architecture of Statelessness
Across South Asia, refugee movements have become one of the quietest yet most consequential forces shaping the region's political and security terrain. From Assam to the Arakan, from the Himalayan ridges of Bhutan to the shrinking mangroves of Bengal, people have crossed borders not in pursuit of safety but in search of recognition. Displacement here is not the residue of war, it is often the intention of peace. Bureaucratically crafted, legally disguised, rhetorically justified. The blueprint of this architecture was drawn in 1947. But its foundations were laid long before. The colonial state had already tested the logic of exclusion: pass laws, criminal tribe registries, vagrancy codes. It taught the postcolonial state how to document without protection, to survey without rights, to govern through absence. uprooted over 15 million people in a frenzy of postcolonial violence. That rupture did not end with the ceasefires; it rehearsed, refined, and rehearsed again, until exclusion became policy masquerading as nationhood. It institutionalised the belief that borders could manufacture belonging through exclusion, that citizenship could be both inherited and revoked. What began as a line across a subcontinent became a template for expulsion. Since then, South Asia's map has been redrawn repeatedly, through secession, civil war, monarchy's fall, proxy insurgencies, demographic engineering. Each upheaval displaced its own cast of undesirables. The birth of sent ten million refugees into India. Bhutan's campaign of national purification expelled the Lhotshampa. The Sri Lankan scattered Tamils from Tamil Nadu to Toronto. turned Pakistan into a refugee depot. Myanmar's were erased from citizenship and hunted by their state. India's National Register of Citizens (NRC) sought to vanish the undocumented by redefining who had the right to exist, on paper. Every decade, a new group of refugees joins the ledger Every decade, a new group joins the ledger. Their languages differ. The cause of exile changes. But the experience remains the same: move, wait, disappear. These are not episodic tragedies. They are the architecture of exclusion, calibrated, systemic, and sanctioned. Today, an estimated 3.5 million refugees live in South Asia, just 0.18% of its population. But numbers miss the point. The real story lies in the normalisation of statelessness: how expulsion becomes policy, how documentation becomes a weapon, how silence becomes law. Nowhere is this more visible than in Assam, where the past returned with . India's Home Minister called undocumented Bangladeshis '.' The metaphor was not casual. It naturalised exclusion, turned people into pests, and made denial feel like hygiene. The NRC asked people to prove, with brittle papers, that they were Indian. Nearly two million could not. Among them, many had never known any other home. But even as the state prepared to unwrite them, something softer but no less stubborn emerged: a quiet resistance. In villages across Assam, neighbours pooled documents, drafted affidavits, shared what proof they could find. Volunteers taught the elderly how to speak for themselves before tribunals. Lawyers filed petitions not to win, but to delay erasure. It wasn't enough. But for a moment, it was refusal. The law offered no clarity on what would happen next, only that something would. Entire families, by a signature. The question was never really about borders. It was about belonging. of the Nepali-speaking Lhotshampas, once woven into its agricultural spine, followed a similar logic. The state decided it needed to look more like itself. Ethnic Nepalis who had lived there for generations were asked to prove loyalty with papers few possessed. When they failed, they were declared alien. The language was legal. The motive, demographic. The method: cultural cleansing through policy. Camps took root in eastern Nepal. They lingered for two decades, until foreign planes carried many away. The region moved on, leaving its displaced to histories few would remember and fewer still would write down. Not all displacement is marked by tents. In Myanmar, the Rohingya were removed not just from land, but from law. The 1982 Citizenship Act left them stateless. The military's 2017 campaign drove 700,000 into Bangladesh. became a city of waiting; a million people with nowhere to go, and no way to belong. The world flew drones, delivered aid, hosted conferences. The camps grew, hemmed by wire. The tarpaulin roofs became symbols of permanence. In one of the camps, where the tarpaulin walls pulsed with heat by day and damp by dawn, a girl knelt in the corner of her shelter and traced her name into the fabric. Over and over, she pressed her finger into the weave, as if to keep it from slipping. She had never seen it written. Her name lived in breath, recited at checkpoints, repeated for clerks, forgotten in silence. In a place built from waiting, this was the only record she could make: a movement, a murmur, gone with the morning damp. South Asia does not declare its expulsions, it enacts them, quietly Sri Lanka's civil war drove tens of thousands of Tamils into India. Many still remain in limbo, neither citizens of Sri Lanka nor fully recognised by India. They inhabit the fault lines of memory, war, and neglect. Even in Tamil Nadu, the state most sympathetic to their cause, the word 'citizenship' catches in the throat. Others moved further still. In Canada, in the UK, in Australia, fragments of that exile found new ground. Statelessness dispersed into diaspora, sometimes remembered, sometimes ritualised, sometimes recast. Some funded movements. Others tried to forget. A few carried the war within them: across borders, into basements, through births and funerals, across decades. Pakistan's Afghan hosting has turned from geopolitical leverage to domestic burden. In Karachi, Afghan families who arrived in the 1980s still live in the shadows, on the margins of neighborhoods built by others. Their names are absent from the census. Their children inherit liminality like property. Some fought Pakistan's wars. Others built shops and futures on borrowed ground. South Asia does not declare its expulsions. It enacts them, quietly, bureaucratically, sometimes with courtesy, more often with silence. The refugee is rarely called one. He is an infiltrator in one country, a voter in another, a ghost in records that were never digitised. In Delhi, Tibetan flags hang from second-story windows, folded, cautious, half-visible. The refugee here is suspended in plain sight, not unseen, but unclaimed, between exile and embrace, between hospitality and the hush of hesitation. Across the region, borders have become mirrors, each reflecting stories the state would rather forget. Words follow policy. The vocabulary of welcome has expiry built in. And the words that remain - alien, illegal, suspect - shape what follows: detention, denial, disappearance. The refugee becomes shorthand for disorder. For dilution. For danger. Rarely for history. Rarely for justice. Also Read: From Balochistan to Kashmir, the Region's Unresolved Grievances Refuse To Stay Buried Language is never neutral. It becomes architecture, brick by bureaucratic brick, affidavit by affidavit, silence by silence. In speeches and televised declarations, the refugee shifts from someone who lost protection to someone who must be monitored. In India, the term – intruder - echoes through everyday speech. 'Each is a threat to the nation,' the Home Minister thundered in 2018, drawing applause and lines deeper than any border wall. Even South Asia's moments of magnanimity have not translated into permanence. India's hospitality to Tibetans has endured, but few have been offered citizenship. Bangladesh shelters over a million Rohingya, but the political vocabulary frames them as guests overstaying their welcome. Pakistan's have become political flashpoints. The language of protection erodes with each electoral cycle. South Asia has no refugee convention. No regional asylum framework. No mutual recognition system. Protection is not a right, it is a favour. Refugees are logistical problems, not political subjects. None of the region's principal states are signatories to the 1951 Refugee Convention or its . The UNHCR is allowed to operate, not empowered to enforce. Statelessness becomes a feature of sovereignty, not a failure of it. Laws shape the absence of rights as much as their presence. In leaving them behind, the region sketches a different kind of map, one where citizenship is conditional, belonging revocable, protection dictated by whim. The refugee is not the exception. He is the evidence. What happens at the border does not begin there. It begins in speech, in silence, in statute. What begins in silence ends in disappearance. The crisis ahead And the tide is rising. The crisis ahead will not be driven by war alone. Environmental degradation will multiply displacement. Rivers swell. Coasts recede. The are becoming a geography of waiting. They retreat inland, inch by inch. Communities follow. Villages drown, slowly, bureaucratically. Himalayan melt and glacier ruptures threaten entire valleys. This isn't tomorrow's crisis. It is today's reality. The land is sinking while policy treads water. These people are not yet called refugees. But they will be. In the Maldives, the a little more each year. No refugee camps have formed, yet. Only models, projections, and a growing fear that someday soon, even the memory of return will feel fictional. The region's smallest state may soon become its loudest metaphor. To watch this region is to witness a quiet reconstitution of belonging. Citizenship is redrawn by ancestry. Rights are filtered through religion. Bureaucracy the border. Today, exclusion is no longer stamped, it is scanned. In places like India, the Aadhaar system has made identity digital, and disappearance easier. Refugees are not simply those who have lost a country. They are reminders that nations can also lose their people, one document, one silence at a time. Global comparisons do little to flatter South Asia. The EU's asylum system is contested but codified. Africa's Kampala Convention acknowledges the displaced within borders. Latin America's Cartagena Declaration expands protections. South Asia has no such moral vocabulary, only the grammar of delay. Also Read: Fighting Terrorism Demands Partnership, Not Primacy The international community treats this displacement as static. The world has grown accustomed to the camp, but not to the cause. It funds containment as if mercy were enough, and forgets that recognition, not rations, is the measure of justice. Aid flows. Resettlement trickles. The architecture endures. Host states perform hospitality but deny permanence. Across South Asia, refugee governance is not built for permanence. This is not a failure of resources. It is a blueprint. It is a waiting room with no exit, where time is suspended and return is myth. Refugees are not the fallout of collapse alone, but of intent, of someone deciding who belonged, and who did not. Displacement here is not a crisis. It is a . The refugee is not the aberration; he is not the exception, but the system's most faithful creation. For too long, the region has redrawn its maps, of territory, memory, citizenship, while erasing those it first cast out. When return is impossible, memory becomes the last homeland: fragile, portable, and haunted. Refugees carry their histories. Sometimes, they carry their wars. They may leave the battlefield, but the battle does not leave them. Wounds travel. And where they are ignored, they deepen. They are not stranded between countries; they are disowned by the very lands that once claimed them, named, then unmade. That alone should remind us that displacement begins not with movement, but with abandonment. If the world is serious about reducing forced migration, it must do more than feed the symptom. It must confront the sovereign impulse to erase. What's needed is a politics that names the displaced not as burden, but as evidence, of what states deny, and what justice demands. Statelessness is not sovereignty's accident. It is its design, and its deepest cruelty. Until that is reversed, borders will remain: not as protections, but as the quiet scars of decisions made, and never confessed. Somewhere, another border will be drawn. And somewhere else, someone will vanish into it. Shyam Tekwani is a professor at the Daniel K. Inouye Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of DKI APCSS, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government. The appearance of external hyperlinks does not constitute endorsement by the United States Department of Defense (DoD) of the linked websites, or the information, products, or services contained therein. DoD does not exercise any editorial, security, or other control over the information you may find at these sites. The Wire is now on WhatsApp. Follow our channel for sharp analysis and opinions on the latest developments.
Indian Express
3 days ago
- Indian Express
Illegal migration from Bangladesh has been a problem for decades. Why did no one act?
The Government of India has finally woken up to the problem of illegal immigration from Bangladesh. There are reports from different states about local police identifying the Bangladeshis and deporting them. In Delhi, during the last six months, at least 770 immigrants have been deported; some were airlifted to Tripura and the rest sent by the surface route. In Assam, the state government is systematically tracking down individuals declared illegal foreigners by the Foreigners' Tribunals and pushing them back into the no man's land between India and Bangladesh. It is reported that 30,000 people who had been declared foreign nationals by the Tribunals in Assam have just disappeared. There are reports of deportations from Maharashtra, Gujarat, Rajasthan and Haryana. Whatever action is being taken, however, amounts to a trickle compared to the very large number of Bangladeshis settled in India. In the wake of Partition in 1947, many Hindus crossed over to India from East Pakistan to the adjoining states of Assam, West Bengal, and Tripura. Later, however, when the Pakistan Army started persecuting the Bengalis, a large number of Muslims also crossed over to India. After the liberation of Bangladesh in 1971, it was expected that the new regime would maintain communal harmony. However, that did not happen, and Bangladeshis continued to pour into India, partly due to religious discrimination but mostly for economic opportunity and in search of a better life. According to the Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies, nearly 3.5 million people 'disappeared' from East Pakistan between 1951 and 1961 and another 1.5 million between 1961 and 1974. Some Bangladesh intellectuals justified the mass migration of people to India as lebensraum – the legitimate movement of people from high-density to low-density areas. The Government of India's response was half-hearted. Migration slowed down only after India started fencing the 40967.7 km long border with Bangladesh. The Task Force on Border Management, headed by Madhav Godbole, in its report submitted in August 2000, said that 'there is an all-round failure in India to come to grips with the problem of illegal immigration'. The report went on to say that 'facts are well known, opinions are firmed up, and the operating system is in position, but the tragedy is that despite this, nothing substantial happens due to catharsis of deciding in this regard due to sharp division of interest among the political class'. The Task Force estimated that there were about 15 million illegal Bangladeshi immigrants in the country and that about 3 lakh Bangladeshi nationals were entering India illegally every year. The Task Force report was never placed in the public domain because it was brutally honest. The very next year, in February 2001, the Group of Ministers, in their recommendations on national security, while taking care of Bangladesh's sensitivity in the matter, reiterated that 'the massive illegal immigration poses a grave danger to our security, social harmony and economic well-being'. The Supreme Court of India, in a landmark judgment in Sarbananda Sonowal v. Union of India (2005), observed that 'there can be no manner of doubt that the State of Assam is facing 'external aggression and internal disturbance' on account of large-scale illegal migration of Bangladeshi nationals' and that therefore, it is 'the duty of the Union of India to take all measures for protection of the State of Assam from such external aggression and internal disturbance as enjoined in Article 355 of the Constitution'. All these warnings by the Task Force, the Group of Ministers and the Supreme Court remained unheeded. There was no plan of action to deal with the problem. Now that our relations with Bangladesh have soured, the Government of India has started deporting the Bangladeshi illegal immigrants. The total number of illegal immigrants deported so far would be a couple of thousand only. The drive must continue — with greater vigour — whether the Bangladesh government cooperates or not. It is relevant that the US is deporting all illegal immigrants from different parts of the world. Even Pakistan has repatriated 1.3 million Afghanistan nationals back to their country. There is no reason why India should be hesitant or have any reservations about acting against illegal immigrants from any country. Meanwhile, the chief minister of Assam has given a new angle to our relations with Bangladesh when he said that Bangladesh has 'two of its own chicken necks'. One is from Dakshin Dinajpur to South-West Garo Hills, and the other is the Chittagong Corridor from South Tripura to the Bay of Bengal. The Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) inhabited by the Chakma tribes, who are mostly Buddhists, are in a state of turbulence. There are serious problems of ethnic identity, land rights, and cultural preservation of the indigenous tribes. Thousands of Chakmas have fled to India and have been settled in the north-eastern states of Arunachal Pradesh, Tripura and Mizoram. Was Himanta Biswa Sarma speaking on his own, or was he acting as the Centre's mouthpiece? In any case, there is food for thought. The writer is a former Member of the National Security Advisory Board and Director General, BSF
Indian Express
3 days ago
- Indian Express
Detained as Bangladeshis, Bengal workers now ‘scared' to leave state
'We spent a night at a detention camp. Somehow, through the intervention of our state's police, we were released. I will never go to work in Assam again. I have worked in different parts of India but never faced such a situation.' Sahbaz Hashmi (35), from Kuligram in Murshidabad, is among a large number of migrant workers from Bengal who have returned home after being detained by authorities in Gujarat and Assam, and allegedly harassed by local residents in Odisha, amid a crackdown on illegal Bangladeshis. So much so, that top officials in the West Bengal government and police have now reached out to their counterparts for help. 'There have been many such cases where migrant workers of Bengal are being targeted in different states. Officers in the police and administrative levels of the state government have spoken with their counterparts in other states,' Samirul Islam, chairman of the state's migrant welfare board, told The Indian Express. Adding to the mounting fear, seven persons from the state were detained by Mumbai Police and pushed into Bangladesh by the BSF on June 14. They included four youths from Murshidabad, one from Purba Bardhaman and a married couple from North 24 Parganas. All of them were brought back to India following the intervention of the Bengal government. 'Whenever such a case has been brought to our notice, the state administration and police have helped in the release of such detainees. In one such incident in Assam, I personally called the SP there,' said Islam, who is also a TMC Rajya Sabha MP. Islam has also written a letter to Union Home Minister Amit Shah, 'highlighting how our migrants are being targeted not only by mobs but also by police in different states, only because they speak Bengali'. Similar letters have been sent by TMC MP Yusuf Pathan and Congress leader Adhir Chowdhury to the chief ministers of Gujarat and Odisha. 'The welfare board already has a helpline number for anyone who is facing problems in other states,' Islam said, adding that its portal has about 22 lakh registered migrant workers in all. 'We are also trying to provide jobs to many of those who have returned through state schemes like Pathashree (road construction),' he said. Recounting his ordeal over the phone from Murshidabad, the migrant worker Hashmi said he was part of a 12-member group in Assam's Numaligarh. 'On May 24, we were called to the local police station. We told them we hailed from West Bengal. They had a list with them. They let two from the group, who had voter IDs with them, leave. They took us to our rented home where we showed them our voter ID and Aadhaar card,' said Hashmi, who returned home on Saturday. 'But they insisted that we were Bangladeshis,' said Abdus Sattar, from Kuligram, who was part of the group. 'The two who were let go contacted us,' said Sattar's father Barjahan Ali. 'We went to the local MP and MLA and appealed for help. Then, the police took all relevant documents from us and contacted Assam police. Finally, on May 28, they let the youths leave. But till now, they have not released their documents or cell phones,' he said. According to Hashmi, they were taken to Assam by a contractor for a monthly salary of Rs 15,000. 'Now, I don't know where I will get a job,' said Hashmi. Another group of workers from Kusumgoria village in Birbhum district told The Indian Express that they had returned from Surat in Gujarat where they worked as a saree craftsmen. 'We were picked up and detained for four days by police,' said Sheikh Ataur Rehman (18). According to Rehman, the local police detained his uncle Sheikh Ataur Rehman (40) and cousin Kamrudzaman Mullick (18), too, on April 26. 'They said Aadhaar and voter ID were not enough. Initially, they took our phones away but then allowed us to use our phones twice. We called up our homes and got other documents such as school certificates. Then, they asked for land papers. I had a small plot of land in my name and got photos of the relevant papers sent over the phone. They released us,' he said. For Shahina Bibi, from Kusumgoria, poverty meant her husband, Ansar Ali (33), had to overcome the fear of going back. 'My husband, a marble worker, was picked up by local police on April 26 from our rented room. He had been working in Gujarat for eight years. I ran from one police station to another. After nine days, he was released after he showed land papers and school certificates after contacting home,' said Shahina (24). 'We returned. Three days ago, he went back to work in Surat. We need the money. But this time, I stayed home with our three children,' she said. Other migrant workers who returned from Odisha told The Indian Express that they faced harassment and threats from local residents. Says Kabir Sheikh (22) a resident of Chakrapur village in Murshidabad: 'On April 18, about 30 of us were on our way to Sambalpur where we had a contract to work as masons. However, when we were having tea outside the railway station, a crowd gathered and asked for our details. Then they started to beat us, shouting that we will never be able to work there. We ran into the station and caught the next train back.' Ravik Bhattacharya is the Chief of Bureau of The Indian Express, Kolkata. Over 20 years of experience in the media industry and covered politics, crime, major incidents and issues, apart from investigative stories in West Bengal, Odisha, Assam and Andaman Nicobar islands. Ravik won the Ramnath Goenka Excellence in Journalism Award in 2007 for political reporting. Ravik holds a bachelor degree with English Hons from Scottish Church College under Calcutta University and a PG diploma in mass communication from Jadavpur University. Ravik started his career with The Asian Age and then moved to The Statesman, The Telegraph and Hindustan Times. ... Read More
