Nothing in a principled defence of Sifat Abdullah requires sanitising his words. His Facebook video clip contains crude and degrading verbal abuse directed at Prime Minister Tarique Rahman and his deceased parents, former President Ziaur Rahman and former Prime Minister Begum Khaleda Zia. Freedom of expression does not convert intolerable slang into democratic virtue. Citizens may criticise a bill, a government, or a prime minister fiercely, but personal vilification impoverishes public debate and may injure the rights of others.
That said, moral outrage, however justified, is not enough to establish criminal liability. Vulgarity is not terrorism. Sifat, a 20-year-old student, was detained in Gazipur on September 3 after his Facebook video about allegedly excessive electricity bills went viral. The next day, a court sent him to jail in a case filed under the Anti-Terrorism Act. Despite initial reports connecting the detention to his abusive remarks, police later offered a different explanation. According to Deutsche Welle, no new anti-terrorism case was filed. Sifat was instead shown arrested in a case filed on June 27 concerning an alleged Awami League and Chhatra League flash procession and attack. He was not named in the FIR, which reportedly included 50 to 60 unidentified accused.
The only publicly reported state justification is, therefore, the police account, which should be assessed at its strongest. Awami League activities remain prohibited at present, and sections 8, 9, 10, 11, and 12 of the Anti-Terrorism Act criminalise various forms of conduct relating to prohibited entities and offences under the act, including membership, support, conspiracy, attempt, and aiding or abetting. If credible evidence shows that Sifat knowingly joined a violent operation, helped organise one, or conspired to commit an offence under the act, his offensive video post would be irrelevant. Freedom of speech is no defence to violence, sabotage, or criminal conspiracy. The state has a duty to investigate such conduct.
But the problem is that the police account appears to reverse the lawful order of reasoning. Local officers who filed the case reportedly said that information about Sifat’s alleged participation in flash processions emerged after his detention and that evidence would now be collected. The investigating officer said Sifat was arrested “on suspicion” because he made provocative posts on Facebook, while investigation would determine whether he was involved in the June incident. An arrest should not become a fishing expedition in which a citizen is identified for objectionable speech while evidence of a different, graver offence is sought afterwards.
Criticism, profanity, or a political label cannot perform the evidentiary work required to establish said membership, support, or conspiracy. An FIR containing dozens of unidentified accused persons must not become a reservoir from which police select inconvenient citizens whenever their speech angers the governing party. The relevant question, therefore, is not about whether Sifat used provocative words or could be described rhetorically as a “fascist” collaborator. It is about whether objective facts connect him to the particular acts alleged in June. If such facts exist, police must place the evidence before the court. Without them, the Anti-Terrorism Act becomes a means of transforming an insult into a threat to the state.
Article 39 of the Constitution supplies the proper balance. It guarantees freedom of speech but permits reasonable restrictions imposed by law for, among other purposes, state security, public order, decency, morality, defamation, and incitement. So, speech is not unlimited but any restriction must be reasonable and appropriately tailored to the wrong. Where words satisfy the elements of defamation, section 499 of the Penal Code provides a legal remedy, including in narrowly defined circumstances involving an imputation against a deceased person intended to hurt the feelings of close relatives. Section 198 of the Code of Criminal Procedure ordinarily requires a complaint to be filed by an aggrieved person. Whether Sifat’s words fulfil those criteria is for a court—not partisan outrage—to determine. The availability of ordinary law also makes the use of exceptional security law harder to justify.
International law reinforces this distinction. The UN Human Rights Committee accepts restrictions necessary to protect reputation or public order, but requires them to be lawful, necessary, and proportionate. It also stresses that the mere fact that speech insults a public figure is insufficient to justify punishment, and that heads of government remain legitimately subject to criticism. This does not dignify obscenity; but prevents using the identity of the person insulted to turn a speech-related wrong into a national security offence.
We should recognise the historical warning in this context. In 2020, cartoonist Ahmed Kabir Kishore and writer Mushtaq Ahmed were detained under the Digital Security Act, 2018 over cartoons and online commentary criticising the Awami League government’s Covid response. Kishore later alleged torture in custody. Mushtaq, a writer, died in prison on February 25, 2021, after spending nine months in pretrial detention and repeated denial of bail.
Sifat’s vulgar abuse is not equivalent to their peaceful criticism. The similarity lies in the state’s used method to deal with both cases—a speech displeases those in power, an exceptional law is invoked, detention follows, and a broader allegation is used to provide legitimacy later.
The July uprising, it bears recalling, was broadly a rejection of an order in which criticism was treated as disloyalty, coercive law protected rulers, and repression answered public anger. The UN later documented brutal and systematic violations during the 2024 protests. The democratic lesson was not that one set of untouchable political icons would replace another. No electoral mandate places a government beyond criticism or permits police power to enforce partisan honour.
During Police Week, Prime Minister Tarique Rahman told senior officers that the police are protectors of law, not of any political party, and that citizens judge the government through police conduct. This case tests that pledge.
The government should order an immediate, transparent review of the basis for Sifat’s arrest. Unless concrete facts link him to the alleged June offence, the terrorism allegation should be withdrawn and his liberty restored, without prejudice to a lawful and proportionate remedy pursued by a genuinely aggrieved person. His complaint about electricity bills should also be investigated.
A democracy need not celebrate abusive speech to protect the speaker from arbitrary power. It may condemn the words, demand an apology, and enforce carefully drawn laws. What it cannot do is allow the dignity of rulers to become a national security interest. The answer to vulgarity is proportionate legal response, public rebuttal, and democratic restraint—not allegations of terrorism.
Barrister Khan Khalid Adnan is advocate of the Supreme Court of Bangladesh, fellow at the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators, and head of the chamber at Khan Saifur Rahman and Associates in Dhaka.
Views expressed in this article are the author's own.
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