Congratulations! Not gonna lie, never thought we’d have to rely on the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) to deliver justice of all kinds: gender, economic, social, political, environmental. But here we are, begrudgingly or otherwise, because again we voted for the available alternative under conditions that perhaps no one will deny were “free and fair.”

Not a high bar this time, because the problem with Jamaat-e-Islami lies in the direct subordination of women, framing them as mothers, sisters, or whores, embodying a local form of the Madonna–Whore complex in which women can either be maternal and maternal-adjacent or sexual objects available for consumption. No doubt, many men, including non-Jamaat men, believe exactly this. 

So yes. You’ve made it. And because your victory was not exactly guaranteed, I believe you want to stay in power for a while. Which means, like it or not, you will have to do right by us, the citizens, including half of us who are women.

The election results indicate that the majority have extended a wide berth to you and decided to trust you to do what is right: limit your own power by supporting the referendum. Let the upper house be configured through the popular vote. Refuse to use state apparatus to control and violate people. Curb corruption. Foster democracy as a social practice, not just an electoral performance. Allow MPs from your own party to make up their own minds. Listen to the needs of the people, which, luckily for you, remain basic: food, housing, jobs, safety, health, education. Enable a praxis of justice for all, not just your cadres, party men, and capitalists who fill your coffers. Keep honest friends. Think about how your actions might affect those who are already minoritised by the various axes of oppression, and act to protect them.

Please do the work to earn the trust that we’ve already given you by default. Because while you’re celebrating, some of us are already doing the maths for 2031, and it does not look good for you if you screw this up.

But as you begin to roll out your now-famous “plan”, let me say, earnestly: we need help.

We, to put it mildly, are not okay right now.

Psychologically. Emotionally. We are a traumatised people.

Three generations raised under the shadow of 1971, raised by parents who carried that war in their bodies and parenting styles, and then raised again—or re-traumatised—under not one but two authoritarian regimes. H.M. Ershad. Then Sheikh Hasina… Well, they have left their mark. We have issues. What each of our former heads of state understood, and exploited brilliantly, is the “sentimental state”, or the conditions in which a political entity uses emotions—specifically fear, trauma, and the accusation of treason—to shape public opinion, justify policy, and govern by manufacturing consent.

We are worried. Why? Because the sentimental state didn’t disappear with Sheikh Hasina. A new one is already being constructed with new affective instruments, new hierarchies of grief, new claims to victimhood, and we are worried that you, BNP, will be tempted to build your own version, organised around your own martyrs and your own enemies. That would be a catastrophic mistake. If the past regime has taught us a few lessons, one of them is this: we don’t need to make and remake old enemies. We must simply let them go.

On the institutional side: police and security sector reform cannot mean shuffling personnel around. The Rapid Action Battalion, the specific units deployed to kill protesters, the officers who received the orders and carried them out—the accountability here has to be transparent and followed through. But more than accountability for past acts, the structures that enabled impunity need to change.

So, what do we want? We want justice. Not just for the martyrs, but for everyone: all the people who witnessed the state violence of 2024, directly and indirectly via social media, played over and again on our hand-held devices in our own homes. We all need to heal. From the violence. From the aftermath of the violence. From political polarisation-driven animus that everyone in Bangladesh seems to carry—a heavy burden that takes the form of mental ill health and lost friendships. From being around people who have donned new masks to forge new alliances and proximity to power, transitioning with the nation to become the nouveau riche or the nouveau intellectual, becoming beneficiaries of the deaths that toppled Sheikh Hasina’s regime.

What I have in mind is a different kind of justice.

I recognise that after mass state violence, the instinctive response is always punitive. Prosecute the perpetrators. Hand down sentences. Declare the case closed. This instinct is not wrong; legal accountability does have a role. Scholars studying post-atrocity reconciliation have argued that “legal accountability may well be essential for the restoration of moral equality between ‘victims’ and ‘perpetrators’ and for the creation of a just society” (Čehajić, Brown, and Castano, cited in Murshid, EPW, 2013).

But I think it’s fair to say we don’t need more violence, not even in the name of punishment.

We don’t need prosecutions designed less to address the structural conditions that produce violence and more to perform outrage, demonstrate state power, and satisfy a public audience. We don’t need celebrated trials in which stories about violence are narrated and re-narrated for the purpose of identifying a threat to society and justifying a punitive response to it, as if that is supposed to make the victim-survivor feel better.

We have seen this before.

The International Crimes Tribunal, set up under Sheikh Hasina, had genuine popular support; the Shahbag uprising of 2013 was a real expression of decades of unresolved trauma and grief over 1971, expressed as third-party (un)forgiveness on behalf of parents and grandparents by Bangladeshi youth unable to forgive what had never been properly named. But the Tribunal became compromised, failing to protect witnesses, struggling with due process, and producing verdicts that satisfied political agendas more than the standards of justice. The rajakars were brought to court, but not in a way that left the nation psychologically resolved. Three generations later, Bangladeshis are still, in a meaningful sense, victim-survivors of 1971. And those same victim-survivors were forced to experience a deadly round of state violence in July 2024, compounding the trauma of the past.

The risk with 2024 is replication: a rushed tribunal that produces convictions without credibility, leaving us with the same unresolved trauma, without psychological redress. And it leaves the structural conditions—a security apparatus organised around regime protection, institutional impunity, the absence of independent oversight—intact, unless the separation of powers that the referendum seeks is actually achieved. What we fear, BNP, is that your newly formed government will want to inherit the same tools and use them to consolidate power the way the Awami League did; that your government will see state violence as legitimate state practice that delivers justice, for which you will seek consent through the renewal of the sentimental state.

We want you to know, we are done with that kind of justice. The justice we pursue in post-July 2024 has to reach beyond individual prosecutions towards structural reform, and beyond putting July in the museum, memorialised to be used in the way 1971 was used as a divisive tool of narrative politics.

So, what does that actually look like? Restoration and rectification.

Let us think seriously about what restorative justice means in a post-mass-violence context, which, admittedly, is messier than the term suggests.

So, BNP, the only way to make sure that you last until 2031 and win the next elections, prevent a Jamaat-governed Bangladesh, or an usurpation by the Awami League, is by actually governing well: help us heal, deliver welfare, restore communities, build institutional trust, create the conditions under which people’s everyday struggles are met by a state that shows up for them, and understand that our communities thrive when we do not formalise but organise informality.

Researchers who have studied transitional justice in societies emerging from atrocity draw a distinction between restorative justice as a set of procedures and restorative justice as a way of understanding what harm actually is (Stovel and Valiñas, 2010). The procedural version involves face-to-face encounters between victims and perpetrators, community circles, negotiated reparations. It has real limits after mass violence, particularly when perpetrators have no incentive to acknowledge what they did. But (and this is a huge but), if state actors involved in the killings of 2024 are willing to sit with and be accountable for what they did, real reconciliation and healing might happen. But if we are to be honest, I’m not certain that members and supporters of the Awami League are ready to accept their role and honour the victims that their actions and inactions produced. If they are, however—and I’m happy to be wrong—then what we need is a form of Truth and Reconciliation that we’ve seen in places like Rwanda.

What is most useful about this process is the way restorative justice asks us to understand violence as a violation of people and relationships rather than a violation of law (Stovel and Valiñas, 2010, drawing on Zehr, 1990). When you start from that premise, the questions change. The question stops being only “who did this and what is their sentence?” and becomes “what did this do to trust between citizens and the state, between communities, between people who lived through the same event and came out with incompatible accounts of it?” Those are harder questions, but they are the ones that determine whether Bangladesh can actually heal or whether it just cycles through the same wound, dressed in bandages of new language.

Stovel and Valiñas make a distinction worth thinking about: the difference between reintegration and reconciliation. Reintegration is the bare minimum as far as outcomes go, involving physical presence, civil behaviour, and the agreement not to take revenge. Reconciliation goes deeper. It requires genuinely restored trust, which cannot be legislated or declared, only built. After mass violence, trust between groups tends to be catastrophically low, and rebuilding it requires something more than verdicts. It requires what they call “contact under positive conditions”, which are structured, supported encounters between people from divided communities that produce the kind of empathy that makes shared civic life possible again (Stovel and Valiñas, 2010). This is slow, undramatic work. It does not make good press releases. But it is the difference between a country that processes its violence and a country that just buries it.

Stovel and Valiñas further distinguish between conflicts that are primarily intra-communal, where perpetrators and victims share a community and the perpetrator eventually has to face neighbours who know what they did, and conflicts that are inter-communal, where perpetrators return to communities that regard them as heroes or, at the least, justified in their actions. In inter-communal conflicts, restorative justice processes face a hefty obstacle: the community itself does not condemn the violence, which removes the social pressure that makes accountability meaningful. Bangladesh’s situation with 1971 fits into this. Those who committed the atrocities—members of the Pakistan Army—returned to a society that did not see their violence as unjustified or unjust, while their collaborators, members of Jamaat, were rehabilitated into democratic politics without having to apologise for their actions. There was no community of perpetrators that condemned the violence of 1971. It was only articulated by those who were harmed. That absence of condemnation is precisely why Bangladeshis have not had the opportunity to face the enemy in the post-liberation era, and why the trauma has been transmitted rather than resolved across generations.

Similarly, we are yet to hear condemnations from members of the Awami League regarding the violence they unleashed in 2024. As such, justice for 2024, if it is to go differently, has to learn from that failure in 1971.

The first thing that has to happen—before policy, before commissions, before anything institutional—is acknowledgment. The state must formally name what happened, not passively in the bureaucratic passive voice of “lives were lost”, but specifically. These are the names of the dead, this is who gave the orders, this is the apparatus that carried them out, and the state of Bangladesh is accountable. The failure of that acknowledgment under Sheikh Hasina—her appearance on national television after Abu Sayed’s murder, invoking her own personal grief rather than the nation’s horror, offering her trauma in place of an apology—was the moment that made regime change the only remaining demand. An apology is not weakness. It is, in the context of a sentimental state, the one act that cannot be faked or managed by affect alone, which is precisely why it carries so much weight.

BNP, you will be tempted to perform a version of this by invoking the martyrs of 2024 as currency, building your own hierarchy of whose grief counts. But please learn from the regime before you. The lesson is that affect as a political instrument, without accountability, only produces more of what we’ve already had.

We also need to talk about mental health, which in Bangladesh tends to be treated as a luxury or a private problem rather than the public health crisis it is. The intergenerational transmission of trauma in the form of the 1971 war carried in bodies, transmitted through parenting, through silence, and through violence, through the authoritarianism of households shaped by the authoritarianism of states, is real. But it remains unaddressed.

What the notion of restorative justice reminds us of is that this internal, individual dimension of healing cannot be separated from the political. Victim-survivors need to process what happened to them in order to be available for the civic work of rebuilding. Ignoring the psychological dimension of justice in favour of the procedural is a guarantee that the wound will reopen (Stovel and Valiñas, 2010). A BNP government serious about justice would invest in mental health infrastructure at a population level as a recognition that a country cannot build democratic culture on unprocessed collective grief and trauma.

Beyond acknowledgment and healing, there needs to be a platform for testimony that is survivor-led. What mattered in models that have actually worked is that victims were agents of the process (Bumiller, 2008). Restorative processes that centre the needs of those harmed focus on helping people feel heard and safe, restoring their sense of dignity and agency, and giving them some genuine say in what happens next (Stovel and Valiñas, 2010). In Bangladesh’s context, that means families of those killed in 2024, survivors of enforced disappearances, and communities that bore the sustained violence of the preceding decade have real roles in shaping what accountability looks like. That organisations such as Mayer Daak emerged in the aftermath of state violence is all the proof we need that community building is the first step towards such forms of healing; it is proof that we are ready for this kind of healing.

On the institutional side: police and security sector reform cannot mean shuffling personnel around. The Rapid Action Battalion, the specific units deployed to kill protesters, the officers who received the orders and carried them out—the accountability here has to be transparent and followed through. But more than accountability for past acts, the structures that enabled impunity need to change. Independent oversight mechanisms with genuine authority are the minimum requirement. Parliamentary accountability hearings, with the power to compel testimony and impose consequences, are another. And the reforms need to be designed specifically to constrain what the next government can do, not just to settle scores with the last one.

But we must remember: apologies often resurface trauma as the harm is named and validated. The aftermath of the apology is an important time. That is when we will need the most help to process what has been confirmed, to sit with the fact that it happened, that the state did this, that the people who died were not aberrations or collateral damage but the direct consequence of deliberate decisions. Psychological support, community spaces for grief, and the sustained presence of institutions that take healing seriously must be part of the restorative justice system that you must build. Without such support, acknowledgment risks becoming another wound.

Jamaat gets this, which is why you risk ceding ground to them. Remember, there’s nothing wrong with borrowing some strategies from their playbook. Jamaat is now a formidable opposition, with more seats in parliament than they ever thought possible. Part of this is because of the absence of the Awami League in the elections. But the other part is that they have excellent grassroots-level mobilisation and micro social welfare for their supporters (see Navine Murshid, 2026). Those are worthy ideals to live by.

This is the difference between justice as reconciliation-rectification and justice as revenge.

So, BNP, the only way to make sure that you last until 2031 and win the next elections, prevent a Jamaat-governed Bangladesh, or an usurpation by the Awami League, is by actually governing well: help us heal, deliver welfare, restore communities, build institutional trust, create the conditions under which people’s everyday struggles are met by a state that shows up for them, and understand that our communities thrive when we do not formalise but organise informality. That means investing in public health, education, and social protection in ways that do not disappear when the political wind shifts. And it means recognising that much of what holds Bangladeshi life together already happens outside the state—in the markets, the mosques, the neighbourhood networks, the informal arrangements that people have built precisely because the state was absent-present. Work with that. Don’t replace it with bureaucracy, and don’t ignore it in favour of the kind of top-down institution-building that looks good in donor reports but means nothing to the rickshaw puller whose child is sick on a Tuesday.

Jamaat gets this, which is why you risk ceding ground to them. Remember, there’s nothing wrong with borrowing some strategies from their playbook. Jamaat is now a formidable opposition, with more seats in parliament than they ever thought possible. Part of this is because of the absence of the Awami League in the elections. But the other part is that they have excellent grassroots-level mobilisation and micro social welfare for their supporters (see Navine Murshid, 2026). Those are worthy ideals to live by.

I probably don’t need to say this, but while we’re here, might as well say it: you must act like a state when in government, not a party apparatus, committed to serving the people—those who voted for you, and those who did not. That means investing in public health, education, and social protection in ways that do not disappear when the political wind shifts.

It also means taking women’s lives seriously as a matter of governance, not as tokenism but as part of everything that you do. The question to ask about every proposed gender reform in every sector is whether it gives women the agency to act in their households, their workplaces, and their communities, or whether it primarily empowers the state to act on their behalf. These produce very different outcomes.

You’re operating in a new terrain. This is not 2005. We have emerged from an authoritarian state. Our youngest citizens have a much lower threshold for that kind of undemocratic governance. Their appetite for being used is next to nothing. They refused the rajakar label, which up until now had been very useful. They refused the hierarchy of trauma that Sheikh Hasina’s regime instilled, refusing the invocation of Bangabandhu’s assassination to downplay state violence. They refused the logic that the state’s fear of terrorism and treason could justify killing its own citizens. And now some of them will be your colleagues.

And they’re all watching. The families of the dead are watching. The people who voted, grudgingly or otherwise, for the lesser evil are watching. And Jamaat, with its disciplined cadres, its long organisational memory, and its willingness to wait, is also watching.

Please make sure that you don’t mess this up. The work ahead of you is political, institutional, social, and psychological all at once, and none of it can wait for the right moment, because the right moment has the unfortunate habit of never arriving.

Nadine Murshid is Associate Professor, School of Social Work, University at Buffalo. She is the author of Intimacies of Violence: Reading Transnational Women in Bangladeshi America (Oxford University Press, 2024).

References

Bumiller, K. (2008). In an Abusive State: How Neoliberalism Appropriated the Feminist Movement against Sexual Violence. Duke University Press. 
Murshid, N. (2013). “The Shahbag Uprising: War Crimes and Forgiveness.” Economic & Political Weekly, Vol. XLVIII, No. 10. 
Murshid, N. S. (2025). “Our Sentimental State.” New Age Long Reads. 
Murshid, N. (2026). “Why Jamaat Wins When Others Stay Home.” Counterpoint. 
Stovel, L., and Valiñas, M. (2010). “Restorative Justice after Mass Violence: Opportunities and Risks for Children and Youth.” Innocenti Working Paper No. 2010-15. UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre, Florence.

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