Thirty years after the abduction of Kalpana Chakma, the burden of waiting for justice rests heavily on her brother, Kalindi Kumar Chakma, yet the memories of that night remain vivid and haunting. Memory has deepened its hold. He recalls the approaching footsteps outside their mud hut, the shades of darkness by the well where they were bound and blindfolded, the sudden rupture of gunfire as he fled into the water and swam to safety. And above it all, still intact against the years, is her voice— ‘Dada, more baja (Brother, please save me)’ — a cry that escaped political apparatuses of enforced forgetting.
Against forgetting
Kalpana Chakma was the general secretary of Hill Women’s Federation, an indigenous women’s organisation established on March 8, 1988. While the state continues to describe this period as the ‘insurgency era’ in the Chittagong Hill Tracts, indigenous lived experience registers it instead as one defined by state atrocities and systematic harassment — conditions that have been extensively documented in reports by international human rights organisations. In her own writings, diary entries and letters addressed to comrades, Kalpana Chakma described the life under conditions of militarised presence:
In this hilly region, behind the green and lush mountains lie heart-rending cries, piercing screams that split the sky, on one side is the mass struggle of the small Indigenous communities across ten linguistic groups to protect their national existence, and on the other is the military effort to suppress that struggle — together turning the Chittagong Hill Tracts into a fiery battlefield. Here, under the violence of gunpowder and oppression, everyday life has become unbearable. After long years of persecution, repression and suffering, the wounded people of the hills today utter in sorrow: ‘Life is not ours’.
Kalpana Chakma, Kalpana Chakmar Diary (Dhaka: Hill Women’s Federation, 2000), 53, author’s translation.
Her diary reveals her as a rare political observer who registers both the gendered nature of state violence and the patriarchy within her own community. In her address to the Delegates of the First National Conference of Representatives of the Hill Women’s Federation on May 21, 1995, she called upon women:
Sisters, giving the highest importance to the national movement, we must also come forward for the equal rights of women. We must bring about a fundamental transformation in the social sphere. We cannot deny our decaying social order, our patriarchal social system. Towards this goal, the struggle of our Hill Women’s Federation is not only political, but also a struggle against the oppression of male domination in social and family life.
Kalpana Chakma, Kalpana Chakmar Diary (Dhaka: Hill Women’s Federation, 2000), 23, author’s translation.
In pages after pages in her diary, she took note on how revolutionaries talked about freedom, she copied long passages from Subhash Chandra Bose on student movement, also copied an excerpt from Nelson Mandala’s call on Botha government to abandon the path of hatred and repression. Reading Fidel Castro, she briefly reflects on the impossibility of separating comrades who share the same ideals, even in prison or in death.
As an organiser of the Hill Women’s Federation, her diary is also evidentiary record of the violence against women by settler Bengali men. Such entries read like legal records with detail accounts of the place of incidents, names and background of the perpetrator, and other circumstantial evidences.
Letter to the comrades were different. In these letters, she talked about her experience and exasperations. On April 1, 1996, Kalpana Chakma wrote to her comrade,
The news from here is that on February 28, when miscreants abducted Ishaq, the Bengalis have been mobilising to attack the hill people. Now [after March 13, 1996], the Bengalis have completely prohibited the hill people from going to the market, entering Bengali areas and even speaking with them. Since then, the work of organising the hill people has begun. That is, a system of collective defence across the entire Kachalong. Day and night vigilance has been arranged. Meanwhile, the army camp commander in our village, the miscreant Lieutenant Ferdous, deceitfully met with the village elders under false assurances. Since then, many small incidents have been occurring. The main targets of the Bengalis are Bottola, the site of the incident [possibly the abduction of Ishak], and the four neighbouring villages.
In this situation, on March 19, when cries spread throughout Kachalong, the infamous Ferdous came to New Lallyaghona village and burned down nine houses of seven families in total, and severely beat the hill guards. After this, the DC [Deputy Commissioner], the SP [Superintendent of Police], and the Communication Committee (JSS) member Mathura Lal Chakma held a meeting, and the situation has now calmed down….
Kalpana Chakma, Kalpana Chakmar Diary (Dhaka: Hill Women’s Federation, 2000), 69-70, author’s translation.
On June 12, 1996, the night before the country’s 7th general election, when news spread of her abduction reportedly by a group of plainclothes men, including Lieutenant Ferdous and two Village Defence Party members, Saleh Ahmed and Nurul Huq, it came as no surprise for her community. Kalpana Chakma had already left behind written records documenting the political circumstances surrounding her enforced disappearance.
In the days that followed, the civil-military administration in the Chittagong Hill Tracts, along with wider state institutions, engaged in systematic efforts to dismiss the violence that Kalpana Chakma and her family had endured on the night of her abduction. The First Information Report recorded the allegation of abduction, but omitted the names of the plain clothed men that her brothers identified.
As the news crossed national boundaries and generated outrage within international human rights circles, the Bangladesh Army distributed leaflets from helicopters, describing the allegations as a ‘so-called abduction’ and asserting that the claims against the army officer were ‘baseless.’ Civil administration conveniently recollected no record of any prior encounter between Kalpana Chakma and the accused army officer. A controversial human rights organisation visited her home and claimed that ‘she had gone to India’. A rumour, appeared deliberate in nature, floated that members of her own community were involved in her abduction, allegedly due to her support for an independent candidate in the national election — a claim that later found its way into police reports, as well as the findings of a commission formed by the home minister. The commission concluded that Kalpana Chakma may have been abducted ‘willingly or unwillingly’, but that the perpetrators could not be identified, ‘thereby recommending no legal action or punishment’.
These events unfolded within a broader structure of denial that disavowed violence and rendered it narratively displaced, administratively inconclusive, and legally non-actionable — an architecture within which the case underwent a slow erosion of procedural viability over three decades, going cold, being declared closed, briefly reopened, and ultimately dismissed by a Rangamati court on April 23, 2024.
Yet, Kalpana Chakma’s story continues to be one of defiance. The dismissal of the case neither ended the legal struggle for justice, nor did the structure of denial succeed in enforcing oblivion. Against all odds, her brother remains unbroken in his resolve, while the legal team continues to seek avenues to contest the dismissal order. Kalindi Kumar Chakma, the plaintiff in the case and a witness to the abduction, awaits the next court date, scheduled for July 6, for a hearing of the review petition against the dismissal order. Meanwhile, her comrades in the hills and plains paint walls across the country in the aftermath of the July mass uprising, asking: ‘Lieutenant Ferdous, where is Kalpana Chakma?’
Momentary recognition in July graffiti
Kalpana Chakma’s struggle and her words of courage had been inscribed on the walls of Dhaka and the CHT long before the July uprising. But in the post-uprising atmosphere, charged with hope and a longing for justice, those images and words from the margins multiplied, briefly came into sharper focus, before being pushed back into oblivion. The student leadership that emerged from the uprising quickly signalled that its politics of anti-discrimination is structured around an indigenous exception. Past atrocities in the CHT were excluded from the national agenda of concern for justice, while new episodes violence claimed the lives of indigenous youths.
On September 19, 2024, a little more than a month after the fall of the Awami League regime, a moment that many marked as Bangladesh’s ‘second independence’, four indigenous youths were killed in Rangamati and Khagrachari, an incident that, despite repeated demands from the affected communities for a credible investigation, remains uninvestigated. On January 15, 2025, activists of Students for Sovereignty attacked indigenous groups and their supporters with hockey sticks while they were protesting the removal of a July graffito from textbooks that included the word ‘indigenous’ (adivasi in Bangla), leaving two indigenous youth leaders seriously injured. The case has since seen no significant progress.
Kalpana Chakma aptly spoke to a political transition that echoes what we are witnessing today. On November 17, 1995, while addressing a memorial meeting organised by three organisations — the Pahari Chatra Parishad, Pahari Gana Parishad, and Hill Women’s Federation — in remembrance of the Naniarchar martyrs, she argued that the fall of military autocracy in 1990 did not end the policy of exclusion and repression but instead consolidated the hegemonic Bengali Muslim majoritarian governance in the CHT:
The people are now going through extremely difficult times. Following the fall of autocratic rule, under the guise of parliamentary democracy — clothed in the garb of democracy — yet another new design of autocratic rule is flourishing in the country. During the tenure of democratically elected governments there have occurred three consecutive massacres and two communal riots: the killings of 1991, 1992, 1993, and 1995.
Under the democratic cover of the then ruling BNP government, there is an extreme manifestation of communalism. This is a continuation of the path followed by previous governments in the Chittagong Hill Tracts. It is a path through which thousands of innocent Jumma families have been forced to leave their homesteads…
— Kalpana Chakma, Kalpana Chakma’r Diary (Dhaka: Hill Women’s Federation, 2000), p. 36 (author’s translation)
Kalpana Chakma’s observation that political transitions can reproduce older forms of exclusion under a new ‘garb of democracy’ offers a lens to understand how cry for justice itself becomes selectively structured and politically managed. In this sense, the fleeting visibility of indigenous suffering in the post-uprising moment reflects a disciplined hierarchy of remembrance and victimhood in which some violences are rendered legible as national trauma while others remain persistently exterior to it.
Victor’s justice
The first of the many commissions established during the tenure of the interim government was the Commission of Inquiry on Enforced Disappearances, formed on August 27, 2024. While Kalpana Chakma’s abduction fell outside the Commission’s temporal mandate, allegations of enforced disappearances that reportedly occurred in the period immediately preceding the fall of the Awami League regime also escaped its scrutiny. According to reported allegations, at least two Bawm youths became victims of enforced disappearance on July 15, 2024, having reportedly last been seen at a checkpoint near the Ruma Garrison in Bandarban.
The Commission’s work is significant in that it attempts to construct an evidentiary archive of enforced disappearances within a transitional context marked by fear, missing records and the deliberate concealment of detention practices. By documenting patterns of state violence and proposing pathways towards accountability, it provides an essential counterpoint to institutional denial and the erosion of legal memory. Yet its framing of enforced disappearance primarily through the lens of majoritarian national politics raises concerns that the inquiry may inadvertently reproduce an ethnically uneven archive of state violence.
Kalpana Chakma’s case was only fleetingly referenced to establish historical context, while the enforced disappearance of Mikel Chakma was taken up for investigation. However, beyond these instances, the enforced disappearance in the CHT did not fall within the Commission’s purview of investigation.
Such silences do not merely reflect investigative omissions. They suggest that questions of justice and accountability are shaped by the interests of those who come to define the post–regime-change order. While impunity enjoyed by military intelligence and other law enforcement agencies under the fallen regime remains a serious concern, in the CHT militarisation itself is reframed as necessary governance. An assumption made explicit when Asif Mahmud Sajib Bhuiyan, then adviser to the ministry of youth and sports, noted in a Jamuna Television interview on March 21, 2025 that, in a ‘transitional, turbulent situation’, the army’s central role in the hill tracts warranted its input in selecting the CHT adviser. His articulation effectively frames continued military control in the CHT as a matter of national security. Justice for indigenous people eludes the imagination of the post-uprising political establishment. It is within this politically sanctioned impunity that the alleged enforced disappearances of Bawm youths in Bandarban or Kalpana Chakma slipped from the horizon of accountability altogether.
And I ask: is it justice at all when impunity is challenged in the plains but tolerated in the hills?
Saydia Gulrukh is an assistant editor at New Age.
