In the shadow of Bangladesh’s hard-won independence, where the echoes of 1971’s heroic sacrifices still inspire dreams of a just society, a grotesque perversion unfolds: a seven-year-old boy, barely old enough to tie his own shoelaces, shackled in legal limbo for a kidnapping he couldn’t possibly orchestrate.
This is not a relic of some medieval farce but a fresh outrage from Chittagong, exposed by Prothom Alo on December 7, 2025โa stark emblem of how, since the upheavals of August 2024, mobocracy has hijacked the rule of law, turning courts into echo chambers of vengeance and police stations into vendetta mills.
The tale of this unnamed child is a microcosm of systemic rot. Arrested alongside his mother on flimsy hearsay from a desperate neighbour, he was funnelled through a judicial pipeline that brazenly defies the Children Act of 2013, which explicitly shields those under nine from the clutches of accusation, arrest, or detention. Seven months after a four-year-old vanished from a hospital corridor, policeโperhaps greased by a bribe, as the boy’s tea-stall father allegesโaccepted a case that no sane interpreter of law would entertain.
The court, in a holiday haze of procedural paralysis, dispatched him to a “child development centre” that reeks more of a reformatory than a refuge. Only public outcry and a belated bail petition pried him free today. Yet, this “victory” is pyrrhic; the damage to an innocent soul, and the precedent it sets, lingers like a toxin in the nation’s veins.
This is no isolated aberration. Since Sheikh Hasina’s ouster on August 5, 2024โa moment many hailed as a rebirth of democracyโBangladesh has descended into an orgy of extrajudicial retribution, where mobs dictate justice, and the state plays enabler. Human rights watchdogs like Odhikar and Ain o Salish Kendra (ASK) paint a grim ledger: over 40 extrajudicial killings from August 2024 to September 2025, with at least 45 custodial deaths tallied by October 2025. These are not footnotes in history but fresh graves: 14 tortured to death, seven beaten lifeless, 19 gunned down in “encounters.”
106 charge sheets filed amid row over fake July martyrs and selective justice
Sheikh Hasina slams Yunus-led probe into 2009 Pilkhana massacre
Disappearance Case: How Jamaat-run ICT-BD flexing muscles for revenge
Justice Makers Bangladesh in France (JMBF) documents 70 such fatalities in the Yunus-led interim regime’s first year, 61% in custodyโechoing the impunity of old regimes but now cloaked in the garb of “reform.” Names like Nazrul Islam, beaten in Bhola’s lockup for alleged theft, or the 24 Awami League affiliates who perished in cells since August, scream of a continuity the revolution promised to sever.
Mobocracy thrives not just in brutality but in the banal: mass arrests that swell prisons beyond capacity, denial of bail as a default sentence, and false cases as confetti in a political circus. Amnesty International decries a “disturbing pattern” of politically motivated prosecutions, where families of July uprising victims file scattershot murder complaints naming hundredsโjournalists, lawyers, even bystandersโwithout a shred of individualised evidence. Courts, besieged by protests or paralysed by vacations, rubber-stamp remands while rejecting bail pleas; over 10,000 were swept up in July-August 2024 alone, many on fabricated sabotage or terrorism charges.
The International Crimes Tribunal, repurposed post-Hasina, issues warrants like edicts from a kangaroo court, detaining 119 without due process, while real revenge killingsโover 1,400 in the uprising’s furyโevade scrutiny under an August 2024 amnesty for “student efforts.” South Asians for Human Rights warns of eroded public trust, as “mass criminal cases” and “loopholes in justice” breed insecurity, from minority pogroms (1,769 alleged attacks, 82% on August 5 alone) to viral arrests of Hindu leaders like Chhinmoy Prabhu.
This is mobocracy in full bloom: crowds storming the Supreme Court to oust judges, as in August and October 2024, forcing 12 High Court justices to recuse themselves under duress. Mobs lynching the vulnerableโ185 killed in 466 incidents from August 2024 to June 2025, per Rights & Risks Analysisโwhile shrines burn and minorities flee.
Ex-army officer BNPโs Abdul Hoque calls for annexing Indiaโs Seven Sisters
Ex-army officer Hasinurโs anti-India remarks ignite fears of regional instability
Graves of five freedom fighters set on fire in Rajbari under Yunusโ watch
The interim government’s “zero tolerance” rhetoric rings hollow; advisers defend mobs as “pressure groups,” and the army’s street patrolsโextended since July 2024โfail to stem the tide. Even the Tribunal’s death sentence for Hasina, built on a flawed OHCHR report lacking evidentiary rigour, reeks of “judicial assassination” via mob-orchestrated decree.
We, the heirs of 1971’s blood-soaked liberty, cannot abide this descent. The July uprising toppled a tyrant, but in its wake, we’ve birthed a hydra: vengeance masquerading as virtue, where the innocentโlike a seven-year-old boyโpay for the sins of the system. The Yunus regime must act decisively: Enforce the Torture and Custodial Death (Prevention) Act, 2013, with teethโprosecute the torturers, as in the lone 2020 conviction, and make custodial death a standalone crime.
Reform the police, end warrantless arrests, and grant bail as a right, not a rarity. Shield the judiciary from street sieges, investigate the 24 Awami League custodial deaths with transparency, and probe the 2,442 communal attacks without bias. International allies, from the UN to Amnesty, must amplify these callsโBangladesh’s accession to the Convention Against Enforced Disappearance in August 2024 demands it.
The child from Chittagong is free today, but how many more must suffer tomorrow? Mobocracy is not revolution; it is regression, a betrayal of the muktijoddhas who fought for a Bangladesh where justice is blind, not beholden to the baying crowd. Let us riseโnot with torches of rage, but with the steady flame of lawโto forge a nation where no grave injustice, no child’s tears, goes unanswered. The time for reckoning is now, before the mobs claim us all.
English 
Bengali