Rights Group Criticises Arrests at a Dhaka Party Office
The rights group says the detention of nearly 290 JSD supporters in Dhaka reflects a broader pattern of arrests targeting perceived Awami League sympathisers.
Human Rights Watch has treated a police sweep at a small left party's Dhaka office as more than a local law-and-order case. In a note carried by Prothom Alo this week, the group called the 26 September detentions the latest blow to civil and political rights under the Bangladesh Nationalist Party government elected in February.
Police took roughly 290 supporters of the Jatiya Samajtantrik Dal into custody after activists of the ruling party's youth wing, Jubo Dal, said the gathering was a covert meeting of the banned Awami League. A Dhaka court later sent 27 of them to jail. Police told the magistrate they had been held under Section 54 of the Criminal Procedure Code after "Joy Bangla" was chanted inside the JSD central office in Gulistan. The slogan, long tied to the Awami League, was the stated reason for the remand.
JSD is not the Awami League. It is a smaller left party that sat in the 14-party alliance led by Sheikh Hasina's party from 2009 until that government fell in the 2024 student uprising. Local reporting said about 400 leaders and activists had come to the Gulistan office for a meeting that began in the morning. A party account said BNP activists arrived first and assaulted people on the premises while police were already nearby; officers then began taking people out in the afternoon, including a journalists' union figure. Police said they moved after a tip that the slogan had been raised and a meeting was under way.
The same weekend brought parallel cases that HRW folded into the same pattern. On 26 September, police in Barisal held 12 Awami League activists over an alleged secret meeting to "plan sabotage." Two days later, 15 people were picked up in Dhaka under the Anti-Terrorism Act on similar claims. Those detained said they had met to mark Hasina's birthday.
HRW's sharper point is about the promise the BNP made on the way into office. The party spent years as the target of Hasina-era repression — killings outside the courts, disappearances, torture, and detention of opponents. It campaigned on restoring rights and the rule of law. The rights group says the new government has instead held perceived opponents without clear charges, and has stepped back from safeguards the interim administration had put forward. Hundreds of Awami League figures are already in jail, many still uncharged, and police have repeatedly raided gatherings described as secret party meetings.
The legal claim in the Gulistan case is narrow: a slogan, an unsatisfactory explanation of why people were in the office, and a belief that a cognisable offence might be involved. The political claim is wider. International law protects speech and association even for parties a government dislikes. HRW's line is that abuses committed while the Awami League was in power do not license the same methods now — and that Bangladesh's own record shows where that cycle tends to go.