Bawms are Bangladeshi citizens: treat them as such

On April 20th 2024, three Bawm women were taken from their home in Bandarban’s Ruma upazila, without any warrant or explanation. With them were four children, the youngest a mere six weeks old. For over a year, all seven remained behind bars, imprisoned under the Special Powers Act and Anti-Terrorism Act, charged in multiple cases, and denied bail on multiple occasions.

Just weeks earlier, on April  8th 2024, in the same upazila, 25-year-old Lalnun Kim Bawm, a second-year BSS student at Bandarban Government College, had been swept up in a mass arrest alongside her two sisters. Kim, a patient suffering from chronic effects of stroke and spending most of her time living in the district town to access treatment, was detained upon returning home for Eid holidays. In custody, she was taken to hospital several times but denied the sustained medical care her condition demanded. A CT scan at Chattogram Medical College on December 9th 2024 confirmed recurrent stroke and recommended ongoing medical supervision – care she has never received. Until August 21st 2025, the three sisters remained imprisoned without trial, while their parents lived in limbo, with no hope of redress. 

The Bawm are an indigenous Christian community in the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT). In early April 2024, in the aftermath of a dramatic bank robbery in Ruma and Thanchi, the state’s joint forces launched what they described as an operation against the Kuki-Chin National Front (KNF), a separatist armed group. In the process, they have corroded the line between insurgency and identity. Being Bawm is now, in effect, enough to be treated as a militant, detained without trial, or worse.

Between October 2022 and October 2024, more than 4,000 Bawms were displaced from their ancestral lands due to the severe targeted crackdown on the community in the name of raids against KNF. A Netra News investigation has found that since April 7th 2024, at least 22 civilians have been killed by the military, and at least 11 women have been victims of mass arrests kept in prison for over 12 months. Over the past year, nearly 200 Bawm civilians have been caught in the dragnet of state repression. Some were forcibly taken from their homes in the dead of night, others detained during sweeping joint forces raids.

Held under the guise of anti-terror operations, countless detainees have languished in pre-trial detention for over a year, with their legal representatives obstructed at every turn. Their families have been left in a limbo of fear and confusion, often unaware of the charges – if any – under which their loved ones are being confined. Security forces have enforced strict controls on the daily lives of the entire community, limiting their access to essential goods, including food and medicine. 

Their freedom restricted and their lives within the illusory freedom squeezed, Bawms are now dying in custody. Within the span of just three months, three Bawm men – Lal Thleng Kim Bawm (29), Sang Moy Bawm (55), and Van Lal Rual Bawm (35) – have lost their lives in state custody. Each was accused under nearly identical charges, none was ever convicted, and all three experienced a sharp decline in health while incarcerated. Yet, in every case, access to adequate medical treatment was either delayed or denied altogether, and they were transferred to hospitals only when their conditions had already deteriorated beyond recovery being possible. The near-total absence of the plight of the Bawms in the public discourse, let alone substantive objections, has allowed this deteriorating state of affairs to continue on its trajectory unabated.

To understand how an entire community could become criminalised almost overnight, one needs to trace the state’s own complicity in creating the very force it now cites as justification for repression. The KNF origins lie in the Kuki-Chin National Development Organization (KNDO), founded in 2008 in Ruma, Bandarban, by Nathan Bawm and his brother, Vanchunlian Bawm. While it began as a development-focused entity, it swiftly evolved into a political force. According to an independent investigation by the International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs (IWGIA), senior military officials provided legitimacy, material support, and public endorsement to Nathan’s activities, including the inauguration of the KNDO office in 2013, where Brigadier General Syed Siddiqui himself was present.

Nathan’s project, however, was met with scepticism by Bawm elders, who feared both the divisive politics of Zo nationalism and the dangers of aligning with military-backed experiments. Yet a small section of younger Bawm men, enticed by the promise of power, became his core support base. The tacit partnership between the KNF and security forces shifted abruptly in October 2022, when the Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) staged a public crackdown on the KNF. 

The CHT has, for decades, functioned as a permanently militarised frontier, governed through the enduring logic of occupation. Lacking implementation, the CHT Peace Accord 1997, once heralded as a historic milestone to end armed conflict and recognise indigenous autonomy, has become a monument to the state’s dishonesty, if not failure. Military presence in the hills continues unchecked, often superseding civilian authority in both form and function. 

What scholars have theorised as securitisation – the process by which states construct a group, issue, or population as an existential threat in order to justify exceptional, extra-legal measures – has long been the organising principle of governance in the CHT. Once a people are securitised, their dehumanisation is complete and the rules of democratic engagement no longer apply. The terrain shifts from politics to policing, from rights to risk management. Everything becomes permissible, cloaked in an absolute pursuit of security for the greater good.

This dynamic did not emerge ex nihilo with the last regime, nor will it disappear simply because power has changed hands. Hasina’s regime of the past 15 and a half years rightly drew ire for its systematic dismantling of democratic institutions, but even in this so-called transitional moment, there remains a silence we dare not break, a force we dare not name: the unaccountable, ever-expanding power of the military and security establishment.

Whether we admit it or not, militarisation of governance has become the foundational logic of the Bangladeshi state. In the CHT, this logic takes its most violent form, where the absence of a formal emergency has not prevented the reality of de facto occupation. Mass arrests, scorched-earth raids, extrajudicial killings, and prolonged detentions without trial are the norm. There is no alarm about this alarming reality.

Journalists sympathetic to the cause censor themselves pre-emptively when reporting on these, aware that some subjects cannot be named and some patterns cannot be acknowledged without professional or personal risk. Pages run by activists seeking to document Bawm detentions have been removed from social media platforms without notice or explanation. Meanwhile, mainstream outlets reproduce the press notes of security agencies as fact. Even in the “New” Bangladesh, some things are sacrosanct – chief among them, the uniform. We speak of reform without confronting the fact that certain institutions by their very design exist not to serve democracy, but to insulate themselves from it.

This is the paradox at the heart of Bangladesh’s post-uprising transition: a state that proclaims its return to democracy while deepening the very forms of structural violence that democracy was meant to dismantle. The real problem is that the tools of authoritarianism – laws of exception, discretionary force, and the bureaucracies of surveillance – have become indispensable to the functioning of the state itself. In the Hills, where the border between the rule of law and the rule of force has long been blurred, that transformation has always been more brutal, somehow more complete. 

To speak of justice in the Hills, then, is to speak of a fundamental rethinking of the relationship between the state and its peripheries, of whose lives are deemed governable through consent, and whose through coercion. It requires reckoning with the unspeakable truth that the military and security apparatus now operate as autonomous centres of power, helping construct the very discourses of threat and legitimacy that shape state responses, delineating the boundaries of permissible speech, and dictating who may claim the full protections of citizenship.●

Sushmita S. Preetha is a journalist and researcher.