In April, a fisherman named Miraj Sheikh “vanished” into the machinery of state power, barely two months after Bangladesh’s newly elected government took office. It is reasonable to assume that the political leadership issued no order to disappear a fisherman from a coastal community, even amid allegations that he had links to coastal pirates.
Yet the burden of this crime, perpetrated by rogue elements within the security apparatus, lands squarely on the shoulders of the political executive.
This is the central pathology of post-authoritarian governance. For 17 years, Bangladesh’s security agencies were turned into instruments of surveillance and political terror to serve the Awami League. Having achieved a democratic transition, the new administration remains trapped, swallowing the criminal overreach of institutions it nominally commands. Dishonest officials act with impunity, secure in the knowledge that their political superiors will take the blame.
Today, public outrage is not directed at faceless intelligence chiefs or field directors. It is directed at the Home Minister and the Prime Minister.
The solution requires institutional surgery. Investigations under the enforced disappearance law must be removed entirely from the security agencies and handed to an empowered Human Rights Commission. Unsanctioned surveillance access must cease immediately, and the reforms drafted under the interim administration must be restored. Corrupt officers frequently trade in abductions and wiretapping for private profit—settling local land disputes or protecting extortion rings.
They effectively rent out state power. When the bill comes due, however, it is the elected government that pays in international condemnation, judicial reprimands, and lost legitimacy. The Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) administration has time to reverse course. If political cover is needed, it can blame the stringency of the reforms on the outgoing administration of Professor Muhammad Yunus.
The alternative is structural decay. Security forces remain packed with personnel recruited over the past decade through political patronage and outright bribery. Their institutional loyalties remain tied to the previous regime. Left unmanaged, these elements will continue to engage in sabotage, triggering crises for which the state must account.
During the interim period, the overhaul of Section 97 of the Telecommunications Act addressed a simple question: who has the legal right to spy on citizens, and under whose authority? Under the previous regime, roughly 18 agencies operated surveillance apparatuses without a shred of legal mandate—a breach of privacy rights almost without global parallel.
The interim reforms stripped access back to four legally grounded entities: the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) for standard investigations, emergency services for immediate life-saving interventions, the Special Branch for national security, and the National Security Intelligence (NSI) for state security. To clean up the fragmented operations of the police, a centralized coordination cell was designed directly into Section 97.
Exclusions were deliberate. The Coast Guard, the Border Guard Bangladesh, the Rapid Action Battalion (RAB), and the Directorate General of Forces Intelligence (DGFI) were omitted because their governing statutes contained no legal provisions for telecommunications interception.
RAB presented the most acute hazard. Granting fresh surveillance powers to an elite paramilitary unit already under international sanctions—and facing a complete rebranding—was non-viable. If RAB required interception capabilities, it could apply through the central police coordination cell.
This rationale met ferocious institutional resistance. During cabinet negotiations, agency chiefs launched aggressive attacks against the proposed constraints. They demanded to know why the National Telecommunication Monitoring Center (NTMC)—an instrument perfected under the former dictator Sheikh Hasina—could not be preserved intact. They questioned the very concept of judicial oversight, asking why courts should pry into state secrets or whether judges could even be trusted.
This hostility exposed an institutional ignorance regarding quasi-judicial review. Most functional democracies balance state surveillance with rigorous oversight, such as the FISA court system in the United States. Sheikh Hasina left behind an intelligence culture that viewed accountability as treason.
The human cost of that culture was documented by the Commission of Inquiry on Enforced Disappearances, which received roughly 1,500 complaints from victims of arbitrary detention.
To accommodate operational realities, strict exceptions were carved out. The Coast Guard and Border Guard were granted narrow windows strictly for cross-border anti-smuggling operations, subject to direct authorization by their agency heads. Miraj Sheikh, abducted in inland Barguna, hardly fit the definition of an international smuggler.
The Ansar paramilitary was granted minimal access purely to monitor internal troop discipline. DGFI was included only after intense cabinet lobbying, and even then, every single interception required explicit, case-by-case approval from both the agency chief and the Prime Minister.
These safeguards—strict access limits, mandatory paper trails, quasi-judicial reviews, and periodic reports to a parliamentary committee—were designed to break the cycle of abuse. Yet, following the democratic transition, institutional pressure eroded the entire framework. The law was gutted, and arbitrary surveillance returned. The abduction of Miraj Sheikh was the predictable outcome.
Where unchecked surveillance exists, extrajudicial detention quickly follows. It is unlikely that senior officials explicitly ordered Sheikh’s capture; instead, field officers acted for private gain. But when an officer abducts a citizen for cash, the political system absorbs the blow. If international bodies levy sanctions against units like the Coast Guard, the consequences will ripple across the entire country, inflating procurement costs, disrupting international financial transactions, and eroding sovereign credibility.
A government that leaves the surveillance apparatus unmoored from the legal process actively undermines its own survival. Reclaiming control of these rogue forces is not an act of political weakness, but the prerequisite for state stability. The interim reforms must be restored before the window closes entirely.
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Faiz Ahmad Taiyeb is a former Special Assistant to the Chief Adviser of Bangladesh and a writer on sustainable development