Sifat Abdullah is twenty, studies at Adamjee Cantonment College and, on September 2, uploaded a Facebook video in which he brandished two electricity bills, one for 4,000 taka, another for 5,000 taka. 

Electricity is expensive, bills are painful and Bangladeshis are entitled to ask awkward questions when the numbers appear absurd. So far, so democratic.

The difficulty was what came next. Sifat did not merely complain about his electricity bill. He decorated the complaint with a stream of vulgar abuse directed at Prime Minister Tarique Rahman. This distinction, between protesting a bill and abusing a person, might have provided the starting point for a sensible political conversation.

Naturally, politics abolished it.

The opposition rushed to Sifat’s defence. National Citizen Party leaders demanded his release and threatened to “make it international”. A Jamaat lawmaker from Gazipur-4 called for his immediate release, conceding that his language “might have been objectionable” while arguing that his grievance represented ordinary people.

The second proposition may well be true. The first does not cease to matter because of it.

This is one of the strange habits of Bangladeshi politics…once somebody becomes politically useful, all examination of his conduct must apparently stop. The government arrests him, therefore everything he did before being arrested must retrospectively become admirable. One side exaggerates an offence; the other responds by pretending there was no offence of manners at all.

Both positions require less thought than the situation deserves. Nor is Sifat’s electricity story quite as straightforward as the viral clip suggested.

KM Nazmul Haque, an assistant press secretary to Prime Minister Tarique Rahman, subsequently published on his verified Facebook page what he said were figures obtained from Gazipur Palli Bidyut Samity. According to Nazmul, Sifat’s two-storey family home in Ward 38 has three residential meters, not one, and tenant families also live there.

Between May and August, the three meters consumed a combined 2,080 units, producing bills totalling 16,273 taka. One meter generated bills of 1,182 taka in July and 513 taka in August; another, 3,594 taka and 2,397 taka; the third, 1,633 taka and 1,362 taka.

This does not prove that every bill was correct. A Facebook post by a government official is not an audit, and the government cannot settle a billing dispute simply by producing numbers on social media. But the figures do make the original morality play rather less tidy.

Nazmul also said officials from the Board Bazar Zonal Office visited the house seeking an inventory of electrical appliances but were refused entry and the gate was closed.

Excellent. Then investigate it. Publish the meter readings. Show the consumption records. Let Sifat challenge them. Let Palli Bidyut explain how every taka was calculated. If the bills are wrong, correct them. If they are right, demonstrate why.

This is called resolving an electricity dispute. It requires meters, records and some boring calculations. It does not require turning an unpleasant Facebook performance into an act of political courage.

A young man who curses a prime minister over an electricity bill may still have a perfectly legitimate complaint. He may also have behaved appallingly while making it. Bangla has a wonderfully economical word for this: beyadob. Conveniently, Bengali culture also supplies the cure: adab.

Imagine Sifat standing before his parents and using precisely the same vocabulary against a rickshaw-puller, a schoolteacher or a night guard twice his age. Would anybody rush forward holding up the electricity bill as Exhibit A for the defence?

More likely his parents would be mortified, an uncle would pull him aside, and somebody would instruct him to apologise. Everyone would instinctively understand something our politics suddenly finds intellectually demanding: two things can be true at once. The boy may have been wronged. The boy may also have behaved disgracefully.

The prime minister, of course, is not entitled to protection from criticism. Democratic office means precisely the opposite. Tarique Rahman should be subjected to more scrutiny than an ordinary citizen, not less. His government’s electricity policy, prices, policing, appointments, failures and hypocrisies are all legitimate material for the harshest political attack.

But freedom of expression protects the right to speak; it does not confer a medal for speaking badly. Democracy requires governments to tolerate offensive speech. It does not require the rest of us to pretend that obscenity has somehow become an argument.

And here the opposition squandered a rather ‘splendid’ opportunity.

Imagine a senior opposition politician saying something like this: Sifat’s electricity complaint deserves investigation. His language deserves no defence. Release him, examine the bills and let the young man apologise to the prime minister. We ask the prime minister, as the senior figure, to accept the apology and move on.

What exactly would have been lost?

The opposition would have defended a citizen against disproportionate state power. It could have put the government on the defensive over electricity prices. It would have upheld free expression without confusing freedom with vulgarity. And it would have offered a twenty-year-old a dignified route out of a foolish mistake.

Instead, politics once again demanded absolutes. Sifat must either be a dangerous offender deserving jail or a courageous young citizen whose behaviour is beyond criticism. Apparently there is no room in between for the far more plausible possibility that he is a young man with a legitimate grievance, a foul mouth and a government that badly overreacted.

That middle ground may be less exciting. It also happens to be where liberal democracy lives.

The broader problem is what politics teaches young people to value. If the crudest possible performance of anger brings fame, political protection and applause, the lesson will not be difficult to learn. Parties that teach their supporters that manners are bourgeois affectations may eventually discover that the vocabulary of rebellion sounds rather different when shouted at their own leaders.

Bangladesh has already seen where this road goes.

After the rupture of 2024, the “mob” became both a noun and a political technique. Anger acquired a curious moral immunity…if the target was sufficiently wicked, the conduct of the crowd apparently required no examination. The righteousness of the cause became an all-purpose licence for the behaviour committed in its name.

Political cultures do not decay because people become angry. They decay when anger becomes evidence of virtue. The government, meanwhile, appears determined to make the opposite mistake.

A vulgar Facebook video is not terrorism. If the police possess credible evidence that Sifat committed some separate offence, they should state the allegation plainly and produce the evidence. But if the substance of the matter is that a twenty-year-old insulted the prime minister, prison is an oddly nervous response from a government possessing an electoral mandate.

Nothing advertises the fragility of power quite like treating a foul-mouthed Facebook rant as a threat to the republic.

A warning would have sufficed. An apology would have been better. Whatever proportionate legal remedy exists could have been considered. Arresting him transforms a matter of bad behaviour into a test of political freedom — and hands the opposition an entirely avoidable cause.

Assistant Press Secretary Nazmul himself supplied a perfectly serviceable principle. Citizens, he wrote, have every right to protest failures in public services, but should do so “in appropriate language and through proper means”. On the billing dispute, he argued that meter readings, units consumed and billing records should matter more than “emotion or rhetoric”.

Quite so.

The government might consider applying the same principle to governing, and the opposition to opposing.

Sifat Abdullah has every right to question his electricity bill. Palli Bidyut has an obligation to explain it. The government must answer legitimate anger over electricity prices. The police should not convert vulgarity into a national-security offence. The opposition should defend a citizen against disproportionate punishment without pretending that his conduct deserves applause. 

And Sifat should learn that being twenty, angry and politically useful does not suspend the ordinary obligation to behave decently. There is, in fact, a wonderfully simple ending available to everyone.

Release him. Verify the bills. Let the boy apologise. Let the prime minister accept it.

Nobody loses face. The state demonstrates restraint. The opposition demonstrates judgment. A young man learns that having rights does not mean never having to say sorry.

And Bangladesh might rediscover something rather unfashionable in its politics: adab.

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