Miraj Sheikh and the return of ‘never again’
Bangladesh has spent two years saying “never again” about enforced disappearances. Miraj Sheikh is the test of whether those words meant anything.
Miraj, a 30-year-old fisherman, disappeared near the Sundarbans on April 10. His family and witnesses say Coast Guard personnel detained him and took him away. His wife, Mukta Khatun, says she went to the Coast Guard’s Digraj base the next day and was initially told that her husband was there and had been taken on an operation. When she returned later, she was told no one named Miraj was there. He has not been seen since.
Human Rights Watch has called it the first known alleged enforced disappearance in Bangladesh since the July 2024 uprising. That distinction should be chilling. The BNP government came to office promising that the machinery of disappearance would not return.
Yet within six months of taking power, Bangladesh is confronting a case that looks disturbingly familiar…a man allegedly taken by a state force, an institution denying custody, a family wandering between offices, and authorities unable to say where he is.
There is, however, a grim flourish to this story. The force accused of taking Miraj has been questioning Miraj’s family.
A Daily Waadaa report showed that Coast Guard officers questioned Miraj’s wife, mother and sister at Mongla police station as part of what police described as the force’s “internal inquiry.” The family says important details were omitted from statements prepared after the questioning. Miraj’s sister, Liza Islam, asked the obvious question: if the allegation is that the Coast Guard made her brother disappear, how can the Coast Guard investigate the matter?
This is not merely a problem of optics, though the optics are dreadful. It is a problem of elementary institutional credibility. An accused institution may conduct an internal administrative review of its personnel, but that cannot substitute for an independent investigation into the allegation against it.
When relatives of a missing man are summoned and questioned by officers belonging to the very force they accuse, the process risks feeling less like fact-finding than power examining its accusers.
That is why the Miraj case matters far beyond one family in the hinterland of Mongla. It explains, in miniature, the public anger over the government’s enforced-disappearance legislation, which would leave investigations to the police while stripping away stronger independent powers contained in the 2025 framework.
The objection is not that every police officer is compromised. It is that Bangladesh’s history makes institutional independence indispensable. The Commission of Inquiry on Enforced Disappearances identified 1,569 cases between 2009 and 2024 and called even that a substantial undercount.
Police units, RAB and military intelligence were among the agencies implicated. Against that history, telling citizens that disciplined forces can investigate allegations involving disciplined forces is not reassurance. It is precisely the arrangement that requires reassurance.
Transparency International Bangladesh (TIB) has made the same point. It has warned that the proposed laws could weaken the National Human Rights Commission, leave disappearance investigations entirely with police and create avenues for impunity. HRW has likewise urged the government to restore independent investigative authority and safeguards against security-force abuse.
The government should pay attention not because NGOs have discovered a fashionable objection, but because Bangladesh has already conducted an experiment in self-policing. The results are in thousands of grieving households.
The political significance is greater. The July uprising was a revolt against a state that had learned to treat citizens as manageable objects. Enforced disappearance was among the ugliest expressions of that statecraft. The Awami government could erase people from the public world and then oblige their families to argue that they had existed in official custody at all.
Sheikh Hasina did not invent disappearances in Bangladesh, but during her long rule it became a political tool of extraordinary utility. Fear worked where persuasion failed. Uncertainty worked where prosecution was inconvenient.
The message was understood without being printed on a poster…the state could reach you, and afterwards it might deny that it had.
That culture did not begin in 2009, either. Kalpana Chakma, the Indigenous rights activist who disappeared in 1996, remains an old, painful unresolved case. Her disappearance occurred before Hasina first took office, so it would be historically false to pin the original act on her government.
But the failure of successive governments, including Hasina’s, to deliver a credible resolution helped teach the state a disastrous lesson: some disappearances can simply outlive outrage.
That is the danger now.
One case is not “only one case.” One case is how a prohibition becomes negotiable. If the disappearance of Miraj is allowed to dissolve into procedural fog and institutional denials, the precedent will be noticed. Security institutions learn from consequences just as politicians do. If there is no consequence, the lesson writes itself.
This is why Bangladeshis should be outraged before the Miraj case becomes another anniversary. Outrage after 20 years is remembrance. Outrage while a man may still be recoverable is citizenship.
The High Court has already ordered law-enforcement agencies to find Miraj and produce him before the court. The government should treat that not as an awkward legal instruction but as an emergency test of its democratic claims.
It should ensure an independent, credible investigation, protect the family and witnesses from pressure, establish who ordered the Coast Guard questioning, preserve all relevant records and make the findings public.
And Parliament should reconsider a disappearance law that asks citizens to place faith in precisely the institutional arrangements that history has taught them to distrust.
Bangladesh did not endure August 5 so that the vocabulary would change while the reflexes survived. A government that promised no more enforced disappearances should understand the brutal simplicity of its obligation: when someone vanishes after alleged state detention, the state must find him, investigate independently and account for every official involved.
Miraj Sheikh cannot become the first exception. In Bangladesh, exceptions have a habit of becoming systems.
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Faisal Mahmud is the Managing Editor of Daily Waadaa