The tyranny of the tag
In South Asian political culture, affixing a label to an opponent was long understood as an effective, if blunt, tactic for crushing morale and casting inconvenient voices out of the mainstream. Yet the mechanics of political nomenclature run far deeper than mere name-calling.
As the sociologist Howard Becker famously argued, deviance is not an inherent property of any act; rather, it comes into being at the precise moment an authority brands a group as abnormal. Terms such as Razakar, cockroach, deplorable, or beggars are not neutral descriptions of identity. They are social constructions crafted through the eyes of the powerful, quietly defining who belongs to the body politic and who must be relegated to its periphery.
The life cycle of an insult, however, rarely remains under the permanent control of its creator. Over time, an offensive tag can migrate into the hands of the targeted group and acquire an entirely inverted meaning—a process the philosopher Michel Foucault termed "reverse discourse."
Foucault pointed to the word "homosexual," originally coined within nineteenth-century medical literature to designate a mental pathology, which was subsequently reclaimed by gay communities as a badge of identity and a rallying point for civil rights. Placed side by side, these trajectories reveal a recurring historical cycle: power first imposes a name to segregate a group, after which the group absorbs the epithet and transforms it into a symbol of defiance. Yet this therapeutic reversal is never guaranteed.
Consider the grim alternative. In 1990s Rwanda, the term Inyenzi—meaning cockroach—was initially applied to Tutsi armed fighters. Through sustained state propaganda, it expanded to dehumanize the entire Tutsi population, laying the rhetorical groundwork for the 1994 genocide. The label never flipped into a symbol of pride; instead, it accelerated mass violence.
Similarly, in the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks, the elastic umbrella of the "War on Terror" collapsed complex regional identities into a single category of the existential enemy. Reversal, in short, requires a specific set of political conditions. Where state violence is absolute, power simply tightens its grip on the vocabulary it manufactures.
Bangladesh offers a lesson in the persistence and mutability of political tagging. Since independence in 1971, the binaries of Muktijoddha (freedom fighter) and Razakar (collaborator) have formed an unyielding moral wall, even as the nuanced reality of individual lives seldom fit neatly into either box.
In the digital age, fresh epithets emerged to police the boundaries of debate. During the 2013 Shahbagh movement, terms like Sushil (civil-society elite) and Chagu were weaponized online to silence dissent. Demonstrators demanding war-crimes trials were branded pro-establishment Shahbagis, while their critics were dismissed with equal speed.
Around the same period, the tag of "nastik” was applied to bloggers and intellectuals; between 2013 and 2016, the deadly link between that label and a string of targeted assassinations offered a horrific demonstration of how a word can endanger a human life. Throughout the long tenure of the Awami League, accusations of being a Jamaati, Razakar, or Bamati (leftist) functioned as standard apparatus to render anti-government voices suspect, shifting public focus away from what was being argued and onto who was daring to argue it.
This reflex did not vanish with political transition. Critics of subsequent administrations find themselves quickly branded as agents of the old regime. Members of the Hindu minority are routinely tagged as pro-India; indigenous communities are cast as foreign proxies; intellectuals critical of religious dogma are stamped as atheists; and women’s rights activists are dismissed as Westernized constructs.
Even the generic title of "senior journalist" has been weaponized as a sarcastic label to mark out specific commentators for public scorn.
Yet the quota-reform movement of 2024 upended this familiar script. When former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina attempted to discredit student protesters by sneering that they were the "grandchildren of Razakars," the demonstrators executed a swift tactical reversal. They seized the insult, turning it into a mass rallying cry that spread across the country, energizing the movement and contributing directly to the regime's collapse.
The word meant to morally disqualify them became their primary banner of resistance, proving that the language of state authority can slip out of its creator's hands with fatal consequences for the sovereign.
Even so, the fall of a government rarely cures a society of its lexical addictions; old habits simply adopt new vocabularies. Today, terms like leftist, Shahbagi, Sushil, and fascist collaborator pollute political discourse anew. The labels change, but the strategy remains constant: rather than engaging with the substance of an argument, the speaker is boxed into a discredited category so that there is no longer any operational need to listen to them.
A political culture that once silenced citizens by calling them Razakar will, given the chance, achieve the exact same outcome by calling them fascists.
This dynamic transcends South Asia. When Hillary Clinton described a segment of Donald Trump’s electorate as a "basket of deplorables" in 2016, the target audience embraced the slur, printing it on merchandise and turning it into a badge of populist honor.
Centuries earlier, in 1566, when Dutch nobles petitioned against Spanish persecution, an adviser to the regent dismissively referred to them as "beggars" (Geuzen). The nobles adopted the insult, declared themselves willing to be beggars for their homeland, and built a national liberation movement around the name.
The essential problem, then, is not merely the use of offensive words. It is the systemic presence of a political culture that evaluates an identity before it ever weighs an argument. Words like Jamaati, Razakar, Shahbagi, or collaborator become cheap substitutes for thought. The enduring lesson of history is that while any single label's power is temporary, the architecture of labeling survives one ruler after another.
The ultimate struggle is not against any specific slur, but against the central authority that claims the right to decide who is allowed to speak, who counts as a patriot, and who is cast out as an enemy of the state. Language is never just a passive mirror of politics; it is the battlefield itself.
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Nafew Sajed Joy is a Bangladeshi researcher, writer, and environmentalist with a keen interest in sustainability, development, and South Asian affairs