The ‘strange fruit’ of Bhaluka and a republic in retreat

On the night of December 18, 2025, a young man was beaten to death, tied to a tree, and set ablaze by a mob in Bhaluka, Mymensingh. The victim, Dipu Chandra Das, was a garment worker. The mob's accusation, as relayed by Rapid Action Battalion later, was that he had insulted religious sentiments. The smoke that rose that night was not just from that unceremonious pyre; it was the smoke of our shared social contract slowly burning to ashes.

This image compels a haunting melody to mind: Billie Holiday's "Strange Fruit," her elegy for the lynched and hung Black bodies of the American South. Today, this could be easily associated with what happened in Bhaluka, its horror lying not only in the unspeakable cruelty but also in its stark, public visibility. It was a spectacle. Traffic slowed. Phones recorded. This was not a crime hidden in the shadows but a performance staged for a community's eyes, meant to sear a new reality into our collective senses.

The French philosopher Jacques Rancière gives us a lens to see this horror for what it truly is: an aesthetic coup. He argues that politics is fundamentally a battle over the "distribution of the sensible"—the system that determines what is visible and invisible, sayable and unsayable, who has a part in the communal story, and who is rendered a silent ghost. The existing social order, what Rancière calls the "police order," maintains this distribution through implicit rules and conventions. The killing in Bhaluka was a violent, audacious act of redrawing that rulebook. The mob decided, in that moment, what was permissible to see (a burning body as just punishment), what was permissible to say (an accusation of blasphemy as a death sentence), who belonged (the mob), and who could be erased (a minority youth).

This violence did not erupt in a vacuum. It was the bitter, logical endpoint of a pattern we have witnessed and documented with growing dread. Just months ago, on September 5 in Rajbari, another mob exhumed the body of a controversial spiritual leader and set it ablaze on a national highway. That, too, was a public spectacle, a ritual of domination. Before that, the chainsaws came at dawn for a centuries-old banyan tree in Madaripur, around whose trunk people of different religions tied threads of hope. It was felled by a mob declaring it a "corruption," an act of cultural ecocide performed for the camera.

Each of these acts—the burning of a "heretic's" corpse, the assassination of a syncretic tree, the killing of a minority youth—follows the same chilling script. First, an accusation is made declaring a person, a practice, or a place to be outside the bounds of a rigid orthodoxy. Then, the mob gathers, often agitated through the digital echo chambers of social media, where rumour metastasises into righteous fury. Finally, the violent performance: a destruction meant to be seen, filmed, and shared, to instil fear and demonstrate who truly holds power in the public square.

On the very night Dipu Das was killed, a similar script was being enacted in the heart of Dhaka. Hundreds of people audaciously stormed the offices of The Daily Star and Prothom Alo. They vandalised and set the buildings on fire, trapping journalists inside the English newspaper's building, who were left "gasping for air" as smoke filled the newsroom. For the first time in 35 years, The Daily Star could not publish its print edition the next day. An attack on a Hindu man in a village and an attack on the free press in the capital are not disconnected events. They are twin assaults on the same thing: the pluralistic, questioning, and diverse fabric of society.

And herein lies the state's profound failure. Rancière reminds us that the foundational duty of any state is to maintain a monopoly on the legitimate use of force and to uphold a shared, sensible public order in which all citizens can appear as equals. In Bhaluka, Rajbari, Madaripur, and on the streets of Dhaka, that monopoly has been surrendered. The official "police order" has fled the scene, apparently replaced by the mob's violent logic. The state's response—a condemnation on social media—is a masterpiece of impotence. It tries to manage the aftermath, having abandoned the decisive moment. When the guardians of order are reduced to spectators, the very concept of the state collapses. We are left in a state of exception where life is reduced to bare life, vulnerable to violence without recourse.

So, we must ask: who benefits from this unravelling? The immediate perpetrators are but foot soldiers. The true beneficiaries are the forces of division, those who thrive in the epistemic murk where fact and fanaticism blur. A society terrified, fractured, and silent is a society that can be easily managed, its historical memory of syncretism erased, its future dictated by the loudest and most violent voices. The burning of Dipu Das was meant to be a lesson written in fire: this is the new normal. This is the new boundary of the possible and the sayable.

We must refuse this lesson. To do so requires more than moral outrage; it requires a sensorial and political rebellion. We must refuse to let this image of "strange fruit" settle into our landscape as just another tragic headline in an endless cycle of horror. We must make it jar, grate, and scream against any notion of a tolerant Bangladesh. This means demanding a state that does not just tweet condemnations but demonstrates, through preemptive and decisive action, that it will dismantle mobs, arrest ringleaders, and protect the vulnerable. It means defending our journalists, our artists, our eccentrics, and our minorities not as special interests, but as vital organs of the body politic.

The opposite of this burning is not passive peace. It is the active, courageous defence of a shared world. It is the replanting of the banyan, the mourning of every desecrated grave, the insistence that the name Dipu Chandra Das be remembered not as a target but as a citizen whose death broke our collective heart and must now mend our collective resolve. The mob's fire sought to illuminate its own power. Our task is to harness that light to see clearly the abyss we stand before, and to step back, together, to create a future where the only fruit our trees bear is that of shared shade and shelter.

Zakir Kibria is a writer, policy analyst, and entrepreneur currently based in Kathmandu, Nepal. His email address is zk@krishikaaj.com.

Views expressed in this article are the author's own. 

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