In the halls of fear, an uprising was born

In Bangladesh, authoritarianism began with a knock on a dorm room door. For over 15 years, in Bangladesh's public universities, thousands of students were summoned late at night—not by professors, but by enforcers of the ruling regime. They were called to "guest rooms" in student dormitories, spaces informally repurposed by the ruling party's student wing, the Bangladesh Chhatra League (BCL), and interrogated.

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There, the violence began.

The accused were questioned about their activity, network, and political loyalty. Did they post or like anything critical of the government? Were they connected to any opposition group, or even suspected of sympathising with one? Did they share a video of a speech? Miss a rally? Fail to pay tribute to the prime minister's father?

Once labelled disloyal, they were beaten with cricket stumps and iron rods, burned with cigarettes, slapped, kicked, and in some cases, thrown from balconies. Some were left permanently disabled. Others never came back.

This was not random violence; it was regime policy.

Under Sheikh Hasina's increasingly authoritarian rule, Bangladesh was governed not by popular mandate but through the manufacturing of fear. Elections were rigged. Courts were manipulated. Dissent was criminalised. But the most enduring frontline of repression was found not in the courtroom or the ballot box, but in the dormitory corridors of the nation's public universities.

Why the dorms? Because students have long been the frontline resistance to authoritarianism in Bangladesh.

From the 1952 language movement to the anti-autocracy uprisings of the 1990s, it has always been students—not generals, not elites—who sparked Bangladesh's most powerful political transformations. The Hasina regime understood this better than anyone. As long as campuses remained free, so did the possibility of resistance. And so, her administration didn't merely surveil universities, it occupied them.

BCL, later banned as a terrorist organisation, acted as a de facto paramilitary force. They controlled room allocations, ran dormitory surveillance, and summoned one or more students at a time for questioning—interrogations that blurred into beatings. According to a 2024 report by Socchar: Torture WatchDog Bangladesh, 78 percent of the victims were non-political students, targeted for things as trivial as skipping a rally, liking a Facebook post, or wearing a religious cap.

One student was beaten with a hammer and left with shattered bones. Another was thrown from a fourth-storey balcony. A female student was stripped, filmed, and blackmailed. Students were offered urine to drink when they begged for water. Soft drinks were given between beatings to rehydrate them so the torture could continue.

And no one intervened.

Not friends. Not university officials. Not the police. The institutions that should have protected students became their betrayers. Administrators loyal to the regime looked the other way or helped compile target lists. Law enforcement arrested victims under fabricated charges. Perpetrators were rewarded with government jobs, academic posts, and scholarships abroad. In Hasina's Bangladesh, brutality wasn't punished, it was promoted.

Between 2009 and 2024, BCL perpetrated hundreds of violent incidents across university campuses, resulting in thousands of injuries, sexual assaults, and deaths. While survivors may have healed from their physical wounds, the psychological scars—the long-term trauma they carry—remain incalculable. What emerged was not merely isolated suffering, but a profound and enduring collective trauma.

Roommates heard the screams but dared not intervene. Friends distanced themselves from the victims to avoid becoming targets. Parents checked their phones every night, fearing the worst. An entire generation lived under the doctrine of survival through silence.

Socchar's interviews with victims capture this with chilling clarity. Survivors speak of nightmares, isolation, dropped studies, and years of anxiety. One student, tortured over a decade ago, has still not returned to Dhaka—too afraid to set foot in the capital.

This model of repression reflects what scholars of authoritarian regimes describe as "the politics of fear." In autocratic systems where elections are manipulated and opposition is silenced, violence serves not just to punish dissent, but to prevent even its imagination. Fear is engineered to fragment solidarity and extinguish embryonic resistance, especially in universities, the historic cradle of social movements.

But authoritarian control is never total.

In July 2024, that fear finally cracked. Students ignited a mass uprising against a rigged job quota system that disproportionately benefited ruling party loyalists. What began as a protest soon became a revolution. But before taking to the streets, they did something far more dangerous: they took back the dormitories.

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The first act of revolution was the liberation of the halls. Students expelled the BCL from university campuses across the country, reclaiming the very spaces that had long been outposts of terror. The same dorm rooms that once echoed with screams now echoed with resistance.

This seismic shift triggered a chain reaction. When the dormitories fell, so did the fear—and then the regime itself. Sheikh Hasina, who had remained in power through administrative muscle, manipulated courts, elections devoid of legitimacy, and a culture of fear, was forced to flee. Her downfall began not in parliament or on the streets, but in the dorm rooms her regime once used to control a nation.

Let that be remembered.

Because the regime that ruled with terror did not fall to international sanctions or elite negotiations. It fell to the courage of students who, after years of silence, finally said: enough.

To move forward, Bangladesh must institutionalise justice. Independent commissions must investigate campus torture. Perpetrators must be prosecuted. Student politics should be banned from dormitories. Universities must offer trauma support for survivors. Most importantly, the country must declare, clearly and permanently, that no student shall ever again be tortured for an opinion.

Dr Sibbir Ahmad is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Virginia and president of Socchar: Torture Watchdog Bangladesh. He can be reached at [email protected].

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

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