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A NEW era has begun. This moment, woven with unprecedented events and changes, stands as a testament to the power of the people. But the cost was high!

Sitting on a cushy couch in my comfortable apartment in the USA, I see harrowing images and read dreadful stories of death. The stench of tear gas filling the air in my country does not impair my vision, yet my sight becomes blurred. The bullets don’t pierce my chest, yet my heart aches. The blood of my loved ones does not stain me red, but still, everything appears red to me. The time-space distance that separates my reality from that of my fellow citizens cannot shield me from incomprehensible anger and terror. Despite being thousands of miles away, the emotional weight of their suffering pierces through the barriers, leaving me haunted by their pain and driven by an urgency to make sense of this unending senselessness.

Abdur Rahman Jisan (18) was a water supplier to the shops in the neighbourhoods of Rayerbagh in Dhaka. On the afternoon of July 20, a bullet pierced him through the right eye. Nine days later, his wife took her own life. The wife’s death, though socially labelled as suicide, was an act of killing.

On July 21, a 7/8-year-old boy was shot dead in Town Hall Bazar as he took shelter and peeked from behind a tree. When he left home that morning, neither he nor his mother knew it would be his last game of peek-a-boo. The tree, now stained with his blood, stands as a silent witness to the tragedy.

Journalist ATM Turab was hit by pellet guns, mainly in his liver and lungs, and died in the ICU on July 19. From London, his wife pleaded for help to see her husband one last time, but due to the internet lockdown, she couldn’t. Turab’s mother saw the dead body of her beloved son, who was riddled with a hundred pellet wounds. I heard that traumatised mother still keeps asking everyone, ‘Why did the police kill my son?’

Turab’s mother is not alone. Her cry echoes the lament of millions of Bangladeshis: ‘How come a government has killed its own people?’ The answer to this question lies in the government’s necropolitics, killing in the name of sovereignty, the ultimate exercise of authority that not only has the right to kill but also the power to expose its citizens to death.

It was the autocratic government that designed the architecture of the violence to intentionally direct people towards death. This necropolitics was not about some abstract notions of rules. Rather, it was about the tangibles of life and death: Power cuts on campuses left students more vulnerable to the lethal attacks by the Bangladesh Chhatra League. Country-wide internet lockdown led to a wildfire of rumours and speculations and made more students take to ‘offline’ streets. Indiscriminate shootings caused children to die on rooftops, playgrounds, or comfy bedrooms. The forced fingerprinting of the injured upon arrival at the hospital led many of them to choose to remain untreated, dealing with deadly wounds. The sudden spraying of rifle shots at pedestrians and protesting crowds from low-flying helicopters ensured the deaths or severe injuries of those who couldn’t escape in time. The deployment of ever-greater forces, including the paramilitary unit whose leaders faced international sanction over allegations of torture, extrajudicial killings, and forced disappearances, amplified the brutality. And the imposition of a curfew with a ‘shoot-on-sight-order’ increased the number of casualties and immense suffering.

Each of these incidents reflects the calculated decisions of the government over the life and death of its own citizens. They uncover the fact that weapons and excessive forces were deployed in the interest of maximum destruction of people and the creation of ‘death-worlds’ (from Achille Mbembe). They reveal what Mbembe claims: ‘the ultimate expression of sovereignty resides, to a large degree, in the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die.’ This absolute ‘power to kill’ has elucidated that a ‘dirty war’ on citizens was, in fact, taking place in Bangladesh.

The Awami League government of Bangladesh showed little regard for the lives of its citizens. Here, the citizens existed in what Agamben calls ‘a state of exception,’ the process whereby sovereign authorities declare emergencies to suspend legal protections for individuals while unleashing the power of the state upon them. The regime turned the whole country into a ‘space of exception’Ìýwhere human and constitutional rights were suspended under the guise of ‘security.’ It created a new form of social existence in which the majority of citizens have been conferred the status of ‘living-dead.’

The ‘living-dead’ condition resulted from a triple loss: loss of the right to live, loss of the right over one’s own body, and loss of the freedom of speech. This triple loss was identical to absolute power, domination, and social death. But this does not mean that citizens are passive objects. Rather, despite being deprived of humanity altogether, the citizens maintained alternative perspectives towards power, rights, and life. However, lacking basic human rights and protections, when the citizens opposed the government, they became killable animals in the eyes of the state. This state of exception thus became the normative basis for ‘the right to kill.’

However, the AL government’s necropolitics extended beyond the moment of death. After all, sovereignty is not just about the war on life. It is also a war on corpses. To exercise sovereignty is to exercise necroviolence (from Jason De León) through the specific treatment of corpses that is offensive, sacrilegious, or inhumane. The government not only killed but also disregarded the facts of the killing, which was evident in the first information report (FIR) of Abu Sayeed (filed by the police themselves) that did not mention gunshots as being the cause of death and acknowledge the involvement of the police. This disregard does not refer to ignoring something. Rather, it uncovers an attitude of purposeful inattention located on the edges of awareness. The government also naturalised the killings. One state minister said, ‘If law enforcement agencies come under attack, they will return fire. It is only natural that there would be some casualties’. ÌýThe killings or ‘natural casualties’ were always justified in the name of muktijuddher chetona (spirits of ‘71) by labelling the dead as enemies of the country — ‘third force,’ ‘razakar,’ BNP, Jamat, or Shibir.

The bodies of the enemy had been the instrument of the government for a long time, through which they exhibited excesses of violence and intimidated their targets. Humiliation of the dead bodies of people has also long functioned as a tool to alienate the victims from their social context and reduce them to mere corpses. On July 19, a 14-year-old boy was killed in Mohakhali by a police officer who was kicking him to check whether he was alive. The body that was once showered with the love of the dear ones lay on the ground, disgraced by the insult and humiliation that continued even after his last breath. The government deployed violence against the dead and, through them, against the living.

However, the most enduring form of necroviolence has happened in the context of the complete destruction and disappearance of corpses or the failure to identify bodies. The disappearance of the bodies not only has prevented the dead from receiving a ‘proper’ burial but also has granted the perpetrators of violence plausible deniability. The erasure of bodies has robbed the dead of voice and agency. We know that 21 bullet-ridden bodies, including that of a child, were buried as ‘unclaimed’ by Anjuman Mufidul Islam. However, we will never be able to fathom the ceaseless search for their loved ones by their families, who will remain stuck between the worlds of life and death until the end. They will be haunted by the ‘ambiguous loss’ (from Pauline Boss), which will freeze their grief in a void forever and render closure impossible.

But what the government failed to understand was that nothing vanishes utterly, leaving no trace. Each dead person has carried the story of their death in their own body. The cracked skulls, punctured ribs, and shattered backbones have revealed the stories of necropolitics that have turned our country into a land of open graves. Ordinary people knew that to fight against the ‘memory-killing’ strategies of the AL regime, they needed to keep those stories alive. They started to collect stories of death. Internet lockdowns and the fear of being killed or arrested did not stop them from recording and sharing the stories of broken bones, broken hearts, and broken lives. The stories inscribed in the bones enabled the living to envision their lives not just as they are but as they should be or might become. People, therefore, fought hard until a new dawn arose in Bangladesh.

But this new beginning has now turned into a precarious reality, marked by sad episodes of looting, vandalism, attacks on minorities, and the killing of police, members of the Awami League, and their families in the name of ‘revenge’ or ‘justice.’ In this apparent post-totalitarian regime, we are witnessing humanness being differentially allocated, with a boundary between those rendered properly human (Muslim Bengalis not affiliated with the AL) and those considered disposable life (police, AL members, minority communities). This ‘logic of dispossession’ (from Judith Butler) is clearly an instrument of necropower that excludes subjects by eviscerating the conditions for life and humanity. In his speech, the chief of army staff, General Waker-Uz-Zaman claimed, ‘I am taking all the responsibilities — the safety of your life and properties.’ However, he appears to have failed to shield minorities from the fear of violence. He failed to protect the six children who were burned alive in their own house, the house of former councillor Shah Alam. Probably, their mother is asking the same question as Turab’s mother: ‘Why have they killed my sons?’ The question is, are we ready to hear her?

The task of undoing necropolitics in Bangladesh is a tall order because every killing is still a reinforcement and repetition of necropower. Yet each repetition is a singularity, distinct from the previous action and the next.

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ÌýAanmona Priyadarshini is a writer and visiting lecturer at Southern Methodist University, Texas.