Bangladesh’s rulers have a habit of renaming institutions when they become politically radioactive. Streets are renamed after coups, and laws after public outrage. Practice is usually useless.
Now, the same survival instinct is being applied to the Rapid Action Battalion (RAB), the paramilitary force that for two decades served as the main enforcement arm of Bangladeshi authoritarianism.
Officials insist a new legal framework and a new table could rehabilitate the force. They are wrong. The problem with RAB was never the branding. It was the philosophy of the state that armed it.
The RAB emerged in 2004 under a Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) coalition government led by Khaleda Zia. Born out of public panic over a wave of violent crime and Islamist militancy in the east, it was sold as a necessary tool for a weak state.
In narrow tactical terms, it worked. The operations against the militant group Jama’atul Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB) won praise at home and abroad. However, Zia’s government made a Faustian bargain of efficiency for accountability.
Under her watch, RAB “crossfires” — the term is a transparent euphemism for extrajudicial executions — became normalized.
According to human rights observers, more than 350 people were killed in these organized gun battles during the BNP’s tenure until 2006. Like many elite units born in panic, the RAB quickly transformed from a counter-terrorism squad into a parallel coercive structure operating in the gray area between military power and civilian life.
This ambiguity was by design. Although nominally placed under the Ministry of Home Affairs, the RAB was built by amending the Armed Police Battalion Act to allow the deployment of personnel from the military and intelligence services.
Soldiers from the Army, Navy and Air Force entered civilian law enforcement without giving up their martial culture. This was original sin. Armies are trained to neutralize enemies; the police are trained to manage citizens under constitutional restraint.
When Sheikh Hasina and her Awami League took power in 2009, they perfected the machinery. During her 15-year rule, RAB ceased to be a crime-fighting unit and became a sophisticated apparatus for political survival.
Under the guise of a “war on drugs” and on terrorism, the force systematically targeted the political opposition, journalists, dissidents and even random people from civil society.
The statistics of the Hasina era are incredibly accurate. Between 2009 and her overthrow in August 2024, human rights groups documented over 600 enforced disappearances and more than 2,500 extrajudicial killings by security forces.
RAB was the main executor. A terrifying new vocabulary has entered the Bangladeshi lexicon. The main one was Aynagar (“House of Mirrors”), a network of black military and paramilitary clandestine sites where dissidents were subjected to prolonged isolation and confinement, sometimes for years, completely cut off from the legal system.
The force operated with absolute impunity until December 2021, when the United States imposed Global Magnitsky sanctions on RAB and six of its top commanders, including Benazir Ahmed, former RAB chief and later Inspector General of Police.
The subsequent shift exposed the central myth of Dhaka’s security discourse: that such abuses were tragic necessities of national security. After the sanctions, extrajudicial killings and disappearances fell sharply overnight.
The state always had the ability to restrain force. It simply chose not to until outside pressure changed the cost-benefit calculus.
This is why cosmetic reforms inspire little confidence. Bangladesh’s current Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) government again approaches the issue administratively rather than structurally, debating the new ordinances while avoiding the fundamental question: Should a military-trained institution be involved in civilian governance at all?
The risk is compounded because Bangladesh’s military structure is a sprawling corporate conglomerate. Military-related enterprises dominate banking, insurance, construction and telecommunications.
This union of coercive authority and economic interest creates a combustible political economy. When security-related networks are embedded across civilian sectors, the temptation to influence civilian politics becomes irresistible.
The RAB became the open instrument through which this institutional creep took place.
The fall of Sheikh Hasina’s autocratic and repressive regime in 2024 exposed the ultimate failure of security-heavy governance. The combined terror of the police, RAB and military intelligence could successfully suppress peaceful dissent, but proved unable to manage mass popular uprisings without escalating the violence to a catastrophic and ultimately fatal scale. Such systems stand out for fear, not legitimacy.
They confuse fear with stability until the two collapse together.
Bangladesh now faces a choice familiar to many post-authoritarian states. It can continue to elaborate the instruments of coercion while claiming that they are consistent with democratic accountability, or it can rebuild civilian policing around transparency and genuine legal restraint.
The first option is easier. It also guarantees returns. A renamed RAB may temporarily appease foreign diplomats, but institutions don’t change because governments repaint their logos.
Until Bangladesh grapples with the militarization of its internal governance, blackface culture will survive any renaming exercise intact.
Faisal Mahmud is a journalist based in Dhaka
