Sifat Abdullah is twenty, a student at Adamjee Cantonment College, and until the first week of September nobody outside his corner of Gazipur had any reason to know his name. A dispute over roughly ten thousand taka in electricity charges ended with him filming himself, cursing the prime minister and the government in language that was crude and undisciplined. By Friday afternoon he was in a Gazipur courtroom, charged not with public nuisance or defamation but under the Anti-Terrorism Act, 2009, the statute this country built for bombers, the financiers of political killing, and those supporting or belonging to banned organizations. The interesting question is not really what Sifat said. It is how a law engineered for one thing so reliably ends up switched on for another.
That was, in fact, the warning attached to this law from close to the beginning. The Anti-Terrorism Act was passed by parliament in February 2009, under the Awami League-led grand alliance government that had just taken office, and it did not take long for rights bodies to object to how loosely it was written. Human rights organization Odhikar has called repeatedly for the Act’s repeal, arguing that its language was broad enough to be turned against the government’s political opponents rather than against terrorists, a criticism that has followed the law through every government that has since wielded it. When parliament amended the Act in 2012 to add the death penalty for financing terrorism, Odhikar and the International Federation for Human Rights warned jointly that retaining such a vague and broadly applicable definition of “terrorist activities” made the law even more vulnerable to abuse. A United Nations review of counter-terrorism legislation later flagged the same phrase, the broad definition of “terrorist act,” as capable of lending itself to arbitrary and abusive implementation, and noted specific concern that such laws were being used to stifle the speech of journalists and human rights defenders. None of this is retrospective wisdom applied after the fact. It was said while the ink was still wet, and largely ignored.
Section 6 of the Act, the definition everyone keeps returning to, requires an act intended to cause death or grievous harm, or destruction meant to intimidate the public or compel a government, generally through explosives, firearms, or comparable instruments of violence. Sifat’s video, whatever else it was, was not that. The rights group HRSS made this argument directly in its statement on the case: that calling something a “terrorist act” requires it to meet the law’s own defined elements, not merely to have embarrassed someone with the authority to file a case. Gazipur police have leaned on a second, separate claim instead. The officer in charge of Gasha police station, Golam Rabbani, told reporters that investigators are examining Sifat’s social media posts, his alleged political contacts, and specifically his suspected links to the banned Awami League, treating the electricity-bill outburst as one thread in a wider anti-state inquiry rather than the whole of it. There is a bitter irony sitting inside that particular accusation: a law drafted under an Awami League government in 2009 is now being used to investigate a young man for suspected loyalty to that same, now-outlawed party. The instrument has not changed hands so much as the target has rotated through it.
Nor is Sifat’s case an outlier this year. In April, a content creator named Hasan Nasim found himself arrested under the Cyber Security Ordinance for allegedly spreading misleading information about the Chief Whip; protesters insisted his real offence was sharing a cartoon. Azizul Hoque, a month earlier, was jailed under Section 54 of the Criminal Procedure Code over someone else’s unflattering post about the prime minister, while in Bhola a woman named Bibi Sawda was held under the same provision until public attention secured her release. Sheikh Tasnim Afroz Eme, a former Dhaka University hall union vice-president, had it worst of all: close to two months inside Kashimpur prison, arrested under this very Anti-Terrorism Act for playing a recording of a historic 7 March speech through a rickshaw’s loudspeaker, before the High Court finally granted her bail in May. Different statutes, different magistrates, the same reflex — a citizen speaks out and ends up in jail.
The reflex itself has a longer paper trail than any of these individual cases. Section 57 of the old ICT Act criminalised online speech so broadly, and so often, that its own notoriety eventually forced its retirement. The Digital Security Act took its place in 2018 and, by the outgoing government’s own count given to parliament, had produced more than seven thousand cases before the students who toppled that government in 2024 ever got near it. The Awami League itself replaced the DSA with a Cyber Security Act in September 2023, less than a year before its own fall, a rebrand that changed little beyond the name on the cover. The interim government then repealed that Act in turn, issuing a Cyber Security Ordinance in 2025 that looked, briefly, like the closing of a chapter. What this year suggests, watching four different laws stretched around four different complaints, is that the chapter never quite closed. It only ever changed authors.
People who lived through the uprising that produced the current government are the ones naming this most plainly. Where Nur Khan, a former member of the Bangladesh Human Rights Commission, hears in these arrests a message that no one may speak against whoever is steering the state — precisely the posture of the government that July’s movement deposed — the rights worker Rezaur Rahman Lenin sees something older still: a restriction on online speech running continuously for a decade and a half, indifferent to which flag happens to be flying over it. Barrister Sara Hossain frames it more starkly, in the language of law rather than politics: arrests made without any allegation of direct harm or threat are not poor practice but a plain violation of the law and of fundamental rights, and ought to carry consequences for whoever authorised them, not apologies afterwards.
But a statute written to intercept bombs, warned against as too vague within years of its own passage, is now the instrument of choice for an electricity complaint. Sixteen years after Odhikar first raised the alarm, the wiring it warned about is still live, still switching on for the wrong current, and still waiting for someone with the authority to rewrite it rather than simply reach for it.
