By Khandaker A. Raquib
This morning’s contempt hearing at the International Crimes Tribunal unfolded less like a routine legal proceeding and more like an ethnographic window into how political actors perform law in moments of deep transition. When BNP senior leader Fazlur Rahman arrived at the court, visibly tense but surrounded by nearly two dozen party lawyers, he brought with him not only a legal case, but an entire political habitus. They were afraid of the decision on the contempt of court order. The choreography of entry, the clustering of lawyers, the whispered reassurances: all these signaled what Kamari Clarke might call an affective jurisprudence, where fear, anticipation, and loyalty saturate the very space of legality.
Inside the courtroom, the script shifted. After calling the item number 1 for hearing, Prosecutor Tamim read out the allegations that Fazlur’s public declaration, “আমি এই কোর্ট মানিনা”, and “it does not have any authority to prosecute the cases of July atrocities, because it was created to prosecute the war criminals of 1971”, were circulated widely in the media, stripped of context and weaponized as an affront to judicial sovereignty. He also read out the law that the court can declare a maximum one-year sentence in principle, heightening the room’s tension. Yet when Fazlur’s turn came, the performance mutated: he froze halfway to the dais, standing awkwardly between prosecution and defense, suspended at the very heart of the adversarial divide. The spatial metaphor could not have been sharper; here stood a political actor caught between competing moral claims on justice.
What followed was an almost dramaturgical layering of wartime narratives. Defense counsel Zainul Abedin invoked Fazlur’s identity as a muktijoddha, as if liberation credentials could be mobilized as moral capital to counteract legal culpability. He requested the court to allow him be seated. Court allowed, and then they want to hear from Fazur Rahman directly. Coming up to the dais, Fazlur said, “Honourable Judge, I am a Muktijuddha, and after God, I respect this court above all.” The judge then asked him, “Will you repeat this kind of act in the future?” When he attempted to respond, Member-1 of the bench intervened and allowed his lawyer to speak on his behalf. Zainul Abedin then gave the floor to Ruhul Quddus to argue for him. Ruhul Quddus said that he did not intend to make such a statement, it was a slip of the tongue. The media, he argued, twists words and drags out meanings from nowhere. He emphasized that the accused is a respected muktijuddha and that he is offering an unconditional apology.
Then Zainul Abedin began again, narrating how Fazlur is a Muktijuddha, describing his own (zainul’s) wartime suffering, even recounting how, during the Liberation War, he had survived by hiding for days in a large taro field. Then came the irony, the judge himself joined in, recounting his own childhood role during the war, carrying food to Muktijuddha, recalling family members who fought. In that moment, the courtroom dissolved into what Foucault would call a regime of truth, where historical memory becomes a currency for legitimacy, and the law is momentarily displaced by affective genealogies of sacrifice.
This exchange reveals something crucial about transitional justice in Bangladesh, despite claims of neutrality and abstraction, courts remain deeply entangled in the moral economy of liberation. The judge, positioned as the embodiment of dispassionate reason, instead participated in a shared narrative of national suffering. This is not mere sentimentality; it is a structural condition. As legal anthropologists like Didier Fassin mentioned, state actors often rely on ethical self-narration to authorize their decisions. Here, war memory became a justificatory apparatus through which both judge and accused negotiated the boundaries of forgiveness.
Ultimately, Fazlur’s unconditional apology was accepted, and the hearing ended. But it was the exit choreography that crystallized the surrealism of the moment. As BNP’s senior lawyers descended the stairs, many of whom are preparing themselves for future parliamentary elections, another line ascended: seventeen high-ranking leaders, bureaucrats, and judges from the ousted Awami League government, now defendants in their own cases. Two lines on the same staircase, moving in opposite directions, each avoiding direct eye contact yet fully aware of their mirrored predicament.
This fleeting spatial encounter was the purest ethnographic moment of the day. A stairwell became a diagram of Bangladesh’s cyclical political violence: today’s accusers becoming tomorrow’s accused; yesterday’s sovereigns walking silently past the newly empowered. The scene evoked me to think about the “eventfulness of the ordinary”, where everyday gestures, like climbing stairs, reveal profound truths about how states collapse and recombine. In that narrow stairwell, power appeared not as a stable possession but as shifting, reversible, fragile. Each side looked down, not out of shame, but out of recognition. They were witnessing the recursive nature of Bangladeshi lawfare, the courtroom as both a site of justice and a theater of political survival.
The hearing ended with no dramatic confrontation, no eruption of anger. Instead, it ended with the quiet, uneasy acknowledgment that everyone is implicated. The surreal choreography of ascending and descending bodies offered a final reminder, in Bangladesh’s transitional moment, that law is not merely adjudicated, it is also performed, remembered, feared, and negotiated, often on the same staircase.
