Paper short abstract:

This paper argues that an ethnographic reading of the Shahbag Movement reveals the existing potential and paradoxes of left politics in Bangladesh.

Paper long abstract:

"#shahbag is nothing but a twitter tag now," tweeted a Bangladeshi man in a Che beret on March 25, 2013, a lament voiced after a month and a half of vibrant protests that had centered at a busy crossroads in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh. The repeated invocations of death in the conversations that I had in and around Shahbag since its eruption in early February is telling particularly because of the movement's core demand of capital punishment for the alleged war criminals on the 1971 war of independence. In many ways, it captures some of the biopolitical pressures of popular politics that a movement such as Shahbag, and the counter-revolutionary forces that it has unleashed in its wake, bring to the surface, in Bangladesh as elsewhere. Tracking what Eric Santner has called, "the vicissitudes of the flesh," the paper explores the many paradoxes that liberal publicity and so-called illiberal politics raise for an anthropological understanding of popular sovereignty in Bangladesh. The paper is based on interviews with a few young activists, particularly left-leaning ones, who have been involved with the movement in various capacities. The tensions around Shabagh, its framing within the Islamist-secular opposition, and the actual performance of its protests bring up some of the tensions within the emerging left. I argue that an ethnographic encounter with Shahbag reveals the existing potential and paradoxes of left politics in Bangladesh.