An uncountable number of innocent people have been jailed during this government’s time … Do you understand? This is the situation of the government policy. This is why those […] who do opposition politics are vengeful on a deadly scale. [… ] 10 days, 12 days, 15 days, one month, two months, this has become very normal for us. They give us so many false cases (mithyā māmlā) that I have to go to court to present myself at least five days a month. There are no real grounds for the cases against me. They were given as a form of harassment. You will have difficulties finding any person in my party who has no case against them. They might even face more cases.
Badrul Imam, February 2022
Among the various forms of political repression, imprisonment based on “false cases” (mithyā māmlā) is a common form of harassment aimed at weakening the opposition in Bangladesh. False accusations are by no means limited to political cases—legal cases and imprisonment resulting from fake accusations are fairly common across the board—yet, false cases against the political opposition are particularly visible because they frequently occur before elections. Opposition politicians are typically charged with arson, rioting, vandalism, attacking police, and/or throwing Molotov cocktails. Although many politicians are, or were in the past, indeed involved in such violent acts, many of the accusations in such cases can easily be proven false. Most prominently referenced in newspaper and everyday conversations are cases in which people who have been dead for several years, or politicians who have long lived abroad, have been indicted for recent violent acts. In other instances, a long list of politicians might be accused of setting a bus on fire and causing it to explode even though no such crime took place at the time and place detailed in the legal case. These “baseless” cases are commonly referred to as bhūt māmlā (“ghost cases”) or gāẏēbi māmlā (which might be translated as “evaporating case”). Another common form of false case involves adding people to the list of accused in cases of actual (political) crimes.
Usually, false accusations do not result in guilty verdicts and thus legal punishment. However, they are a form of harassment that adversely affects opposition politicians, not only because of the potential imprisonment but also because of the time and money that goes into dealing with them, as Badrul Imam highlights in the above quote. People on bail or with running cases against them must present themselves regularly, often once a month (per case), to the courts. In extreme cases, this means that politicians may have to attend court nearly every day, as was the case for BNP’s joint secretary general Habib Un Nabi Khan, who had 450 simultaneous cases against him in September 2023 (Asaduzzaman 2023).

Piles of case files for ongoing cases are stored in the courtrooms, a visual reminder of the mass of pending cases. Photo by the author.
Playing the Game
Despite taking a strong stance against false cases and highlighting them as a problem of current governance in Bangladesh, Badrul Imam seems to play down, arguably even mock, his own experience with imprisonment. “It was only 20 days. You know, I expected it to last much longer. […] It was not a bad time. I managed to get some time for myself at least. Did you know, the prison has a library? So, I finally got to read some good books during my stay,” Badrul joked. In his narrative, his imprisonment was not only surprisingly short but also kind of enjoyable, not something that deterred him from politics. Instead, as supporters of the Jamaat-e-Islami they had become used to being arrested, Badrul jokingly told me. Imprisonment was only problematic if one was guilty, or if it happened unexpectedly, he told me. “Even the guards understand that we are innocent and that there are political reasons.” Badrul’s light-hearted attitude towards his imprisonment was far from exceptional. Imprisonment is to some extent normalized as a part of what it means to be in opposition under the current repressive political climate.
Yet, politically motivated false accusations are by no means new phenomena. Indeed, many Awami League politicians recall how they spent extended periods in hiding or faced imprisonment due to “false” legal cases while their party was in opposition. Interestingly, they also often narrate these past experiences in a light-hearted and matter-of-fact fashion; it seems that they view imprisonment and false cases as an expected part of the political game. According to some, it might even have advantages to face such legal harassment: political imprisonment serves as valuable symbolic capital within one’s party networks because it proves one’s loyalty and willingness to sacrifice. It may thus potentially translate into desired positions in one’s political future (see also Kuttig and Suykens 2020).
Despite and Because of the Odds
Badrul Imam had been a leading figure of the Bangladesh Islami Chatro Shibir, the student organization of Jamaat-e-Islami, during the peak of political polarization in 2013. At that time, violent clashes between the student wing of the ruling Awami League and different student wings of opposition parties were extremely frequent, resulting in the deaths of at least 765 persons and leaving more than 30,000 wounded (Suykens and Islam 2015). Since then, the situation has changed tremendously. The scheduled election at the end of 2013, which the main opposition boycotted, resulted in a strong victory for the re-elected Awami League, but it also sparked fears about Bangladesh’s democratic future in the face of increasingly severe repression of oppositional voices. Subsequently, several leaders of the Jamaat-e-Islami were sentenced in the war crimes tribunal for crimes committed during the liberation war in 1971. In addition, the supreme court ruled that the party’s charter was not in accordance with the secular constitution of the country and banned it from participation in elections. The party had to change its strategy and, in a phrasing commonly heard in Bangladesh, “it went underground.” Though not necessarily operating fully in hiding, its activities and activists became less visible and open protests were rare. Yet, while many activists of the Jamaat, Shibir, and other opposition parties faced severe repression and forms of harassment that adversely affected their lives, many people continue to support their party despite, or possibly because of, these odds.
When Badrul Imam was arrested, he had already left active student politics and started a “professional” working life as a hospital manager. He remained, however, strongly attached to his party, not least through his job. His hospital is widely considered to informally belong to the Jamaat-e-Islami, and its employees are mostly party members. Arguably, his political reputation rather than his academic background as a graduate in anthropology had secured him such a respectable job. Consequently, when he was arrested at his office, he did not have trouble with his employer. Moreover, Badrul attributes the swift granting of bail to the supportive party network and an excellent lawyer who worked for him free of charge. While he had to spend “only” 10,000–12,000 Taka (100–120 Euro) to resolve the issue, many party members are less fortunate.
While the Jamaat-e-Islami has systematically set up networks of lawyers who deal with their member’s political cases and spends substantial party funds (some claim 20% of their budget!) on this “legal aid,” supporters of other parties, such as the BNP, must also deal with the often-substantial financial burdens of dealing with these cases. This is a significant reason why many opposition politicians have left the country in recent years.
And yet, it seems that false cases not only work as a means of repression, nor do they only cause despair in their targets. One could interpret Badrul Imam’s narration of his imprisonment as an attitude of despite, an expressive light-heartedness that reveals his defiance of repressive structures. Instead of cowing political opponents, false cases and imprisonment have thus had the effect of producing a hardened, affectively revived opposition because, as Badrul says, people become “vengeful on a deadly scale.” Because of the repression that people experience, they become even more committed to their respective party and the opposition to the ruling coalition. At the same time, imprisonment has become a normalized part of politics, and something that can even be potentially transformed into symbolic capital. At the same time, the act of dealing with these false cases reinforces structures and experiences of support and solidarity within the party. Imprisonment thus served at once to repress and weaken the opposition and to revive it through a reinforcement of the affective attachment to one’s party.
Badrul Imam, a member of the Jamaat-e-Islami and former leader in the party’s student wing, is an outspoken critic of false cases and repression through imprisonment. Yet, interestingly, when he recalls his own imprisonment, he seems amused and jokingly recalls the prison library. Further below, I explore how many politicians think of political imprisonment both as something quite normal and expectable and as something highly problematic and outrageous arguing that these divergent interpretations are not necessarily contradictory. When Badrul Imam normalizes his imprisonment by talking positively about the prison’s library, his statements are neither proof of a passive acceptance nor a heroic form of rebellion. Instead, they reveal that his interpretations and actions, as is the case for various modes of living in the despite, are characterized by an “both/and” rather than “either/or” logic (Lambek 2015, 59).

Prisoners and people on bail must present themselves regularly to the court. Police buses thus transport prisoners to the court every day. Court attendance days are often also a welcome opportunity to meet family and friends. Photo by the author.
Living in the Mode of Despite: Both/And
One could interpret Badrul Imam’s narration of his imprisonment as an attitude (or mood) of despite, a defiance of the repressive structures that reveals itself through his light-hearted narrative. Yet, based on what I have discussed above, one can easily see that the situation is more complex. The “light-hearted” narratives of many politicians are full of ambivalence and contradictions: politicians are vengeful against the ruling party but also understand political imprisonment as a normal part of the political game, as “how things are.” Their statements often display both an attitude of defiance as well as a deep-seated acceptance of “the rules of the game” that requires taking a pragmatic approach. To be sure, a false case can sometimes be a disaster that ruins a person’s life, but often it is just one more challenge that party politicians must tackle, both seriously and playfully. When Badrul mocks his imprisonment, he is neither naïve about the politics of imprisonment nor is he, in my understanding, actively resisting it through defiance. Instead, he simply continues his life and politics despite, and arguably because of, the existing odds.
References
Asaduzzaman 2023. “BNP leader wake up and rush to court every day” Prothom Alo, published on 20 September 2023, accessed on 15 June 2024.
Kuttig, Julian, and Bert Suykens. 2020. “How to Be Visible in Student Politics: Performativity and the Digital Public Space in Bangladesh.” The Journal of Asian Studies 79 (3): 707–38.
Lambek, Michael. 2015. “Both/And.” In What is Existential Anthropology?, edited by Michael Jackson and Albert Piette, 58–83. New York: Routledge.
Suykens, Bert, and Aynul Islam. 2015. “The Distribution of Political Violence in Bangladesh.” Conflict Research Group. Ghent, Belgium.
Mascha Schulz is a Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany, whose research focuses on politics, (non)religion, and law in Bangladesh. Her recent publications include the edited volume “Global Sceptical Publics: From Non-religious Print Media to ‘Digital Atheism’” (UCL Press, 2022, co-edited with Jacob Copeman) and the special section “The Anthropology of Nonreligion” in Religion & Society (2023, co-edited with Stefan Binder).
Cite as: Schulz, Mascha. 2024. “The prison has a library”. In “Living in a Mode of Despite”, edited by Rishabh Raghavan, Mascha Schulz, and Julia Vorhölter, American Ethnologist website, 3 October 2024. [https://americanethnologist.org/online-content/collections/living-in-a-mode-of-despite/the-prison-has-a-library-by-mascha-schulz/]