Guest contributor
Shafiur Rahman
Bangladesh’s election is being fought over jobs, wages, the cost of living, democracy, and the future of the state after years of authoritarian decay. Yet the country’s most protracted and internationalised crisis, the presence of more than one million Rohingya refugees, remains politically orphaned.
Absent from party manifestos, it is increasingly treated as a security problem to be managed after the vote. That is the first contradiction. While the Rohingya crisis is treated as an existential national burden, it is not a subject of democratic debate. Politicians prefer it as a background anxiety, useful for signalling resolve but too risky for substantive policy.
While public rhetoric emphasises “voluntary, safe, and dignified return,” the state’s default mode is containment – restricting movement, work, education, and representation. This is paired with periodic bursts of “repatriation momentum” that generate headlines without changing conditions in Myanmar.
Pre-election
Bangladesh’s official line has barely changed across governments. It is “the only solution is repatriation.” That line is repeated so often that it now functions like a substitute for policy.
When the Chief Adviser tells UNHCR that the problem began in Myanmar and must be resolved in Myanmar, he is stating a simple truth. But the state’s daily governance of Rohingya life does not follow from that truth.
Bangladesh does not treat the Rohingya as rights-bearing refugees. It treats them as a surplus population – too politically toxic to integrate, too strategically useful to let go. They are contained through restrictions and surveillance.
They are also exploited as cheap informal labour, as justification for humanitarian flows, and as diplomatic currency in regional bargaining.
In this framework, “repatriation” becomes less a policy goal than a holding narrative. Bangladesh invokes “humanity” when it asks the international community to treat the Rohingya as refugees deserving sustained support.
Yet, when addressing its own public, it governs the camps as a legally grey zone where normal rights and normal accountability do not apply.
It is like a permanent state of emergency, run through ad-hoc rules, security orders, and administrative restrictions rather than law, rights, or democratic scrutiny. The Rohingya became a managed population, contained and kept dependent.
This balancing act is not neutral. It manufactures a condition of limbo in which refugees are denied the very capabilities – education, legal mobility, and legitimate work – that would actually reduce the crime and radicalisation risks Bangladesh says it fears.
Those risks are the predictable result of how the camps are governed. Bangladesh then points to the dangers it has helped create as justification for tighter control.
Post-election security direction
Recent policy seminars point to a post-election shift towards a high-powered security commission under the Prime Minister, backed by stronger military deployment in the south-east and talk of “coercive leverage.”
The Rohingya question is being pulled out of civilian debate and placed more firmly in the hands of the security establishment. In Bangladesh’s political grammar, a “special commission” signals centralisation and insulation from scrutiny.
It is a mandate to manage outcomes, not expand rights. The current High Representative for Rohingya also holds the national security portfolio, a telling alignment that shows where the state already locates this issue.
Here is the second contradiction. As Bangladesh seeks democratic renewal, its Rohingya policy moves in the opposite direction – toward “exceptional governance” and securitised command.
‘Rakhine Reconstruction’
Alongside the securitised framing sits a more donor-friendly story, the “Rakhine Reconstruction Plan,” pitched as a mini-Marshall Plan built on public–private partnerships across agriculture, health, education, energy, infrastructure, and industry.
The pitch is simple – make repatriation a development package and give whoever controls Rakhine a reason to sign on.
This is the third contradiction. A technocratic promise is being asked to solve a political crime. Rakhine needs rebuilding, but repatriation is not an engineering problem. The Rohingya were expelled through deliberate exclusion enforced by state violence, not through underdevelopment.
Without enforceable guarantees, including citizenship, and freedom of movement, land and property rights, “reconstruction” becomes an alibi for forced removal. It can make return look “practical” while leaving the structure of exclusion intact.
Development money can rebuild buildings. It cannot, by itself, rebuild a political community that a state refuses to recognise.
Hard power
Bangladesh’s security-policy class increasingly argues that diplomacy has failed and that “hard power” is now needed. But hard power against whom, and to what end? The root cause lies across the border.
Bangladesh cannot force the Rohingya to be safe in Myanmar. It can only pressure them to move, and that is not the same as a solution.
This is the fourth contradiction. “Hard power” rhetoric is rising just as the map of Rakhine has fractured and Bangladesh’s leverage over the real power-holders there has become uncertain.
The junta still denies atrocities, while the Arakan Army now controls large parts of the territory from which Rohingya were expelled.
Dhaka still talks as if the old bilateral script of verified lists and pilot returns will deliver returns, even as armed conflict and fragmented authority make any unprotected “return” look more like a trap than a solution.
In that setting, “capabilities” talk easily becomes a domestic performance – show toughness at home, stage “progress” abroad, and shift the blame for failure onto refugees, NGOs, or Myanmar.
Bangladesh’s Rohingya policy is not only domestic politics; it is also regional bargaining. China and India both want influence in Bangladesh, and both care about what happens in Rakhine for hard, strategic reasons.
That is another reason why coercive repatriation pressure is so dangerous. It can be sold as “regional stabilisation” even when nothing has changed for the Rohingya except the direction of force. The core political fact remains untouched – a people still denied the rights that make repatriation real.
Aid cuts
The next contradiction sits inside the humanitarian landscape. Funding is collapsing, services are thinning, and the camps are becoming more desperate.
Bangladesh condemns donor fatigue as unjust, and it is. It argues that the world is abandoning the Rohingya and shifting the burden unfairly, yet it simultaneously turns that very scarcity into a tool of pressure.
That is why “repatriation after the election” should worry observers. The likely scenario is not mass removal, but a tightly managed “pilot” branded as voluntary, enough movement to generate headlines, reassure donors, and demonstrate resolve. All without building a rights framework.
Bangladesh’s repatriation politics has also developed a numbers theatre – verified lists, eligible counts, pilot batches, headline-ready statistics. These numbers perform sovereignty. They suggest administrative control. They even imply Myanmar is cooperating.
They allow Dhaka to argue: “We are ready; the obstacle is elsewhere.”
But numbers without rights are not progressing. They are paperwork. The only credible test of repatriation is whether returnees get rights.
The political uses of repatriation
The election matters not because Rohingya policy has been debated – it hasn’t – but because repatriation functions as a political promise. BNP figures cite past returns as “successes” and frame political will as the missing ingredient.
But those repatriations were deeply flawed. They were coercive and ultimately unsustainable. The framing defines success by speed and numbers, not by rights, safety, or voluntariness, standards their own returns failed disastrously to meet.
Meanwhile, Islamist and nationalist voices flirt with “bold” fixes – safe zones, corridors, territorial gambits – that play well domestically but are regionally dangerous and disconnected from reality.
Calls for a “unity charter” on Rohingya policy are marketed as maturity, but unity can also foreclose debate. It risks locking in containment at home and performance abroad as bipartisan consensus.
If Bangladesh seeks democratic renewal, it cannot keep its largest refugee crisis outside democratic speech. Democracies decay not just through stolen elections, but when entire domains of life are sealed off from scrutiny.
What a serious policy would look like
Bangladesh needs to stop pretending that slogans are safeguards. “Voluntary, safe, dignified” is not a policy; it is a standard. Nor is it an incantation that will magically create these conditions in Myanmar. Make it enforceable and publish conditions, monitoring mechanisms, and red lines.
A serious post-election Rohingya policy would begin with honesty – about leverage, about Myanmar’s changing reality, and about Bangladesh’s own contradictions. Bangladesh’s real choice after the election is not between “go slow” and “go hard”. It is between governance by coercion and governance by law.
If the next government chooses coercion, it may achieve short-term optics – a pilot return, a headline, a sense of progress. But it will also deepen the very dynamics that have already trapped the Rohingya in repeated cycles of flight – denial, exclusion, and forced repatriation masquerading as a solution.
And if Bangladesh chooses law, protection at home and rights-based diplomacy abroad, it will still face an unfair burden and an indifferent world.
But it will at least stop reproducing the contradiction that now defines its approach: demanding the Rohingya be treated as human beings internationally, while treating them at home as a population to be fenced in, sealed off, and policed.
Shafiur Rahman is a journalist and documentary maker. He writes the Rohingya Refugee News newsletter.
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