Kick a woman, win a garland: the new heroism in Nobel laureate Yunus’s Bangladesh

Sanjoy Kumar Barua

By all accounts, we are living in a golden age of heroism in Bangladesh—though not the kind you might find in dusty epics or UN treaties on human rights.

No, in this brave new republic under Nobel laureate Yunus’s watchful silence, a different kind of valor is celebrated.

It doesn’t involve rescuing lives or speaking truth to power. It involves kicking women.

Yes, that’s right. Strike a woman in broad daylight, preferably on camera, and you don’t just walk free—you ride out to thunderous applause, petals at your feet, and a garland of marigolds around your neck.

Call it patriarchy’s parade. In this surreal theatre of justice, bail is not a legal relief; it is a coronation.

Take young Akash Chowdhury, an islamist hardliner, and a member of Jammat-e-Islami captured on video launching his feet at a female protester. One might assume such barbarism would be met with societal shame.

But lo! The moment he exited jail, he was welcomed like a returning Odysseus.

Garlanded. Photographed.

Flanked by admirers who seemed to believe that gender-based violence is a rite of passage, not a crime.

His crime? Not cowardice.

No, in this Orwellian inversion of morality, his “audacity” made him a national icon—for the wrong nation.

Another paragon of misplaced glory is Nehal Ahmed, lovingly known as Jihad. He, too, emerged from jail last week after allegedly beating two young women at a launch terminal.

He was greeted with a motorcycle cavalcade, as though he’d scored a World Cup goal. It wasn’t justice; it was a jamboree.

Back in March, another accused—Mostafa Asif Arnob, a bookbinder at Dhaka University with known Islamist leanings—was garlanded after securing bail in a case where he allegedly harassed a female student for not wearing a veil.

He was caught on video near the Raju Sculpture, sermonizing about her attire in the name of morality. That footage went viral, not for outrage, but for the remarkable swiftness with which bigotry was rewarded with blossoms.

After getting death and rape threats, I’m shattered. I was traumatised after the incident took place. Now a group of people are threatening me online,said the victim DU student.

What message does this send? Simple: if you are accused of assaulting a woman, fear not.

The state won’t frown. Society won’t shun you.

Instead, some faction of male cheerleaders will dust off their garlands, polish their slogans, and prepare the red carpet.

Your violence will be reframed as virtue. Your criminality, rebranded as courage.

This, of course, is not satire. It only feels like it.

Under the passive reign of Nobel laureate Yunus—a man once revered globally for championing the powerless—the streets of Bangladesh have become performance stages where gender violence is applauded like street theatre.

The irony is monumental. A country that sent microcredit to the poor now sends marigolds to the accused.

Meanwhile, the women—those kicked, slapped, harassed—receive no garlands.

No motorbikes. No statements of sympathy from ministers or moralists. They receive silence. Sometimes threats.

Always suspicion. In this inverted moral universe, survivors must explain what they were wearing, where they were standing, and why they were not invisible.

And let’s not forget the judiciary. These garlanded gladiators are not acquitted. They are on bail.

A procedural allowance, not an exoneration. But in a country where nuance is murdered daily, bail becomes the birth certificate of innocence.

This phenomenon is not merely a grotesque miscarriage of justice—it is the systematic manufacture of impunity.

When society lionizes those who brutalize women, it doesn’t just fail women. It declares war on them.

One might ask: where are the leaders? Where are the feminist firebrands in Parliament? The civil society elders? The Nobel laureate himself?

Their silence is more eloquent than our satire could ever be.

Make no mistake—these garlanded men are not anomalies. They are emblems. Emissaries of a nation spiraling into a moral abyss, where violence is not condemned but consecrated, where justice is not blind but muzzled, and where womanhood is forced to kneel before a fragile masculinity armed with boots and blossoms.

This is not justice—it is a grotesque theatre of Islamist anarchy, where brutality against women is rewarded with marigolds, not morality. A toxic pageant orchestrated by hardliners, whitewashed by cowardice, and endorsed by the deafening silence of Nobel laureate Yunus. In this dystopia, violence is weaponized, sanctified, and paraded as virtue.

When brutality is rewarded and defiance is crushed, the question is no longer whether women are safe. The question is—how long before this silence devours us all?