The State's Role in Preventing Political Violence and Safeguarding Human Rights a Bangladeshi Perspective

Bangladesh still has to grapple with endemic political violence that undermines pro-democratic government, the jurisdiction of the rule of law and the safeguarding of human rights. Electoral conflicts, street riots, extrajudicial executions, arbitrary arrests, and the crackdown on political opposition translate the phenomenon into reality and demonstrate symptoms and causes of weaknesses in the system of governance. With the twofold task of preventing any form of political violence, yet keeping the essential freedoms intact, the state has manifested some institutional weaknesses, deep-rooted corruption, and intolerance of political dimensions that help in hindering the delivery of the custodial roles. This critical discussion of the paradox, based on secondary sources (academic literature, reports, and human rights reports), is presented in the current paper. Various dimensions are being analyzed as interconnected and mostly related to the lack of governance allowing violence as a political tool, the presence of high impunity levels inside law-enforcement agencies, the discriminatory processes related to religious and ethnic minority groups, the use of gender as a predictive factor of violence, and the influence of religious extremism on social stability. Laws and international agreements are in place, but the execution is not following a consistent pattern as it will be affected by politics most of the times. Case studies depict how civil-society organizations and international actors played the role of buttressing the reform, which also demonized state prosecution on their part. The results show that efforts are made at isolated institutional reforms that are often piecemeal and politically inclined because they are not enforced to ensure that the culture of impunity does not exist. Violence is political and systematic in that it is a structural issue that needs to be looked at as a systemic problem. Another area that the paper finds lacking is the evaluation of its proactive abilities, role of state institutions in rebuking the use of power in instances where the marginalized groups are involved. In this way, the paper concludes that effective improvement requires far-reaching changes to the law, political neutrality of the police, real political will, and prolonged collaboration of state and civil society with the international actors. Without such action, political violence and human-rights violations will continue to be part of the status quo, which will not only affect the future of democracy in Bangladesh as far as peace and social justice are concerned.