Mobs and Megaprojects

Drawing on the case study of a river bridge in Bangladesh, this article shows how and why linguistic circulation is indispensable to infrastructural populism that relies primarily on spectacular visibility. The focus here is the Padma Bridge, named after the river it spans, which was inaugurated by Sheikh Hasina amid much fanfare in 2022. Its emergence as, what I call, “populist infrastructure” dates back more than a decade. After the World Bank voiced its concern over corruption and decided to withdraw funding in 2013, the Canadian Supreme Court sided with the individuals sued by the World Bank who were suspected of bribing Bangladesh government officials. The Supreme Court dismissed the evidence of corruption as rumor and hearsay. In 2019, multiple people in Bangladesh were killed in mob violence based on a rumor that the Padma Bridge needed children’s heads for timely completion and that child kidnappers were out to capture children as sacrificial offerings. Focusing on the different iterations of “the people” that were activated around the bridge, this article attends to the mob as a fugitive political formation that comes together through language and realizes, but also disrupts, the promise of postcolonial populism.