In the summer of 2024, the streets of Dhaka became one of the most vivid illustrations of a crisis that runs through law enforcement across South Asia: the moment a police force deployed to protect a government loses its claim to protect the public. When Bangladesh's security forces — police, the Rapid Action Battalion (RAB), and intelligence agencies — opened fire on student protesters demanding quota reform in July 2024, killing at least 858 people according to figures confirmed by the Yunus administration, they exposed not an institutional failure of the moment but the accumulated consequence of fifteen years in which the apparatus of state security had been systematically remade into an instrument of political control. The Monsoon Revolution that followed — and the collapse of Sheikh Hasina's government on August 5 — did not resolve the underlying crisis of law enforcement in Bangladesh. It created a new and precarious opening for reform, whose outcome remains contested.
The challenges Bangladesh faces in rebuilding credible law enforcement are significant in their own right. They are also illuminating as a case study of structural pressures that operate — in different forms, at different intensities — across most of South Asia's major nations. Numbeo's 2024 Crime Index ranked Bangladesh at 61.5 out of 100, placing it fourth-highest in Asia behind Afghanistan, Syria, and Yemen — the only South Asian nation in that tier. India scored 44.3, Pakistan 43.7, Sri Lanka 42.1, Nepal 36.9. The gap between Bangladesh's perceived crime environment and its South Asian neighbours reflects the specific consequences of a decade-and-a-half of law enforcement deployed against citizens rather than for them.
Bangladesh: What the Monsoon Revolution Exposed
Human Rights Watch's January 2025 report on security sector reform in Bangladesh documented a pattern of abuses under the Hasina government that stretched far beyond the July-August 2024 crackdown. Over fifteen years, security forces carried out enforced disappearances, extrajudicial killings, arbitrary arrests, surveillance, and torture of critics, opposition members, journalists, and activists. The commission of inquiry established by the Yunus interim government to investigate enforced disappearances had received over 1,850 complaints by August 2025. By October 2025, the commission had collected significant evidence, but investigators told HRW that security force officers were destroying evidence, limiting cooperation, and resisting accountability efforts. Charges were eventually filed against 28 people for alleged involvement in enforced disappearances.
The institutional mechanics of how this system was built are documented in detail. Bangladesh Bank has identified a "central command structure" through which enforced disappearances were coordinated, with Hasina herself and named senior military and police officials identified as overseers. The December 2024 commission report estimated over 3,500 enforced disappearances under the Hasina government. Of 758 examined cases, around 200 people remain missing. The others were eventually produced as formally arrested after periods of unlawful secret detention — suggesting the enforced disappearance system functioned as an unofficial pre-arrest detention infrastructure for political opponents.
The July-August 2024 crackdown was the most concentrated expression of this system. The Bangladesh Army was deployed to control the situation after police stations were attacked by protesters and the force effectively went on strike for their own safety. Forty-four police personnel were killed during the protests, including 24 on August 5 alone, the day Hasina fled. The violence on both sides — state against protesters and retributive violence against police — reflects the depth of the rupture between law enforcement and the population it nominally served.
The Reform Commission's Architecture
The Yunus government's Police Reform Commission, established on October 3, 2024, and chaired by former secretary Safar Raj Hossain, submitted 15 recommendations to the Chief Adviser on January 15, 2025. The recommendations address the structural failures with some specificity. They propose establishing the police commission as an independent statutory or constitutional body — the critical structural question being whether oversight of the police force would be insulated from the political interference that made the pre-2024 system possible. They call for specialised, non-transferable investigation teams, which addresses the practice of using transfers and postings as political tools to reward loyalists and punish independent officers.
The commission recommended empowering the National Human Rights Commission to directly investigate allegations of abuse by law enforcement personnel. It called for a review of RAB — the paramilitary unit that the United States sanctioned in December 2021 over extrajudicial killing allegations — to "reassess its continued relevance." It proposed banning anonymous First Information Reports, ending the media presentation of suspects before conviction, installing glass-walled interrogation rooms, and improving treatment of female detainees. The US Department of Justice's ICITAP programme met with the Bangladesh Police Reform Committee in November 2024, contributing a draft revision of the Bangladesh Police Ordinance developed in partnership with senior police officials.
Implementation has been incomplete. Crime data from the transition period is not encouraging. From August to December 2024, 1,565 murder cases were reported in Bangladesh — a 30 percent increase over the 1,199 cases in the same period of 2023. Mob violence, which the Human Rights Support Society documented at 201 incidents in all of 2024 (the highest in a decade), resulting in 179 deaths and 88 injuries, continued into 2025: at least 30 incidents in the first two months of 2025 alone. The rights group Ain O Salish Kendra documented at least 124 people killed in mob attacks between June and August 2025. Meanwhile, the interim government itself launched "Operation Devil Hunt" in early 2025, arresting nearly 2,000 people — mostly Awami League supporters — in a sweep that HRW characterised as arbitrary detention, raising questions about whether the new government's use of law enforcement had departed sufficiently from the pattern it inherited.
South Asia's Broader Law Enforcement Landscape
Bangladesh's crisis is the most acute current expression of law enforcement challenges that are structurally embedded across the region. Each South Asian nation carries a version of the same tensions: security forces inherited from colonial administration, adapted to post-independence political contexts in which the distinction between the state's security and the ruling party's security was frequently blurred; judicial systems under institutional pressure from the political executive; and policing cultures that prioritise confession-based investigation over forensic evidence-gathering.
India's National Crime Records Bureau reported a crime rate of 445.9 incidents per 100,000 people for 2024, a slight decrease from 2023, but crimes against women increased by 4 percent. India's police-to-population ratio remains below internationally recommended levels in most states, with significant variation in capacity between well-resourced urban forces and under-equipped rural departments. The Supreme Court's judgments on custodial violence, encounter killings, and the use of sedition law have created legal precedents that constrain state power on paper without consistently changing practice on the ground.
Pakistan's law enforcement environment is shaped by the relationship between civilian police structures and the military's parallel intelligence and security apparatus, which Human Rights Watch and other organisations have documented as carrying out enforced disappearances of journalists, activists, and Baloch rights advocates on a sustained basis. The civilian police force operates in a context where political transitions — including the imprisonment of former Prime Minister Imran Khan in 2023-2024 — have involved the use of law enforcement as a political tool in ways that parallel Bangladesh's pre-2024 trajectory.
Sri Lanka's post-civil war law enforcement landscape combines the legacy of conflict-era emergency powers, which concentrated executive authority over security forces and weakened oversight institutions, with growing challenges from drug trafficking networks. Sri Lanka reported over 10,000 economically motivated crimes in the first half of 2025, 329 assaults on police officers in the same period, and over 600 child sexual abuse incidents — statistics that reflect both genuine crime pressure and the strain on a police force operating in a still-recovering post-crisis economy. Sri Lanka's role as a transit hub for heroin flowing from Afghanistan and Pakistan through Indian Ocean maritime routes to European markets adds an organised crime dimension that strains investigative capacity.
Structural Challenges: What Reform Requires
The structural challenges South Asian law enforcement reform faces are not primarily technical. Most reformers in the region know what good policing looks like — community engagement, forensic investigation, independent oversight, politically neutral deployment, constitutional safeguards for detainees. The UNDP's Police Reform Programme in Bangladesh, operating since 2003, has documented these principles for two decades. The obstacles are political rather than informational.
First, political neutrality is existentially threatening to governments accustomed to using police as a tool for managing opposition. Every South Asian country that has attempted police reform has confronted the reality that the executive branch ultimately controls both the legislation that would create independent oversight and the appointments that would staff it. The Bangladesh Police Reform Commission's central recommendation — an independent statutory police commission — would require the government to legislate away its own instrument of control.
Second, the cultural dimension runs deep. Confession-based investigation — the extraction of admissions through custodial pressure rather than evidence-gathering — is embedded in police practice across the region partly because forensic infrastructure is inadequate and partly because it is faster and cheaper than evidence-based prosecution. The US ICITAP mission's emphasis on transitioning Bangladesh from "confession-based to scientifically based investigations" identifies the right target, but building forensic laboratory capacity, training investigators, and changing the incentive structure that currently rewards quick confessions over rigorous cases is a multi-year institutional project.
Third, accountability mechanisms face the structural problem of institutional capture. Bangladesh's National Human Rights Commission, proposed as a direct investigator of law enforcement abuses under the new reforms, was itself weakened under the Hasina government to prevent oversight. Restoring its independence requires not just a statutory mandate but a track record of protected operation — a track record that takes years to establish and can be reversed by a single hostile government.
For Bangladesh in particular, the window created by the Monsoon Revolution is real but time-limited. The interim government of Muhammad Yunus has the political capital that comes from representing the uprising's aspirations, the institutional endorsement of the UN, and the external technical support of the US government's ICITAP programme. The Police Reform Commission has produced a detailed and credible blueprint. What it has not yet demonstrated is whether the political will exists to implement reforms that constrain the government's own future power over law enforcement — the single hardest reform in any political transition, in any country, in any era.
WinTK covers governance, justice, and human rights developments in Bangladesh and across South Asia. For more investigative analysis, explore our news section.
