A WORKER LYNCHED: WHAT THE MURDER OF DIPU CHANDRA DAS REVEALS
Fahreen Alamgir
Dipu Chandra Das, a twenty-seven-year-old garment worker in Bangladesh, was killed on 18 December after being accused of blasphemy. Das, a Hindu, worked at the Pioneer Knits BD Limited in Bhaluka. He was allegedly beaten to death by a mob, and after the killing, his body was tied to a tree branch and set on fire.
By 20 December, several sources citing the Rapid Action Battalion (RAB), reported that after a blasphemy accusation, an individual was forced to resign and handed over to a mob by the factory manager. When the state employs terms such as “forced resignation” and “handover,” these phrases reveal an administration, governance structure, and system that normalises and legitimises violence. This concern becomes pronounced considering a tweet by the Chief Adviser of the Government of Bangladesh:
Mymensingh, 20 December 2025: In the incident of beating to death Sanatan Dharma adherent youth Dipu Chandra Das (27) in Valuka, Mymensingh, the Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) has arrested seven individuals as suspects.
Although these arrests are described as decisive actions, they also prompt concerns about how Dipu Das is portrayed and categorized in official language as “a young man of the Sanatan (Hindu) faith.” By reducing Dipu Das’s identity solely to his religion, the government has subsumed his case into the broader discourse around incidents of persecution reportedly faced by the Hindu community in Bangladesh since July 2024.
The murder of Dipu Das is neither an isolated incident nor just another chapter in the ongoing violence against the Hindu community. His death exposes structural violence that runs through industrial governance—most sharply in the country’s ready-made garment industry (widely known as the RMG sector) —and the political arrangements that shape Bangladesh today. The RMG sector drives the country’s economy, employing four million people—primarily women—and accounting for more than 80 percent of its exports. Last year, it generated $38.48 billion, making it indispensable to the national economy. Dipu Das was part of this sector. Yet, both the state and the industry failed to protect him, a worker belonging to a minority community. Over the past decades, factory owners have successfully blocked unionisation and normalised violence at the factory level in ways that reinforce entrenched hierarchies, now intensified by religious and class distinctions.
A similar case emerged in July 2025 during a monthly meeting with garment workers convened by a grassroots trade union federation in Gazipur, Dhaka. A Hindu woman worker said factory management forced her to resign solely because of her religious identity. She described daily humiliation—hateful remarks about her faith and derogatory references to Hindus as idol worshippers—revealing how routine such bias has become. She asked whether any provision of Bangladesh’s labour law prohibits Hindus from working in factories, a question that underscores the absurdity of her treatment. After submitting her resignation and notifying the trade union federation, she said she was then pressured to withdraw it.
Is Dipu Das’s death an isolated incident or a symptom of systemic denial? His killing and the subsequent actions that followed must be understood at the intersection of his identities as a Hindu, a factory worker, and a citizen belonging to a minority community. It exposes a deeper rupture in the political order, where responsibility is displaced, and accountability is absent. This reality demands a closer look at governance, beginning with Bangladesh’s RMG sector and extending across the state apparatus.
Protected initially under successive military regimes, the institutional and political development of the RMG sector consolidated an illiberal order. This order rests on collusion between factory owners—the emerging ruling class—and the state, run through civilian and military bureaucracies. This governance structure does exactly what it is designed to do: strip workers of rights while shielding owners from accountability. The wage scale was first declared in 1985. From 1991 to 2024, under successive democratic regimes, the relationships among the ruling class, civil society, and the state apparatus became deeply intertwined. Between 1995 and 2006, workers experienced no wage increases, while factory owners received generous tax breaks. At the same time, repeated factory fires and catastrophic building collapses, such as the collapse of the Rana Plaza tower in 2013, claimed countless workers’ lives.
Governance in the sector reveals the mechanisms of domination. The coordinates of power may shift, but the same people remain at the centre. A faction of owners dominates the Board of the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association and the RMG Sustainability Council, runs in mayoral elections, and, over the past fifteen years, has held at least 30 percent of the seats in Parliament. It does not matter who sits in the office of the Prime Minister: the garment factory owners dominate the situation.
Workers, systematically excluded, have been replaced by civil society actors (Shushil Shomaj) and organisations, predominantly through the NGOisation of trade union federations. This mechanism operates within narrow limits aligned with elite interests, functioning as a proxy for worker representation.
Over time, this political structure has made the SKOP (Sramik Karmachari Oikya Parishad—the federation of trade union alliances) irrelevant, effectively rendering it powerless. Labour governance in the industry is regulation-oriented, where civil society, mediated by a select few, reproduces a culture of compliance that shifts questions of justice and workers’ rights from the material realities of class relations to the ideological sphere. Workers are denied real power. They are neither recognised nor represented by a union, and they cannot openly affiliate with any trade union body or trade union federation.
In Bangladesh’s new political settlement, the death of Dipu Das is no accident. We see the repressive architecture of illiberal power: religious violence and communal politics executed by powerful actors at both state and local levels, and religious sectarian politics, intertwined with the political economy, redrawing the boundaries of recognition—deciding who counts as “our/actual/true citizens.”
Bangladesh is a country of 170 million people. Countless people, such as Dipu Das, Malati Mondal, and Amina Sultana, work in the RMG industry, the country’s most vital sector. For them, their economic struggle for survival is inseparable from the political struggle—against exploitation, against erasure, and for dignity, rights, and freedom as workers with layered social identities.