The Purbachal Plot: A Triumph of Accountability or a Victory for Political Expediency?

The conviction of former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, members of her family, and UK MP Tulip Siddiq in the RAJUK Purbachal plot case is being hailed by the interim government as a triumph of accountability. It is nothing of the sort. It is the decisive signal that the rule of law has been cannibalised by political expediency, and that the International Crimes Tribunal (ICT)—a court born of the blood of 1971—has been hollowed out and repurposed into a domestic punishment machine. Let’s be clear about what the law actually says. The ICT was established under the International Crimes (Tribunals) Act, 1973 with a singular, sacred mandate: to prosecute genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes committed during the Liberation War. It was built to judge the enemies of humanity, not to adjudicate administrative disputes over land plots. By dragging a civil land allocation issue into the arena of a war crimes tribunal, the state has not strengthened justice; it has stripped the process of legality. Jurisdiction is not a suggestion. It is the bedrock of authority. When a court acts outside its mandate, its verdict is not a “tough judgment." It is a legal nullity. The procedural violence is just as stark. These trials are being conductedin absentia, without cross-examination, and without meaningful defence. Where is the money trail? Criminal corruption demands proof of personal enrichment. Yet, no public evidence shows that Sheikh Hasina or Tulip Siddiq monetised these plots. If accumulation of private wealth was the motive, why did Sheikh Hasina preserve Dhanmondi 32—arguably the most valuable property in Dhaka—as a public museum rather than keeping it as a private asset? Motive cannot be presumed when conduct screams the opposite. The hypocrisy becomes nauseating when you look at the history of those now pointing fingers. This is a system of selective enforcement. The Purbachal project involved thousands of allocations across multiple governments. Why target only one family? Compare this to the Ershad era, when prime Gulshan land was allocated to Khaleda Zia for the symbolic price of one taka. That was an openly political transaction involving state discretion over public assets. Was she dragged before a war crimes tribunal? Was she retroactively criminalised? No. The law did not move then. It moves now, only because it is being pushed by political vengeance. While the state prosecutes Hasina for land plots she never sold, it is busy scrubbing the slate clean for its own leader. Just weeks after Dr Muhammad Yunus assumed unelected power, the machinery of the state began to work in his personal favour. In a stunning reversal, a High Court bench recalled a verdict that had demanded Tk 666 crore in taxes from Grameen Kalyan, an entity central to his network. This massive liability was not settled through payment; it was erased through the convenient intervention of a judiciary now operating under the shadow of his administration. But the benefits did not stop there. The interim government then proceeded to grant a sweeping five-year tax exemption to Grameen Bank. This is a level of state-sponsored immunity that no other citizen enjoys. When a leader uses executive authority to wipe out hundreds of crores in personal or institutional liabilities while prosecuting predecessors for administrative irregularities, it is not justice. It is the privatisation of the state. The moral high ground collapses further when you examine the historical record. On August 3, 2008, while serving as Managing Director of Grameen Bank, Yunus oversaw a circular arrangement where 11,000 square feet of prime office space was leased for a nominal rent of Tk 1,000. This was institutional authority exercised for affiliated entities, a classic conflict of interest. Yet, there was no extraordinary tribunal for him. Power, it seems, is only a crime when your opponents hold it. However, the most dangerous shift is not financial; it is ideological. The International Crimes Tribunal was created to prosecute and punish thejuddhaoporadhi—the war criminals and collaborators of 1971, specifically the leaders of Jamaat-e-Islami who opposed the birth of Bangladesh. This is the same tribunal that handed down death sentences to those who orchestrated genocide. Today, in a grotesque inversion of history, that tribunal has been captured by the very forces it was meant to judge. The current ICT has devolved into a “kangaroo court" run by affiliates of Jamaat-e-Islami. The crucial positions of the court—from the chief prosecutor to the defence counsels—are now occupied by individuals deeply entrenched in Jamaat politics. Even the judiciary itself has been compromised; concerns have been raised that judges appointed to this tribunal lack the requisite High Court tenure and standing, selected instead for their ideological alignment rather than their judicial competence. When the defence lawyers of yesterday’s war criminals become the prosecutors of today’s liberation leaders, the court ceases to be an instrument of justice. It becomes a weapon of retribution. This revisionism is not accidental; it echoes a deeper, more personal history. The rehabilitation of these anti-liberation forces finds a disturbing parallel in the lineage of the Chief Adviser himself. Public discourse and historical records have long pointed to the role of Dr Yunus’s father, Hazi Dula Mia, who is documented to have fought for the Pakistan movement and held sympathies that ran counter to the liberation struggle. It appears the son is now finishing what the father’s generation could not. By rehabilitating Jamaat-e-Islami jihadists and handing them the keys to the International Crimes Tribunal, the interim government is not just prosecuting a former prime minister; they are rewriting the history of 1971. When a tribunal abandons its founding statute, denies due process, and is staffed by the historical enemies of the state’s founding, it ceases to be a court. The sentence handed down in the Purbachal case is not a verdict on Sheikh Hasina. It is a verdict on the interim government itself, proof that they are willing to burn the constitution to warm their hands on the flames of revenge. Swipe Left For Next Video And when justice is replaced by vengeance, the real casualty is not a political family. It is the Republic itself.