When a society is shaken by an act of unfathomable brutality, the instinctual human response is a cry for retribution.

The horrific rape and murder of a young woman named Ramisa has triggered precisely this collective trauma. Yet, the subsequent public discourse has taken a turn that is as old as civilization itself, though newly weaponized for the modern digital square.

Far-right intellectual formations and political groups have rapidly moved to occupy the vacuum of public grief, advancing fervent demands for public executions and various forms of archaic corporeal punishment.

To the untrained eye, these demands might appear as a straightforward, if visceral, manifestation of crime control—a desperate society seeking a juridical quick fix to an epidemic of gendered violence.

In reality, they represent something far more calculated.

This is the deliberate deployment of spectacle as a technology of power, a performance aimed at the reassertion of sovereign authority, the production of moral hegemony, and the political orchestration of collective affect.

To understand the mechanics of this phenomenon, one must look back to the time of pre-modern governance.

In ancient and medieval societies, public punishment functioned primarily as a visible dramatization of sovereign power.

Through the public disciplining and mutilation of the transgressor’s body, the state did not merely demonstrate the consequences of breaking the law; it inscribed upon the social consciousness the question of who possessed the ultimate authority to command, punish, and control.

Punishment operated less as an instrument for the establishment of equitable justice than as a spectacular performance of power itself.

The condemned body became a symbolic canvas upon which sovereignty materialized its dominance, transforming state-sanctioned violence into a ritualized political spectacle designed to reproduce obedience, instill fear, and shore up the legitimacy of the ruling order.

Modern manifestation

In today’s Bangladesh, a remarkably similar technology of power is being reproduced within newly configured social and ideological arenas.

Violent crimes are strategically instrumentalized by far-right actors to circulate fear, and moral panic among the populace. Once the collective temperature has been sufficiently raised, "harsh" or "public" punishment is presented as the only conceivable mechanism for restoring justice and social order.

Through this process, these actors attempt to position themselves as the country’s self-appointed moral arbitrators and disciplinary agents of a patriarchal ethics.

They claim a totalizing authority over the regulation of morality, sexuality, and public conduct.

Yet this performative moralism simultaneously performs a magician’s trick of misdirection. By reducing justice to an affective spectacle of public revenge, the structural conditions embedded within the juridical and social order are systematically obscured.

The deep-seated social, economic, cultural, and political crises that produce and reproduce violence are completely displaced from public discourse, rendering the underlying structural causes of brutality increasingly invisible.

Absent from the populist rhetoric are the fundamental, uncomfortable questions that a mature society must confront.

There is a telling silence regarding how patriarchal social structures normalize and perpetuate violence against women, and how religious and social institutions participate in cultures of denial or normalization surrounding such brutality.

Furthermore, this focus on the spectacular hides the systemic failures of the state’s judicial apparatus, which has consistently failed to become genuinely victim-centric.

Instead, the legal system frequently functions as an ideological instrument for reproducing the narratives of ruling power rather than ensuring equitable justice, allowing politically connected or socially privileged perpetrators to repeatedly remain beyond the reach of accountability.

The far-right’s fixation on the public punishment of bodies actively displaces this structural analysis, transforming systemic violence into an emotionally charged commodity for public consumption.

Dilemma of public spectacle

The central dilemma of public punishment lies precisely here that rather than orienting society toward the horizon of genuine justice, it propels it into an intensified desensitization toward violence.

As public audiences are repeatedly exposed to the humiliation, torture, as wel as death of bodies framed as "justice," violence itself undergoes a gradual epistemic shift.

It ceases to be viewed as an aberration and instead becomes the very language, logic, and normative standard of social morality.

Modern power does not merely govern individual life; it actively produces the conditions under which certain bodies are designated for public humiliation or exposure to death.

In this sense, public punishment appears less as an articulation of justice and more as an overt inscription of sovereign violence—an enactment through which power renders itself visible and authoritative.

Significantly, this brand of politics is frequently articulated through a regime of highly selective morality.

Far-right groups amplify outrage and assert moral urgency in response to particular incidents that fit their narrative, while simultaneously lapsing into strategic silence when comparable forms of violence emerge within their own ideological, institutional, or affiliative spheres.

This asymmetry reveals that their operative logic is not anchored in a universal commitment to human dignity, but rather in the production and monopolization of moral authority as a mechanism of political power.

Ultimately, this cycle invites a series of urgent, sobering questions. Does public punishment genuinely function as a mechanism for reducing crime, or does it instead intensify and expand society’s investment in violent imaginaries?

Does it produce justice in any substantive sense, or does it merely reconfigure raw revenge as a legitimate, institutionalized form of law?

In a social formation that refuses to transform the structural conditions that generate violence, and instead fixates on the public punishment of bodies, such demands do not eliminate brutality.

They merely participate in its terrifying reproduction.