The Phulbari tragedy of 2006 remains one of the starkest examples of how large-scale extraction in Bangladesh has relied on state force and the disposability of rural and Indigenous communities. When thousands protested Asia Energy’s proposed open-pit coal mine—which would have displaced over 40,000 people and destroyed farmland, homes, and water sources—police opened fire, killing three youths, Tariqul Islam, Amin, and Salekin, and injuring hundreds. Their deaths exposed the violence required to push through projects that communities never agreed to.
For women in Phulbari, the stakes were immediate and far-reaching. Open-pit mining threatened the forms of labor central to women’s survival: subsistence farming, access to water, household production, and caregiving networks. Losing land meant losing food security, mobility, and the social structures that sustain community life. These risks rarely appear in official assessments, yet they shape the daily realities of those most affected by displacement.
The tragedy extended beyond the shootings of August 26. Families lived under constant fear of eviction, intensified police presence, and the possibility of being uprooted into urban precarity. Women described worries about water access, children’s safety, and the collapse of community systems that hold rural life together. These forms of slow and structural harm are inseparable from the physical violence that drew national attention.
Nearly twenty years later, the Phulbari agreement stands as a marker of community resistance, but the broader questions remain unresolved: who bears the cost of extractive projects, whose land can be sacrificed, and why rural and land-dependent communities must risk their lives to defend rights that should be guaranteed. Phulbari is a reminder that development grounded in dispossession and force cannot claim legitimacy or justice.
Bangladesh Feminist Archives 