Bangladesh is living through a moment that looks, from afar, like a political transition—but feels, from within, like a reckoning postponed too long and unleashed too suddenly. What began as a student uprising against repression has metastasized into a national struggle over legitimacy, memory, and the meaning of democracy itself. The danger now is not simply that Bangladesh may relapse into authoritarianism, but that it may confuse the collapse of one order for the construction of another.
The flight of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina in August 2024 ended a 15-year reign that had delivered growth and infrastructure while steadily hollowing out democratic institutions. Elections became ritual without risk; dissent survived only by shrinking its voice. Stability was achieved, but at the cost of consent. When the dam broke, it did not do so gently.
Into this vacuum stepped Muhammad Yunus, Nobel laureate and reluctant statesman, heading an interim government tasked with the impossible: restoring faith in the ballot while governing a country in which the street has discovered its power and institutions have forgotten their neutrality. Yunus embodies moral legitimacy without political machinery—a rare commodity, and an insufficient one. South Asia does not run on virtue alone.
Bangladesh’s crisis today is driven by four domestic forces, each pulling the republic in a different direction.
First, the interim state itself. Yunus’s mandate is procedural, not transformational: stabilize, reform, and hold elections. Yet the absence of a party base has turned governance into a balancing act between bureaucracy, security services, and the very protest networks that brought down the old regime. Too heavy a hand, and Yunus risks becoming the custodian of repression he replaced; too light a touch, and the state dissolves into a spectator as mobs enforce their own justice. Revolutionary moments are unforgiving of moderation—but democracies depend on it.
Second, the Awami League, now a party without a ballot. Banned from contesting the upcoming election, it has been reduced from hegemon to hostage. This is no small matter. The Awami League is not merely an electoral vehicle; it is an ecosystem of patronage, local power, and institutional influence built over a decade and a half. Excluding it from formal politics may satisfy a desire for reckoning, but it also ensures that a significant segment of the polity will seek leverage elsewhere—through street pressure, international advocacy, or calculated instability. Democracies rarely heal by amputating their largest parties.
Third, the returning opposition. The Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), long weakened by repression and inertia, has re-entered history through the familiar doorway of dynasty. Tarique Rahman, son of former prime minister Khaleda Zia, has returned from exile to position himself as the face of “restoration.” His appeal lies in promise rather than proof: a return to competitive politics after years of foreclosed choices. Yet the BNP’s dilemma is acute. To win decisively, it must mobilize religious conservatives; to govern credibly, it must reassure centrists, minorities, and international partners. In Bangladesh, coalition arithmetic is rarely innocent.
Fourth, and most volatile, is “the street.” Students, civil society activists, and ordinary citizens who toppled an entrenched regime understandably fear a restoration in new clothes. Their demand is not merely for elections, but for accountability. Yet accountability enforced by vigilantes corrodes the very rule of law it seeks to restore. When journalists are attacked and mobs claim moral authority, the revolution begins to consume its children.
Hovering above these domestic struggles are institutions that prefer silence to scrutiny. The security services, judiciary, and bureaucracy are the quiet kingmakers of any transition. Having adapted comfortably to the Hasina era, they are now being asked to reinvent themselves overnight as neutral referees. Their instinct, as always, is survival. Selective justice and uneven enforcement are the early warning signs of a transition going awry.
No South Asian crisis, however, is complete without its geopolitical chorus.
The United States has rediscovered Bangladesh through the language of democratic norms and visa restrictions, driven as much by Indo-Pacific strategy as by concern for ballot integrity. Washington wants stability without repression, competition without chaos—a reasonable desire, and an impossible formula to impose from afar.
Pakistan’s intelligence services are the region’s perennial suspects, accused of fishing in troubled waters through Islamist networks and disinformation. Such involvement, where it exists, is opportunistic rather than orchestrating. Foreign hands exploit fractures; they rarely create them. To blame outsiders alone is to indulge in denial.
India, the silent stakeholder, watches with unease. Sheikh Hasina’s predictability has been replaced by volatility, and volatility unsettles borders, trade routes, and river politics. Delhi’s restraint reflects a hard-earned lesson: overt intervention only deepens resentment.
So what is really happening in Bangladesh?
A country born of a liberation war is struggling to liberate itself from the habits of permanent incumbency. An uprising that sought dignity now risks normalizing disorder. An interim government that promised neutrality is being pulled toward judgment. And an election meant to restore democracy is already burdened by exclusions that undermine its promise.
Bangladesh’s tragedy would not be the return of an old party or the rise of a new one. It would be the failure to rebuild trust—trust that power can change hands without bloodshed, that opposition is not treason, and that the state belongs to citizens rather than surnames.
Democracy, as the subcontinent knows too well, rarely dies in a coup. It more often suffocates under applause, fear, and fatigue. Bangladesh still has time to choose a different ending. Whether it will do so before the ballot becomes another battleground remains the republic’s defining question.
