Fascist Rehabilitation and Bangladesh on the Edge

There are moments in a nation’s history when the price of forgetting is paid not in abstract political cost but in blood. Bangladesh is approaching such a moment. The mass uprising of July 2024, which brought down Sheikh Hasina’s sixteen-year authoritarian regime at the cost of hundreds of young lives, was not simply a change of government. It was a generational verdict, a declaration by the people of Bangladesh, and most viscerally by its young generation, that the era of state-sponsored terror, enforced disappearances, extrajudicial killings and the systematic dismantling of democratic institutions had to end. That verdict is now quietly undermined, and the people who paid for it with their lives deserve better than to watch its fruits be negotiated away in the name of political pragmatism.

The pattern that is emerging is not subtle. Awami League leaders and activists who were imprisoned following the uprising - many of them face charges connected to the killings of protesters, to corruption on a scale that staggers the imagination, and to the documented abuse of state power over sixteen years - are being released from custody. Their reappearance in public life is not tentative. Some have already announced intentions to contest upcoming city corporation mayoral elections, presenting themselves as legitimate political actors in a democratic competition as though the crimes alleged against them are either resolved or irrelevant. Awami League, whose political activities were suspended following the uprising, is visibly reorganising through social media narratives built on fabricated information, the resurfacing of its media ecosystem, street-level mobilisation in its traditional strongholds, and the quiet reactivation of networks that spent sixteen years penetrating every institution of the Bangladeshi state.

To understand why this trajectory is dangerous, one must remember what Awami League’s sixteen-year rule produced. This is not a matter of political opinion; it is a matter of documented record. According to Ain o Salish Kendra, more than 600 people, including political opponents, journalists and activists, were victims of enforced disappearances between 2009 and 2023. The Bangladesh Police and Rapid Action Battalion (RAB), operating under political direction, were responsible for hundreds of extrajudicial killings in operations euphemistically described as “crossfire”. Human Rights Watch documented a systematic pattern of these killings over more than a decade, noting that victims were overwhelmingly opposition members, dissidents and individuals who had crossed powerful political figures. The Digital Security Act, enacted in 2018, was used to imprison journalists, cartoonists, students and ordinary citizens for social media posts that criticised the government. By 2023, more than 900 cases had been filed under the act, with a conviction rate that made clear the law’s purpose was intimidation rather than justice.

The economic dimension of the Hasina era’s legacy is equally staggering. Bangladesh Financial Intelligence Unit and subsequent investigations have documented capital flight of billions of dollars facilitated by politically connected business figures under the protection of the regime. The banking sector was systematically looted through politically directed loans that were never intended to be repaid. Padma Bridge, metro rail and other projects, while real achievements in their physical completion, were accompanied by procurement irregularities and cost inflation.

It was against this accumulated weight of tyranny, corruption and impunity that the students and citizens of Bangladesh rose in July 2024. The immediate trigger was the quota reform movement, but the deeper fuel was sixteen years of compressed grievance across every sector of society. The regime’s response to the protests – deploying police, Border Guard Bangladesh (BGB), and reportedly plain-clothes Awami League activists against unarmed students – resulted in the deaths of hundreds of young people in the streets of Dhaka, Chattogram, Rajshahi and other cities. Estimates of the total death toll in the weeks of unrest range from four hundred to over a thousand, depending on the source, with thousands more injured and arrested.

The interim government of Muhammad Yunus, which governed from August 2024 to early 2026, was given an extraordinary mandate by the sacrifice of those lives. It was expected to deliver justice, to dismantle the structures of the fallen regime, to reform the institutions that had been captured and corrupted, and to ensure that the political forces responsible for 16 years of authoritarian rule could not simply reconstitute themselves and return. On each of these expectations, the interim government delivered partially at best and failed substantially at worst. The intelligence services were not reformed. The judiciary, still populated by appointees of the previous regime, moved at a pace that frustrated victims and emboldened perpetrators. The dismantling of Awami League networks from civil administration and law enforcement was incomplete and inconsistent. And now, after the election, what was incomplete is increasingly being reversed.

The rehabilitation of Awami League figures through bail, release and permission to participate in electoral politics sends a message that is received with precision by every constituency in Bangladesh. To the families of those killed in July 2024, it says that their children died for a transition that is already being compromised. To the survivors who were blinded, maimed or traumatised by state violence, it says that the state’s accounting with those responsible for that violence is negotiable. And to the broader public, it says that in Bangladesh, power ultimately protects power, and that the July uprising, like every previous moment of popular assertion in the country’s history, will eventually be absorbed and neutralised by the political establishment.

The historical precedents for what happen when transitions are managed too generously towards the forces they were meant to displace are not encouraging. Argentina’s experience after the fall of the military junta offers a cautionary parallel - the early trials of junta leaders, celebrated as a landmark of transitional justice, were followed by amnesty laws that released hundreds of perpetrators back into society, producing a cycle of impunity that required decades to correct and left wounds that Argentine society is still healing. South Korea’s transition from military authoritarianism in the late 1980s succeeded precisely because it maintained consistent pressure for accountability rather than trading justice for stability - a lesson that Bangladesh’s political leadership appears not to have absorbed.