Published: 12:51 AM, 18 May 2026
Bangladesh Has Changed Its Rulers, Not Its Habits
Dr. Mohammed A Rab
When Sheikh Hasina moved to India on 5 August 2024, many people in Bangladesh believed the worst chapter of our recent history was over. Fifteen years of one-party rule ended in a student-led uprising. About 1,400 people had been killed in the streets in just three weeks. The fall of her government felt, for a moment, like a clean break from a long, bad dream.
More than a year and a half later, it is harder to feel the same way. The interim government led by Professor Dr. Muhammad Yunus has done things no Bangladeshi government has done before. The secret detention sites known as Ayna Ghor, where political prisoners were held for years without their families knowing whether they were alive, have been opened to the public. The country has signed the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance. For the first time, a former prime minister, a former home minister, and several army officers have been formally charged with operating a system of secret detention and torture. In November 2025, an international crimes tribunal sentenced Hasina to death in absentia. In February 2026, Bangladesh held a peaceful election, and a new government took office.
On paper, this is a long list. In practice, I do not think Professor Dr. Yunus deserves the credit he has received for it. He oversold what his government was doing almost from the first day. He spoke the language of a fresh start, of a new Bangladesh, of healing and reform, while his administration acted in a very different spirit. From quite early on, the mood of the interim government was not that of a caretaker cleaning the house. It was the mood of revenge.
A leader in his position needed to do the opposite. He needed to stand above the parties, insist that the rule of law be applied to everyone, including supporters of the government that had just fallen, and set a clear example of neutrality. That is the only real authority an unelected interim leader has. Professor Yunus did not choose that path. Either he did not want it himself, or he was not allowed to want it by the people around him, the student leaders and hardline groups that had pushed him into office. The result was the same. Awami League supporters were detained in large numbers, often without proper charges. The party itself was banned in May 2025, along with its meetings and online speech. Cases were filed against thousands of people, sometimes more than eight thousand at a time, most of them not even named.
His choice of advisors deepened the problem. Instead of building a cabinet around skill, experience, and steady temperament, he leaned on his own loyalists and the most visible figures of the uprising. Personality and political closeness mattered more than competence. A country that had just lost fifteen hundred people in the streets and was sliding into mob violence needed serious technocrats in the most important ministries. It too often got well-meaning amateurs whose main qualification was that they had stood near him at the right moment.
For families who waited eight, ten, or twelve years for news of a missing son or husband, the formal charges and the opening of Ayna Ghor are everything, and they deserve every bit of recognition. But the credit belongs to those families, to the human rights workers who kept the names alive for a decade, and to the prosecutors and commissioners who did the actual work. It does not belong to the man at the top, who too often used the language of justice while practicing the politics of settling scores.
The deeper picture is harder to see. The human rights group Adhikar has documented at least forty extrajudicial killings between August 2024 and September 2025, including people shot in so-called crossfire, beaten to death in custody, or tortured to death. The numbers are lower than under Hasina, but the methods are the same. Ain o Salish Kendra, another respected local group, has recorded twenty-eight deaths in custody and 165 deaths from mob lynching in the first ten months of 2025 alone. Attacks on Hindus, Ahmadias, Sufi shrines, and indigenous communities have risen sharply. In some villages, religious leaders have stopped girls from playing football. Journalists are being charged under the Anti-Terrorism Act.
How can a country be both freer and more violent at the same time, opening the torture cells of the old regime while still detaining thousands of people without proper charges?
The answer is that Bangladesh changed its rulers in August 2024 but not its habits. The police, the courts, the prosecutors, and the paramilitary Rapid Action Battalion were not rebuilt. They were simply pointed in a new direction. The men who used to arrest BNP supporters at midnight are now arresting Awami League supporters at midnight. The judges who used to convict critics of Hasina are now hearing cases against her. The same laws once used to silence journalists who annoyed the old government are now, more carefully but still, being used against journalists who annoy the new one.
This is not new. The Rapid Action Battalion was created in 2004 under a BNP government. The first version of digital speech law appeared in 2006. The caretaker system that once protected our elections was misused by a military-backed administration in 2007 and 2008 before Hasina abolished it. What the Awami League did between 2009 and 2024 was not invent these tools. It connected them into one machine and pointed it at every opponent until the country could not breathe. The machine is now in different hands, but it remains.
This is why the moment we are in feels so fragile. Trials and convictions are useful, but they are not the same as reform. A death sentence for Hasina, handed down in absentia, does not give us an independent prosecutor, a police force under civilian control, an election commission no party can capture, or a press protected by law rather than tolerated by whoever is in power that year. Without those things, the next government will inherit the same machine and find it very tempting to use it.
Bangladeshi society has shown twice in one generation that it can rise up and force change at the top. In 1990, we ended military rule. In 2024, we ended one-party rule. Both times, we paid with our lives. Our record on what comes next is much weaker. We are good at removing rulers. We are not yet good at limiting them.
We have learned, painfully, that bad rulers can be removed. We have not yet learned, as a country, that the goal is not to replace them with our own rulers. The goal is to build a state that no ruler, theirs or ours, can use as a weapon.
Dr. Mohammed A Rab writes
on contemporary issues. He is
based in USA. Views expressed
in the article are
the author’s personal opinions.
