Published: 12:51 AM, 11 July 2026
Breaking the Cycle: Why Bangladesh Cannot Build Peace by Excluding a Party
Dr. Mohammed A Rab
Bangladesh has changed governments many times since 1991, but it has never learned to allow a defeated political party to retain a place in national life. Every transition has followed the same pattern. The party that wins does not simply win an election. It moves to dismantle its rival through legal cases, frozen assets, and sometimes outright bans. The party that loses does not accept defeat and waits its turn at the ballot box. It waits for the day it can do the same thing back. This cycle of revenge politics has shaped Bangladesh for more than three decades, and it is now facing its hardest test yet.
The July 2024 uprising that removed Sheikh Hasina differed in scale and moral weight from earlier transitions. The United Nations Human Rights Office found that between 1 July and 15 August 2024, mostly before Hasina's departure on 5 August, an estimated 1,400 people were killed, the large majority of them protesters shot with live ammunition by security forces. This represents a genuinely different order of violence from the case filing and selective arrests of earlier cycles, and the demand for justice that followed is legitimate.
But an honest account cannot stop there. The violence did not end with Hasina's exit, nor did it run in only one direction. On the night of 5 August alone, over a hundred people were killed in retaliatory attacks that mainly targeted police officers and Awami League leaders. At least 25 police officers were killed that day, and by later counts, at least 40 police officers were killed nationwide in the surrounding unrest. In the months that followed, independent monitors and the Awami League's own sources, the latter read with appropriate caution, both documented continued mob attacks, custodial deaths, and targeted killings of party leaders and grassroots workers, with tallies ranging from roughly 250 documented cases to over 300 by partisan count. Minority communities, particularly Hindus, Buddhists, Christians, and Ahmadiyyas, suffered thousands of documented attacks on homes and temples. Nearly 1,500 statues and monuments were vandalized nationwide, including the Bangabandhu Memorial Museum, which was burned to the ground, and multiple statues of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. This fuller record does not weaken the case for accountability for the pre-5 August killings. It shows that violence simply migrated to new targets and new perpetrators, which is evidence of the old revenge cycle, not an exception to it.
Bangladesh's own transitional choices deepened this problem rather than solving it. The country did not move directly from Hasina's fall to a BNP-led election. In between, there were eighteen months of interim rule under Muhammad Yunus, during which student leaders from the uprising organized into the National Citizen Party, with Yunus himself publicly calling them his political appointers and drawing them into the machinery of an unelected government. By the February 2026 election, the NCP was contesting in alliance with Jamaat-e-Islami, Bangladesh's largest Islamist party, whose predecessor organization opposed the 1971 Liberation War, after the interim administration lifted the ban imposed by Hasina's government on Jamaat. Reporting from this period also documented a resurgence of previously marginalized Islamist and militant currents, gaining visibility within the state. None of this means the student movement's original demands were illegitimate. But a movement that began as a broad demand for accountability was, in practice, partly absorbed into a narrower political project during the very period when Bangladesh had the least institutional oversight of who held power.
The interim administration's own record adds to this picture. A retrospective assessment of Yunus's eighteen months in office described prolonged detentions of lawyers, politicians, journalists, and academics without transparent records of charges, governance concentrated among unelected advisers, and a documented deterioration in Transparency International Bangladesh's corruption indicators. The same organization later found that BNP-aligned actors were responsible for the large majority of political violence recorded since Hasina's fall, evidence that mob justice against a defeated political side continued well beyond the days immediately after 5 August. Meanwhile, the reform process itself struggled to produce genuine cross-party consensus. Eleven reform commissions and a National Consensus Commission spent most of 2025 negotiating the July Charter, but the Awami League, along with the Jatiya Party and two smaller parties, was excluded from these talks altogether, having already been banned. The remaining 24 parties signed the Charter, which was then put to voters as a referendum alongside the February 2026 election, while the Awami League was barred from campaigning against it, even online. Independent analysts have separately noted that a reform settlement built without one of the country's two largest historical parties, and validated through a referendum that party could not legally oppose, sits on uncertain legitimacy regardless of the 61 percent Yes vote it eventually received.
This is the heart of the matter. Bangladesh's current approach conflates two questions that should be kept separate. The first concerns individual accountability. Who ordered the use of lethal force against protesters in July 2024? Who carried it out? Who covered it up? These questions deserve a credible tribunal process, with real evidence, real defense rights, and real consequences. This is not revenge. It is the minimum a state owes the families of the dead, and it is what deters future leaders from making the same choice.
The second question concerns the political rights of an entire party organization, including its millions of ordinary members and local organizers who played no role in ordering violence. Banning the Awami League as a party does not distinguish between these two groups. It punishes a grandmother who voted for the party her whole life the same way it punishes an official who issued an unlawful order. A party with genuine historical roots, in this case the party of the Liberation War, does not vanish because it is deregistered. Its supporters remain citizens. They either withdraw from politics and nurse a lasting grievance, get absorbed into other movements as an aggrieved bloc, or wait quietly for the political winds to shift. None of these outcomes strengthens Bangladeshi democracy.
Bangladesh does not need to invent an answer from nothing. Indonesia did not ban Golkar, the party that anchored Suharto's three-decade rule. It allowed the party to compete, and Golkar reformed itself into a normal participant in Indonesia's new democracy, preserving a functioning multi-party system rather than creating a permanently excluded bloc. South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission separated amnesty for lower-level actors from the prosecution of senior leadership, conditioning amnesty on full and honest disclosure and recognizing that not everyone in an abusive system bears equal responsibility. Bangladesh has its own precedent, too. Jamaat-e-Islami, despite its role in opposing the Liberation War, was allowed back into electoral politics in later years, before its registration was eventually canceled through a legal process tied to its constitution rather than a blanket political ban.
None of this means the Awami League should be welcomed back immediately or without conditions. A workable path forward has four parts. First, a credible tribunal process must establish individual accountability for the July 2024 killings, with transparent evidence and defense rights, before any broader rehabilitation conversation begins. Moving too early would be read, correctly, as impunity. Second, the political rights of rank-and-file members and local organizers, distinct from those of the leadership under investigation, should be protected sooner rather than later. There is little reason to treat a local council member with no role in 2024 the same as a former minister facing tribunal charges. Third, any review of the party ban should be tied to specific, publicly stated accountability milestones, not left open-ended or subject purely to political mood. An open-ended ban only builds the grievance this piece warns against. Fourth, the process needs safeguards against simply replacing one set of political prisoners with another, since a tribunal captured by political convenience rather than evidence would repeat the old pattern under a new name. This must apply to violence in both directions, the pre-5 August killings by state forces and the post-5 August violence against police, minorities, and Awami League members alike.
The Gen Z movement that brought down Hasina's government was not, at its core, a movement against the Awami League as an idea. It was a movement against a culture of impunity, elite capture, and a state that had stopped listening to its citizens. A rehabilitation process built on genuine accountability, applied evenly and sequenced carefully, would be more faithful to the spirit of July 2024 than an indefinite ban on an entire party, validated by a referendum the party could not even campaign against. Bangladesh's own transitional choices, including the absorption of student leaders into a narrower political project, the alliance with Jamaat, the exclusion of major parties from the reform table, and the deterioration in rights and governance documented even under the interim government, have already begun to repeat the very pattern this piece warns against. Bangladesh has broken cycles before by choosing institutional processes over political convenience. Whether it does so again will determine whether this transition becomes the country's last revenge cycle or simply its next one.
Dr. Mohammed A Rab is based in
the United States of America.
