Vijay Divas And Bangladesh At 54: Liberation Remembered, Democracy In Doubt

On Tuesday, December 16, 2025, the day Bangladesh was finally liberated more than half a century back, India will mark ‘Vijay Divas’, or Victory Day, with commemorations and celebrations. However, Bangladesh, for the second consecutive year, has chosen not to hold parades to mark the dawn of its liberation from Pakistani forces.

That single omission speaks volumes about the choices the current regime in Dhaka has made since assuming power in August last year. And about how it seeks to reinterpret both the past and the present of the Bangladeshi state.

The angst against Pakistan’s massacre of nearly 3 million Bangladeshis, including the cream of the newly founded state’s intelligentsia, just a day before Lt Gen AAK Niazi, who commanded Pakistan’s army and irregular forces, including the infamous Razakar and Al Badr militias, surrendered to the combined might of the Indian forces and the Mukti Bahini, seems to have ebbed as new forces and new power structures emerge in the South Asian nation.

While voices from the street and from amongst the intelligentsia have called for Pakistan’s unconditional apology before ties are normalised with that nation, the powers that be in Dhaka seem to be progressing towards a closer embrace with Islamabad on the one hand and with Beijing and Ankara on the other.

Several Pakistan army, navy, and intelligence delegations have visited Dhaka and Chittagong during this year. A delegation from Pakistan’s defence production units has held talks for possible co-production of armaments. As have teams from China and Turkey, both of which, in 1971, had sided with Pakistan and had been steadfastly against the formation of Bangladesh.

Fifty-four years ago, the clutch of Islamist and pro-Pakistan parties in Bangladesh had gone deep into oblivion when Dhaka became the free capital of a free nation. While some of the politicians who had been with the Muslim League and Jamaat-e-Islami, parties which had opposed the birth of Bangladesh, were accommodated later. In Bangladesh’s political firmament, their ideologies remained out of favour with its people for long.

Those ideologies are, however, once again ominously making their way back into the mainstream of Bangladeshi discourse, much to the disgust of many ordinary citizens, women’s groups, academia, and others.

Students of Dhaka University, on Monday, built a memorial calling it the ‘Razakar hate pillar’ and threw shoes at it to signify their disgust and distrust of this hated militia from 1971, and their ideological descendants of today, for what the ideology it represented had wrought on the Bangladesh people—killing 3 million people—during the liberation war.

However, for every such act of protest, there are many more instances of Islamisation of Bangladesh’s society and polity, with leaders openly advocating the hijab, the dominance of religious leaders in public affairs, and even questioning whether the country’s liberation was at all justified!

Since its birth, Bangladesh has lived through a profoundly turbulent political journey. It began with the euphoria of victory in 1971 and the construction of a new nation-state under Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the quintessential Bengali leader of what had been East Pakistan.

That promise was short-lived. The country soon descended into a cycle of coups and counter-coups, emerging as a military dictatorship first under Gen Zia-ur-Rahman and later under Gen Hussain Muhammad Ershad.

A return to electoral democracy came in the 1990s, culminating in Sheikh Hasina assuming office in 1996. Power then alternated with Begum Khaleda Zia, the widow of General Zia-ur-Rahman, and Hasina.

It was during Khaleda’s tenure that Islamist militancy took firm root, earning Bangladesh an unsavoury reputation as a source of extremist fighters for conflicts as distant as Afghanistan and Chechnya.

Following a brief period of army-backed caretaker rule, elections in 2008–09 brought Sheikh Hasina back to power. What followed was Bangladesh’s longest stretch of political continuity. The economy expanded rapidly, GDP growth surged, per capita income more than quadrupled, and the country was frequently described as one of Asia’s emerging success stories, even likened by some to an “Asian Tiger”.

That narrative unravelled dramatically in 2024, as the Taka weakened, garment export orders fell, unemployment rose, and public discontent intensified. Student protests, initially focused on job and university quota systems, mutated into a broader movement demanding Sheikh Hasina’s removal. Finally, on August 5, 2024, she was forced to flee Dhaka with help from her army.

An interim government replaced her, ostensibly for a few months. Fourteen months later, it continues to rule. The period has been marked less by stability than by what many describe as mob rule, with vigilante groups exercising de facto control across large parts of the country.

Islamist forces, previously contained through arrests and prosecutions under Hasina, have resurfaced. Many leaders, once jailed on terror charges, have been released and now wield growing influence.

Elections are formally scheduled for February 2026, but their credibility remains deeply uncertain. The Awami League, still the single largest political force in the country, has been barred from contesting.

Many of its senior leaders languish in jail; others have fled to India or further abroad. The Bangladesh Nationalist Party, which initially benefited from Hasina’s fall, has seen its popularity erode amid allegations that its cadres have engaged in widespread extortion during the prolonged instability.

Meanwhile, Jamaat-e-Islami, an avowedly Islamist party whose cadres were implicated in atrocities alongside the Pakistan Army, has regained political legitimacy. Once a pariah, it now stands poised to be a major player in any future electoral contest.

However, whether such an election will take place at all remains an open question, given the instances of violence and possibility of voter boycott.

The fear of the Awami League and its mass popularity, especially in rural areas, among the poor and among women, seems to weigh uppermost on the minds of the current regime’s leadership.

After having arrested thousands of people suspected of supporting the Awami League or for having demonstrated on the streets of Dhaka or other major centres, the Bangladesh government last week summoned India’s envoy to convey “serious concerns” over statements made by Sheikh Hasina from her exile once again. Dhaka also found a convenient scapegoat in her followers for the violence and mayhem which have continued unabated under Yunus’s watch.

It almost seemed that the Bangladesh regime was preparing an alibi in Hasina and her followers just in case the elections failed or were boycotted, even as the voices from the comity of nations demanding an inclusive, free, and fair election got louder. All in all, fifty-four years after liberation, as the subcontinent celebrates ‘Vijay Divas’, Bangladesh finds itself once again at a crossroads, its democratic future far more uncertain than at any point since its birth.

The writer is the former head of PTI’s eastern region network.

Published on: Tuesday, December 16, 2025, 04:13 AM IST