After Sheikh Hasina's Fall, Bangladesh Faces Turbulent Elections Amid Rising Violence & Uncertainty

Dhaka: In August of 2024, when the streets of Dhaka filled with students and the air carried the familiar smell of tear gas and burned rubber, Kamaal Mazumdar believed he was witnessing the birth of a different country.

The protests, improvised, and brimming with youthful certainty, ended, improbably, with the exile of Sheikh Hasina, who fled to India after more than a decade in power. It felt, at the time, like a correction of history: a reset button pressed by a generation tired of managed democracy. But now after 18 months, an unemployed Mazumdar, back in his hometown of Rajshahi, speaks of that moment with a kind of embarrassed nostalgia.

With elections scheduled for February 12, he feels less like a citizen of a reborn republic, and more a spectator to a slow-motion unravelling of Bangladesh.

“The streets were safer, more people had jobs and we could speak out without being labelled or beaten up, before this new regime took over,” he said with a sigh. Even as he spoke, in nearby Natore, activists of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) were fighting supporters of independent candidates. Government employees were protesting outside the official residence of Mohammad Yunus, the head of the interim government, demanding higher wages.

In Chittagong, port workers had shut down operations over fears that the country’s most strategic harbour might be leased to a global MNC. Political violence has become, once again, a background condition of daily life. Human rights group ‘Ain o Salishi Kendra’ (Law & Justice Centre) reported a sharp spike in political violence in January, documenting 75 incidents that left 616 people injured and 11 dead. This represented a steep increase from December 2025, when 18 incidents were recorded, resulting in 268 injuries and four fatalities.

These numbers, like most statistics in Bangladesh, feel both abstract and intimate -- everyone seems to know someone who has been beaten, arrested, or worse. The coming election is widely expected to be one of the most consequential, and also volatile, in recent memory. It is less a democratic ritual than a referendum on the wreckage left behind by the fall of Hasina’s government. The Awami League, the party that led Bangladesh to independence in 1971 and ruled it for most of the past fifteen years, has been banned from participating.

Its absence has distorted the political field, turning what might have been a competitive contest into a struggle between two imperfect heirs to a broken system. The main beneficiary has been BNP, led by Tarique Zia, the son of the former military ruler Ziaur Rahman and of Khaleda Zia, the “other Begum who ruled the country,” in Mazumdar’s words. Tarique, who spent years in London after corruption charges, has returned as a reluctant standard-bearer of secular opposition. Opinion surveys suggest that BNP holds a slim lead, with roughly a third of voters expressing support.

Close behind is Jamaat-i-Islami, an Islamist party that has reinvented itself with remarkable discipline. Its leader, Shafiqur Rahman, is a physician turned preacher whose calm demeanour masks an organisation deeply embedded in the country’s social and bureaucratic fabric. Jamaat has historically struggled to cross 10% of the popular vote, but recent polling places it near 30%, a surge that reflects not only ideological appeal but also organisational reach and possibly the fear that opposing it may have conseuences. The Awami League’s absence remains the great unresolved variable.

In a December survey, more than a quarter of respondents said they opposed the ban on the party altogether. On the streets, its supporters have adopted a slogan that is both plaintive and defiant: “No Boat, No Vote,” referring to the party’s electoral symbol. Whether this translates into a meaningful boycott is uncertain. In Bangladesh, abstention is often less a political choice than a logistical problem; if people do not show up, someone else may vote in their name. “Right now most people believe that BNP has an advantage.

Tarique is being seen as the crown prince who has come back to wave his magic wand. Nobody is talking of his past misdemeanours nor are they calling his party dynastic, though it too is dynastic, just like the Awami League,” said Mazumdar. That edge has been dulled by allegations of corruption and extortion involving BNP activists in the chaotic months after Hasina’s fall. Jamaat, for its part, carries the heavy moral burden of its role in supporting the Pakistani army during the 1971 war, when hundreds of thousands of Bengalis were killed.

Yet its reputation for internal discipline and relative cleanliness has helped it court younger voters disillusioned with mainstream politics. Its critics point to its hostility toward women’s rights and secular values, but its supporters argue that it offers something Bangladesh has not had in years -- predictability. Behind all of this looms the interim government — and, more significantly, the military whose hand was evident when a score of journalists were picked up from a newsroom in Dhaka and then released after a few hours on Saturday after news was released by Bangladesh Times which displeased the army.

Mohammad Yunus, a Nobel laureate best known for pioneering microcredit, has become an unlikely steward of a fractured state. His administration, which has grown increasingly unpopular, is widely seen as a civilian façade for a system still shaped by foreign interests and security officials who prefer to remain offstage. The prevailing fear is not that the election will be cancelled. Bangladeshis have learned to vote under far worse conditions. The deeper anxiety concerns what happens after the results are announced. If the outcome is contested, as seems almost inevitable, the country may once again descend into the familiar cycle of protests, crackdowns, and negotiated settlements brokered in the shadows.