EIGHTEEN months on from the momentous mass protests which upended political life in Bangladesh, the long-awaited general election has finally come to pass, ushering in what many are celebrating as a new era of popular sovereignty. Beyond surface appearances, however, there is a distinct sense that old wine is being repackaged in new bottles.
The Jamaat-i-Islami and Bangladesh National Party (BNP) will be the two biggest parties in parliament. The latter’s leader, Tarique Rahman, son of military dictator Gen Ziaur Rahman, is set to become prime minister; his mother, the late Khaleda Zia was PM twice in the 1990s and early 2000s. The JI, meanwhile, has literally come back from the dead following the execution of its main leaders in the mid-2010s for their opposition to Bangladesh’s independence movement.
The only genuinely ‘new’ actor in Bangladesh’s latest chapter, the organic student leadership which spearheaded the movement to oust ex-PM Sheikh Hasina and her Awami League (AL) party, is represented to an extent by the recently formed National Citizen Party, which chose to ally with the JI in the lead-up to the poll.
Election day was notable for the fact that voters cast two separate ballots — one to elect members of parliament and the second as a referendum to introduce sweeping constitutional amendments. Bangladesh has held three referendums before this one — two were shambolic and designed to rubber-stamp military dictatorships. The present one has followed the banning of the AL under a dubious anti-terrorism law. It remains to be seen whether Bangladesh’s version of constitutional reform resembles the 26th and 27th amendment abominations in this country.
Most voters have been swayed by rhetoric around ‘corruption’.
Bangladesh is, like Pakistan, an extremely young country. At least half of its 120 million voters have never voted before. The student-led movement to depose the Hasina regime was a coming-of-age moment for many young people. The further exercise of their political agency through the vote is no small matter. Yet most of the voting public has been swayed by rhetoric around ‘corruption’, that age-old empty signifier. Neither the interim government nor the three main political parties that contested seemed interested in naming, let alone addressing, deeper structural challenges like the limits of the cheap labour-centric export-oriented capitalist growth model and the powers of military, civil and judicial bureaucracies.
On the other end of the subcontinent, the establishment and mainstream intelligentsia celebrated recent events in Bangladesh, gleefully watching the India-friendly AL’s demise and the resuscitation of right-wing forces that have a much greater ideological synergy with the usual suspects here. It should be noted, for instance, that the BNP and JI fielded very few women candidates. Pakistan’s own embattled progressive forces can hardly be thrilled about Bangladesh’s current direction. The re-emergence of the JI in particular inevitably throws up memories of 1971, an event that many here continue to see only through the prism of Indian designs; the aspirations of the Bengali masses remain absent from the narrative. Indeed, the fact that the mainstream here continues to reduce the situation in Balochistan to a rendering of the proverbial foreign hand shows that few lessons have been learned from 1971.
Separately, Pakistan’s exceedingly young population also craves a break from the security-centric system. But youth aspirations for change have repeatedly been suffocated by manipulation of poll man-dates and/or outright re-pression. We have learned that getting rid of incumbents and bringing in ‘new’ faces can reinforce the under-lying structure of power rather than displacing it.
Bangladesh’s youth, who in August 2024 proved that revolutionary imaginaries can still motivate a collective politics of the people, will have their work cut out to hold the new elected government to account, both with regard to the economic needs of young working people and the preservation of democratic freedoms. Yet it is true that the current political clime in Bangladesh feels more open and hopeful than the gloom engulfing young people here.
This despondency is not just due to state authoritarianism or the complicity of the PML-N and PPP. The differences between the two countries, and the organised power of young people in particular, are explained in part by the fact that student unions are alive and well in Bangladesh. This foundational democratic institution has been conspicuous by its absence in this country for 42 years now, the ban enforced by Gen Ziaul Haq’s dictatorial regime in February 1984 still being in force. We need such nurseries of democracy to seed organised political forces that can genuinely challenge power wielders and their lackeys.
The writer teaches at Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad.
Published in Dawn, February 13th, 2026
