A banned party, a living identity

 By Pushp Saraf

June 30 has come and gone, but the questions surrounding Bangladesh’s week-long security crackdown on the banned Awami League (AL) are only beginning. Dhaka had treated the date as the culmination of a sustained campaign of surveillance and preventive measures, all aimed at stopping any public observance of the party’s 77th Foundation Day on June 23. A fuller picture of what actually happened will likely emerge only in fragments, partly because reporting on a group proscribed under the Anti-Terrorism Act carries real legal risk and many are wary of taking it on.

Even so, what has surfaced points to a pattern: despite the clampdown, AL leaders and supporters managed to organise low-key celebrations at several locations, cutting cakes and marking another milestone in the party’s long, turbulent history. Modest as these gatherings were, they suggest the party still retains well-entrenched pockets of organisational influence even after the sweeping campaign waged against it. It is generally believed that the AL continues to enjoy the sympathy and support of millions of family members of 1971 Liberation War heroes and martyrs even though they may be lying low at the moment with the official machinery wielding the stick.

If anything, security agencies seem poised to tighten their watch further, especially after AL president and former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina used this year’s anniversary to declare her intention to return to Bangladesh. In one such remark, she suggested that she hopes to do so before the year is out. Hasina has been in exile in Delhi since August 5, 2024, when a wave of unprecedented political violence drove her from office and out of the country.

Whether these declarations are meant chiefly to rally her battered supporters, or signal a more calculated political strategy, remains unclear. What is already clear is that Hasina and her party face steep legal and political hurdles ahead.  Their principal rivals, the ruling Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami (BJI), and the National Citizen Party (NCP), are united in trying to block any AL resurgence let alone the homecoming of Hasina.

This is not how a government and political rivals treat a party it believes is finished.

The legal threat is no longer abstract: Hasina has already been sentenced to death by the International Crimes Tribunal (ICT) on charges of crimes against humanity. There’s a sharp irony here. The ICT was created during Hasina’s own tenure to prosecute those accused of collaborating with Pakistan during Bangladesh’s 1971 Liberation War. The trial before it led to the execution of several senior BJI leaders. Now, in a dramatically changed political landscape, the same Tribunal has been made to turn its attention to Hasina and the party she once led from a position of unchallenged dominance.

One blow after another

The scale of the government apparatus arrayed against the AL this June did not emerge overnight. The interim administration first outlawed the party’s activities under the Anti-Terrorism Act in May 2025, in the aftermath of the mass uprising that drove Hasina from power in August 2024. What began as an executive ordinance has since hardened into statute: in April 2026, Bangladesh’s Parliament passed an Anti-Terrorism (Amendment) Bill enshrining the ban in law, with Salahuddin Ahmed describing the AL on the floor of the House as a “genocidal terrorist organization.” The Election Commission deregistered the party outright, and it was barred from contesting the general election held in February 2026. The BNP won the election and  Tarique Rahman was catapulted to power as the Prime Minister following his return from 17  years of exile in London. .

The legal noose has tightened in parallel. Media reports put the number of cases filed against the AL in Dhaka alone in the hundreds, with tens of thousands arrested nationwide since Hasina’s fall. Dhanmondi 32 itself, once treated as sacred ground, has been vandalised and partially bulldozed since Hasina’s fall, its walls now carrying graffiti rather than the reverence once afforded the birthplace of the nation’s founder.

The reason is not difficult to find. For all the legal and physical dismantling of its infrastructure, the AL is not simply a leadership clique that can be exiled or executed out of existence. It is a party that has won most of the elections and built a base measured in the tens of millions, going back to the 1971 Liberation War it led. Analysts who track Bangladeshi politics have pointed out that disenfranchising a constituency of that size does not make the constituency disappear; it simply makes its loyalties harder to predict. Will AL supporters abstain, split between the BNP and Jamaat depending on the district, or spoil their ballots in protest? Nobody, including the government, seems to know, and that uncertainty is itself a form of residual power.

United in opposition, divided otherwise

What makes the anti-AL consensus more fragile than it appears is the discord beneath it. The BNP and the BJI, both prepared to act in concert against the AL, spend nearly as much energy attacking one another over the unresolved ledger of 1971. BNP figures, including Syed Moazzem Hossain Alal and MP Rafiqul Islam Jamal have called for Jamaat itself to be banned over its wartime collaboration with Pakistan, while senior BNP leader Mirza Fakhrul Islam Alamgir has demanded the party apologise for its role in the conflict. The BJI has hit back hard: party figure ATM Azharul has accused the BNP of angling to “rehabilitate the Awami League” by keeping President Mohammed Shahabuddin, an AL-origin figure, in office, and challenged the BNP to say plainly whether it intends to govern alone.

That argument is not a sideshow. It is evidence that the anti-AL coalition has no settled answer to the question the Al’s exile keeps posing: what, exactly, fills the space the party once occupied? Bangladesh’s avowedly secular political tradition, of which the AL was the dominant carrier for half a century, has no obvious heir among parties built on more explicitly religious or nationalist lines. Commentary sympathetic to the party’s historical role has framed its removal as a strategic vacuum with consequences reaching well beyond domestic politics touching border security, radicalisation trends and Dhaka’s relations with India.

The AL’s opponents may have some real grievances. But removing a party by decree does not resolve the political weight it represented; it merely relocates that weight into a more volatile, less visible space. An election fought without a force that had governed for 15 of the previous 18 years, in districts where its support never fully evaporated, leaves a legitimacy question that armoured vehicles and special magistracy powers cannot answer. The very intensity of the campaign mounted to keep the AL off the streets each June 23 is the clearest evidence available that Bangladesh’s rival factions do not yet believe their own verdict on it.

(The Author is a veteran Journalist from New Delhi)