For eight years, Mir Ahmad bin Quasem was imprisoned in complete darkness and isolation, bitten endlessly by mosquitoes and with cockroaches and rats scouring his body. “There was nothing I could do,” he recalls of his ordeal, except “preparing myself every night for the executioners to come and take me out”.
Quasem was locked up in 2016 while serving on the legal team of his father, a leader of the Islamist Jamaat-e-Islami party targeted by the regime of Sheikh Hasina, then prime minister of Bangladesh.
He was among the hundreds held in the dreaded “House of Mirrors” prison, where blindfolded detainees were kept in solitary confinement.
Then, at dawn on August 6th last year, he was dragged out into the light. “I thought I was going to be executed, so I recited my last prayers,” he says. Instead, he was dumped in an empty field, a free man.
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Hasina’s Awami League government had been ousted from power after a student-led uprising now known as the “Monsoon Revolution”. Hasina herself had fled the country.
“I cried when I found out. I couldn’t believe we had been liberated from fascism,” Quasem said.
With the regime in ruins, the student revolutionaries plotted for a new future. They invited Muhammad Yunus, the octogenarian Nobel Peace Prize-winning economist, to serve as a caretaker leader.
The Herculean task of his interim government was not only to overhaul the political, social, judicial and economic institutions captured by Hasina’s party, but also account for extrajudicial killings and disappearances during her 15-year rule, while trying to recover billions of dollars lost to corruption.
Now with elections fast approaching to set Bangladesh on a new path, Yunus is struggling to keep the country of 170 million people together.
The student movement is losing faith in the possibility of what they term a “fresh political settlement” with new faces, as the entrenched political dynasties that have long run the country reassert themselves. Sectarian violence is commonplace amid fears of a surge in radical Islamism, while the Awami League claims there have been killings of some of its members.
And Yunus himself is facing accusations of abusing power and of lawfare after his government banned the Awami League from elections set to be held in February, blaming it for a “co-ordinated violent activity” during the deadly protests last year.
The 85-year-old says he is dedicated to fostering “unity among all political and social forces that took part” in last year’s uprising, because that “is essential to protect the gains of our struggle, to resist all conspiracies against the people’s mandate and to ensure our successful transition to democracy”.
But some now believe the revolution looks like a false dawn.
“We had a rare moment of national unity and that is completely gone now,” says Shafqat Munir, senior fellow with the Bangladesh Institute of Peace and Security Studies in Dhaka. “We are totally divided, we are fighting among each other – and not just across party lines.”
Retribution
In the avenues of the capital, the appetite for retribution against the self-exiled Hasina is plainly visible.
Banners show photos of the former ruler with a noose around her head, reading: “We demand the execution of the killer Hasina – the chief architect of the horrific massacre of July-August 2024.”
According to the UN, as many as 1,400 people – including dozens of children – were killed in last year’s uprising, most by Bangladeshi security forces.
One of the interim government’s first acts was to appoint a new chief prosecutor to the country’s International Crimes Tribunal, Mohammad Tajul Islam, to bring those responsible for the killings to justice.
In January, he brought charges against Hasina and 11 others in her regime relating to enforced disappearances and extrajudicial killings that happened during her rule.
Then in July, a tribunal formally charged her with alleged crimes against humanity related to the Monsoon Revolution.
Her trial in absentia ended last month, and a verdict is expected next week.
Tajul Islam says he is seeking the death penalty for the 78-year-old “for ordering the killings, for planning, for preparation, for incitement, for abetment” of last year’s “massacre” during the protests. “These are the most serious crimes – the gravest of grave crimes,” he says.
The chief prosecutor says Dhaka has made an extradition request to India, but no formal response has been given by New Delhi. Officials in Delhi and in Dhaka say privately this is unlikely. India’s extradition treaty gives it the right to refuse requests if it judges the offence to be “of a political character”.
In written remarks, Hasina said the proceedings against her “are a politically motivated charade”, which “have been brought by kangaroo courts”.
At the same time, the students and other political groups piled pressure on the interim government to drum the Awami League out of politics completely.
In May, it finally obliged by ordering a “temporary” ban of the party from political activity, citing “national security” concerns.
However, rather than going through the courts to curtail Hasina’s party, the Yunus administration issued an executive order, based on a recent amendment to the country’s Antiterrorism Act.
The change broadened the law’s scope to allow authorities to designate political parties as terrorist groups if deemed a threat to public or national security.
Awami League members, many of whom are now based across the border in Kolkata, India, accuse Yunus of pursuing political vendettas.
Mohammad Arafat, a senior member of the Awami League, says that “Yunus is clearly dividing the nation and proceeding with a sham election” while “making a peaceful democratic transition nearly impossible”.
Hasina, meanwhile, warns that “millions of people” who support her party “will not vote” in Bangladesh.
Yunus counters that “in the strongest possible terms the national election will be held on time in the first half of February 2026” and that “all conspiracies, obstructions or attempts to delay or derail the election will be firmly resisted” because “no evil force will be allowed to undermine our march to democracy”.
Comeback
With the Awami League out of the picture, the country’s other major party – the Bangladesh National Party (BNP) – is plotting a comeback.
Analysts predict the BNP will win a majority in the national elections, with Tarique Rahman expected to emerge as the country’s next leader.
The 59-year-old has been in exile since 2008 avoiding corruption charges that he says were politically motivated.
During the BNP’s last stint in power, which ended in 2006, Bangladesh was ranked the world’s most corrupt country by Transparency International for four consecutive years.
Rahman has not returned, his party’s leadership says, amid fears he could suffer the fate of the late Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto, assassinated while campaigning for parliamentary elections after coming back to her country in 2007. It is also possible Rahman’s mother, the former prime minister Khaleda Zia, could be called upon to serve as leader.
For Rahman, the true revolution will only start when “a credible election” takes place. “People wanted to see change. But it’s not possible for the interim government to do all these kinds of things. Because to bring reforms, to do reforms, to change things, you need a government which reflects the will of the people.”
He also says: “The time is very close for my return to Bangladesh.”
However, for many in the student movement, the BNP’s return would not fulfil their dream of a fresh start.
Nahid Islam, leader of the National Citizen Party spearheaded by the students who led the revolution, fears the return of politics as usual.
Like Sheikh Hasina, who is the daughter of the country’s founding president, Rahman is the product of a dynasty. His father Ziaur Rahman was president and Zia, his now 80-year-old mother, took control of the BNP for decades until passing it on to her son.
Islam believes last year’s uprising “was a rejection of a fascist political settlement, of entrenched corruption and of an old style of politics that no longer served the people” and when “ordinary people rose in resistance, they came out on to the streets not just to oust a government, but to demand a new political settlement built on fairness, accountability and dignity for all”.
In a country with a tainted electoral history, he fears there is a chance next year’s vote will not be entirely free and fair because the BNP is already “dominating all political fields”, he says. Across Dhaka, streets are already plastered with Rahman’s face.
Balance
Whoever leads Bangladesh’s next government will have to balance growing ties with China and strained ones with India while managing an economy where the vital garment sector has been hit by 20 per cent US tariffs.
Yunus’s government has steadied prices and taken over the banks that, officials claim, were looted by cronies of the former regime. Central bank governor Ahsan Mansur says in his residence that the interim administration pulled the economy back “from the brink” after “the banking system was completely robbed off, there was a lack of financial discipline, including fixing interest rates, fixing the exchange rate and a running down of foreign reserves”.
The World Bank said in its October outlook that the economy rebounded this year “supported by strong exports, record remittances and an increase in foreign exchange reserves” and it applauded the adoption of a market-based exchange rate and other changes. However, it also called for “urgent reforms” to expand trade, strengthen competitiveness and diversify the economy.
Mansur is also leading an asset recovery effort for more than $230 billion (€260 billion) that officials estimate were drained out of the country.
Bangladesh has brought charges against members of Hasina’s family, including her niece Tulip Siddiq, a British politician, and her daughter Saima Wazed. Siddiq has said the charges are untrue and politically motivated, while Hasina’s son, Sajeeb Wazed, has called wider allegations against the family “completely false, baseless, fabricated and motivated by ulterior political agendas of the Yunus regime”.
Successful investigations would set a valuable precedent, says Mushtaq Khan, a Bangladeshi professor of economics at Soas in London and member of the Anti-Corruption Reform Commission. “We need to get some of the big shots who looted the country to demonstrate that no one should act with impunity in the future.”
But some of the accused are fighting back.
Mohammed Saiful Alam, one of Bangladesh’s richest men, and his family recently submitted an international arbitration claim to the World Bank against Dhaka after being accused of diverting about $12 billion out of the country’s banking system. The tycoon, now based in Singapore, denies the allegations.
After years of what many like Khan describe as nothing but a kleptocracy, “business people are waiting to see what happens”, a senior businessman in Dhaka says.
“Yunus came as a messiah, pushed through reforms, cleaned up the mess, tried Hasina and called for the seamless election in Bangladesh’s history, all that is great,” the businessman says. “The problem is that those around him think they are doing great, but they live in a bubble while the politics are very tense – we are missing a big opportunity here.”
In the halls of Jamuna House, the temporary government residence of Yunus in central Dhaka, there is a sense of pride only tamed by the frustration and exhaustion of himself and his team as the country faces what promises to be a tense electoral period. “Professor Yunus is just too nice to run the government of this country,” a close adviser says. “I just hope history is kind to him.”
Additional reporting by Redwan Ahmed in Dhaka and Susannah Savage in London
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2025
