For much of Sheikh Hasina’s 15 years of autocratic rule, the boundaries of ‘acceptable’ political opinion were policed through state and a state of mind shaped by an imposed chilling effect. The ruling party occupied the centre and its intellectual allies guarded the progressive frontier. Anyone sufficiently troublesome on the religious right could be pushed beyond the limits of respectable debate.
The arrangement had its occasional embarrassments, including enforced disappearances, extrajudicial killings, annihilation of political opponents and elections whose outcomes were scarcely in doubt. But these were frequently treated as unfortunate complications in the larger business of defending ‘secularism’ and keeping a battery of right-wingers at bay.
Then came July 2024. Hasina fell and the prisons opened to political detainees. Previously marginalised groups returned to public life. Religious conservatives as well as Islamists who had spent years under surveillance or political restrictions became more visible.
Some liberals looked at this newly crowded public square and concluded that Bangladesh had moved dangerously to the right.
Manoz De, an editorial assistant at Prothom Alo, offers a version of this argument in an essay published on Tuesday. His concern is that the country's political discourse has shifted dangerously rightward, leaving liberals and leftists ‘increasingly’ marginalised. He points to Jamaat-e-Islami’s electoral gains, the collapse of organised left-wing politics, attacks on Baul performers and Sufi shrines, and the vulnerability of minorities and dissenters.
Yes, religious intimidation is real. So is the electoral weakness of the left. But Manoz De’s explanation treats the visibility of previously suppressed political groups as evidence of ideological transformation without adequately examining the suppression that preceded it. There is a nuance, and difference between a society becoming more conservative and conservatives becoming free to organise.
Confusing the two produces a comforting narrative for the so-called liberals. It allows them to portray themselves as victims of an emerging political order without confronting their own place in the one that collapsed. The question deserves to be turned on its head now. Rather than asking why Bangladesh’s right has become louder, we should ask why so many once considered it acceptable to keep the right silent.
Manoz De begins his essay with the historical proposition that Bangladesh is essentially a moderate, liberal society, shaped by centuries of Vaishnava, Baul, Nath, Yogi and Sufi traditions. There is truth in the description of Bengal's syncretic religious history but there is also rather less justification for treating that history as proof of an enduring liberal political consensus.
Religious accommodation is not the same thing as modern liberalism. Nor does a society's cultural pluralism establish how its citizens should vote, which political organisations they may join, or what forms of religious conservatism they are entitled to express.
Bengal has produced mystics and reformers, but also revivalists, orthodox movements and fierce theological disputes. These traditions coexisted and sometimes collided. Selecting the most agreeable strands and declaring them the authentic national character is a familiar exercise in historical editing.
The past is rarely as politically cooperative as its interpreters would prefer. Manoz's argument becomes more vulnerable when he moves from cultural history to electoral politics. He notes Jamaat-e-Islami's historic 2026 result and the wider gains of religious parties. He acknowledges that manipulated elections under Hasina made it difficult to measure their actual support. Yet he proceeds to interpret their subsequent performance as evidence of a substantial rightward shift.
Yes, Bangladesh lacked the conditions necessary for reliable measurement of political preferences for decades. Competitive elections were progressively dismantled. Opposition activists faced arrests and intimidation. Jamaat's registration was cancelled, its organisational activities were restricted, and senior leaders were executed following war crimes trials whose procedures attracted international criticism.
Those convicted were accused of crimes committed during the 1971 Liberation War. The historical responsibility for those crimes cannot simply be wished away, and criticism of the trials does not establish innocence. But neither does the gravity of an allegation eliminate the requirement for due process.
Political scientists distinguish between changes in underlying preferences and changes in political participation. An organisation can become more visible because its support has grown. It can also become more visible because restrictions on its existing supporters have been removed. The two processes may occur simultaneously.
Manoz largely treats the second as confirmation of the first.
Consider what happened after Hasina's removal. People who had previously avoided public association with Islamist organisations could participate openly. Networks that had operated under restrictions could mobilise and supporters who had concealed their preferences could express them without the same fear of immediate retaliation.
But their sudden visibility was not necessarily evidence of sudden conversion. A political movement emerging from repression is not automatically a political movement engulfing society. So, to understand the post-July visibility of the right, one must examine the political economy of its earlier exclusion.
The global War on Terror provided governments with an adaptable vocabulary. Security, extremism, radicalisation and counterterrorism became terms capable of carrying both legitimate public-safety concerns and less legitimate political ambitions. Bangladesh was no exception.
There were genuine extremist threats. Militant organisations carried out attacks and the state had a duty to protect the public. The 2016 Holey Artisan Bakery massacre was a devastating reminder that violent jihadism was not essentially an invention of government propaganda. But an actual terrorist threat does not justify treating an entire political or religious constituency as a potential terrorist population.
That nuance was repeatedly blurred. Islamist political activism, conservative religious expression, opposition mobilisation and violent extremism were sometimes discussed as though they belonged to a single continuum. Once that continuum was accepted, exceptional state measures could be defended as preventive necessity.
The result was a convenient political arrangement. The government could present repression as security policy, while sympathetic commentators could interpret the narrowing of political space as a contribution to secular stability.
The political theorist Giorgio Agamben's work on the state probably gives some ropes for the uninitiated here. His work theorized the tendency of governments to normalise extraordinary powers by invoking emergencies under which measures initially justified as exceptional become routine instruments of government.
In Bangladesh, under Hasina, that language of ‘emergency’ and security helped normalise a broader culture of impunity. Human rights organisations documented enforced disappearances, secret detention, torture and extrajudicial killings during Hasina's tenure. These abuses affected a range of perceived opponents, not only just Islamists. But religious conservatives and Islamist activists were particularly vulnerable to being placed outside the circle of public sympathy.
For some victims, even the elementary question of whether the state had the right to make them disappear became entangled with their ideological identity. This is where the conduct of self-described liberals deserves scrutiny.
Not every liberal supported repression. Many journalists, lawyers, civil society activists and rights defenders opposed it at considerable personal risk. Some of the strongest documentation of abuses came from people firmly committed to secular and liberal principles.
But another strand of ostensibly progressive politics became disturbingly comfortable with the proposition that the religious right represented a danger so exceptional that ordinary democratic protections could be relaxed. The moral crux was that these people might eventually threaten liberty, so their liberty could be restricted now.
It was an efficient way of defending democracy without allowing everyone to participate in it. But the truth is a liberalism that depends on police power to eliminate ideological competitors is not particularly liberal. It is a preference for one set of political outcomes, dressed in the language of universal rights.
And it raises a question about the present anxiety over the supposed silencing of liberals. Where was the same urgency when Islamist activists disappeared, when opposition figures faced politically motivated cases, or when religious conservatives were collectively treated as security threats?
The answer differs from person to person. Some protested consistently. Others did not. Still others helped construct the intellectual justification for exceptional treatment. Any serious reckoning must distinguish among them. But a selective principle of freedom in which state coercion becomes intolerable only when the victims belong to one's preferred ideological camp is hard to defend for sure.
The War on Terror has since lost much of its former capacity to settle political arguments. Its language remains available, but the assumption that invoking extremism automatically legitimises repression is harder to sustain after the exposure of Hasina-era abuses.
The old bargain between security and silence has become more difficult to sell now. That may explain some of the discomfort now being expressed. The people once discussed primarily as threats have become political participants. Their opponents must confront them through visibility and argument rather than exclusion.
Democracy can be terribly inconvenient that way.
The rise of Narendra Modi in India added another dimension to Bangladesh's political settlement.
Modi came to power in 2014, the same year Hasina consolidated her position through an election boycotted by the principal opposition. Their ideological vocabularies were different. Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party drew its political identity from Hindu nationalism. Hasina presented the Awami League as the indispensable guardian of secular Bangladesh.
Yet the two governments developed a durable strategic partnership. This was, to be honest, not as paradoxical as it appeared. States are generally less interested in the ideological purity of their neighbours than in their usefulness.
Hasina offered continuity, security cooperation, action against insurgent networks and a government willing to accommodate important Indian strategic interests. She also represented a familiar alternative to Bangladeshi political forces that India viewed with suspicion, particularly Jamaat-e-Islami and sections of the BNP.
India meanwhile offered diplomatic support and regional legitimacy at a time when Hasina’s government's democratic credentials were increasingly contested. So, the bargain had a clear political logic. Hasina could present herself internationally as a dependable barrier against Islamist extremism. India could treat her continued rule as an asset to regional stability.
Consider the contradiction. Modi's government advanced an explicitly majoritarian political project at home while maintaining exceptionally close relations with a Bangladeshi government that justified its own political dominance partly through the language of secularism.
Apparently, religious nationalism was a grave danger when practised by Bangladesh's opposition but a manageable diplomatic detail when represented by India's governing party.
This did not mean every act of repression in Bangladesh was ordered or requested by New Delhi. Nor does it mean India's support was the sole reason Hasina survived politically. Her control over domestic institutions, the security establishment and electoral administration was indispensable.
But Indian backing strengthened the external environment in which her government operated. So, Hasina's government benefited when its opponents could be characterized as right-wing extremists. Modi's government benefited from a neighbour that was predictable and hostile to political forces New Delhi distrusted. The language of global counterterrorism helped connect these interests.
It also offered sections of Bangladesh's liberal establishment a convenient moral explanation for supporting or overlooking an increasingly authoritarian government. So, one could oppose religious fundamentalism while remaining curiously untroubled by the disappearance of political opponents. One could celebrate secularism while overlooking the systematic destruction of electoral competition.
And one could condemn majoritarianism in principle while avoiding the awkward question of why a Hindu-nationalist government was among the closest international partners of Bangladesh's supposedly indispensable secular administration. This is the contradiction Manoz’s essay does not sufficiently examine.
The July Revolution disrupted that arrangement. Hasina's removal deprived New Delhi of its preferred partner and deprived Bangladesh's old political establishment of the argument that its continued monopoly was necessary for regional security.
The return of suppressed political forces was therefore also the collapse of a political and diplomatic framework that had helped determine which Bangladeshis were considered acceptable participants in public life. Some of those who emerged from that framework were religious conservatives. Some were Islamists. Some held deeply illiberal views. Others had simply been excluded because of their political associations.
The old system had little incentive to do so. Its usefulness depended partly on keeping the categories blurred.
Manoz De is on firmer ground when he describes attacks on Sufi shrines, Baul performers, religious minorities and cultural activities. These incidents are serious and they deserve investigation and unequivocal condemnation.
The problem is, a distinction between an Islamist party, a conservative voter and a violent religious vigilante is not a semantic luxury, rather it is the difference between political analysis and collective accusation.
Indeed, the same distinction was missing when the War on Terror encouraged the treatment of broad religious constituencies as reservoirs of extremism. Repeating that error after the July revolution would hardly qualify as ‘liberal’ progress. Nor should the prominence given to attacks on shrines be mistaken for the disappearance of liberal voices.
These incidents have received extensive press coverage. Civil society organisations have documented them. Rights advocates have challenged the authorities. Courts have intervened. Editorials and commentaries have condemned religious intimidation. Manoz's own essay is evidence of an active liberal argument taking place in a major national newspaper.
The boundaries of respectable politics were policed by an alliance of state power, institutional influence and a particular understanding of secular nationalism for years and the right wing people were excluded from political competition through coercive measures.
Again, after the July Revolution, the public square became more contentious and less deferential to its former gatekeepers. That is uncomfortable for anyone accustomed to setting the terms of debate. The real danger is that legitimate concerns about religious intimidation become entangled with nostalgia for an earlier political monopoly.
There is also a problem with the proposed remedy. Manoz called for political discourse to move back towards the centre, perhaps even slightly to the left. But who decides where the centre lies?
The centre is not a permanent address on a political map. It changes with public preferences and political competition. Nor is moderation inherently ‘liberal’. A moderate position between equal citizenship and religious discrimination may still be discriminatory. A compromise between due process and arbitrary detention may still violate fundamental rights.
It barely matters whether or not the national conversation sits at the centre, left or right. The thing that matters is whether political participants accept constitutional limits, individual liberty, equal citizenship and peaceful democratic competition.
Labels, in all good senses, can no longer do the moral work. Bangladesh needs a true liberal politics capable of escaping this tendency of labeling. Such politics would defend a Baul singer's right to perform and an Islamist's right to organise peacefully. It would protect a Hindu citizen from religious intimidation and a conservative Muslim from arbitrary arrest. It would investigate attacks on shrines without turning every religious conservative into a suspect. It would prosecute actual terrorists without treating religious identity as evidence of terrorism.
And it would recognise that freedom of expression includes the possibility that other people will use their freedom to reject liberal arguments. Because, the right answer to religious authoritarianism cannot be secular authoritarianism.
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Faisal Mahmud is the Managing Editor of Daily Waadaa