On October 28, 2006, Awami League demonstrated how political opposition could descend into organised violence. Its supporters took to Dhaka’s streets armed with bamboo poles and boat oars and by nightfall, several political activists had been killed as the country descended further into a constitutional crisis.

The episode became known as the logi-boitha movement, after the implements used by the protesters. Its significance was greater than the killings themselves. It revealed an emerging political doctrine…that is the law was an instrument to be employed when convenient and disregarded when obstructive.

Twenty years later, following Sheikh Hasina’s removal from power in August 2024 and the subsequent collapse of the Awami League’s political dominance, October 28 deserves reconsideration and revisit. Because it exposed a governing instinct that would eventually become increasingly recognisable during Hasina’s fifteen years in office.

Yes, the Awami League did not invent Bangladesh’s violent political culture. It did, however, help institutionalise the idea that political legitimacy belonged exclusively to itself and that opponents could be defeated outside the normal constraints of law.

The issue in October 2006 concerned the formation of a caretaker government ahead of parliamentary elections. The outgoing Bangladesh Nationalist Party government wanted former chief justice KM Hasan to lead the interim administration. The Awami League objected, arguing that Hasan’s previous association with the BNP made him unsuitable to supervise a credible election.

It was a substantial objection. The BNP government had already undermined confidence in the electoral process through controversial appointments and changes affecting the caretaker arrangement. Allegations of manipulated voter rolls compounded the distrust. The opposition had ‘legitimate’ grounds to demand safeguards.

But a legitimate grievance does not legitimise every method used to pursue it. Sheikh Hasina called on supporters to mobilise against the proposed caretaker arrangement. The Awami League-led alliance prepared for confrontation, while the BNP and Jamaat-e-Islami organised rival gatherings. Police prohibited assemblies around Paltan, yet activists gathered anyway.

The confrontation that followed occurred amid an organised campaign in which the possibility of violence was foreseeable. Clashes erupted around Paltan and Baitul Mukarram. Crude bombs exploded, bricks were thrown and rival groups fought for control of the streets. Television footage showed a fallen activist being beaten by a crowd. 

Contemporary accounts identified victims among Jamaat-e-Islami and its student organisation, Islami Chhatra Shibir. Al Jazeera reported on October 28 that twelve people had been killed nationwide and approximately 2,000 injured. Subsequent violence pushed the toll higher.

Yes, the Awami League was entitled to challenge Hasan’s appointment and demand electoral reform. It was not entitled to substitute physical coercion for constitutional procedure. Yet the movement blurred those boundaries, treating the defeat of an opponent as sufficient justification for methods that no democratic party should accept.

The BNP-Jamaat government bore responsibility for creating much of the institutional crisis. Rival activists also engaged in violence. But acknowledging those facts does not absolve the Awami League of responsibility for its own mobilisation or the killings attributed to its supporters.

Indeed, the more legitimate the opposition’s original complaint, the less defensible its resort to mob violence became. The movement also demonstrated an early feature of Hasina’s political method: a tendency to conflate the interests of the party with those of the nation.

Once that difference disappears, political opponents cease to be competitors with equal rights. They become obstacles to be removed.

The most revealing development came after the Awami League returned to office. In April 2007, investigators submitted a chargesheet against 46 Awami League leaders and activists and 14 people from other parties in connection with the Paltan violence. Arrest warrants were issued, then suspended pending further investigation.

In 2009, after Hasina became prime minister, her government moved to withdraw the murder case. A court approved the withdrawal on August 17. That decision deserves more attention than it has received.

The party that had mobilised the streets in 2006 now possessed the machinery of government. Instead of ensuring that allegations arising from political killings were tested through a credible judicial process, the administration facilitated the withdrawal of proceedings involving its own side. The connection with the following fifteen years is difficult to ignore.

Under Hasina, Bangladesh experienced increasingly restrictive political conditions, disputed elections, enforced disappearances, extrajudicial killings and the systematic weakening of opposition activity. State institutions became progressively less capable of restraining executive power.

The methods changed. The party no longer needed supporters carrying boat oars to enforce every political decision. It possessed the police, administrative machinery and coercive capacities of the state.

The underlying assumption, however, remained  that the political opponents were threats to be neutralised rather than participants in a shared constitutional order. The zero-sum character of this politics also imposed costs on the Awami League itself.

The irony was that October 2006 helped produce precisely the sort of extra-constitutional intervention the Awami League claimed to oppose. The Awami League ultimately benefited electorally from the subsequent transition, winning the December 2008 election. 

October 28 should therefore be remembered as an early warning about what happens when a party begins to regard its own victory as more important than the rules governing political competition.

The Awami League eventually discovered the weakness of that arrangement. It had spent years reducing the space for legitimate opposition, only to confront a political crisis that its own institutions could no longer resolve. The party had helped establish a political culture in which losing was intolerable. Its final mistake was assuming that it would never lose.

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Faisal Mahmud is the Managing Editor of Daily Waadaa