Bangladesh’s political theatre is accustomed to see a date announced, a nation is invited to hold its breath, and absolutely nothing happens.
The Awami League has considerable experience in this field. Its latest production is called "Sheikh Hasina Returns in December." The publicity campaign is well under way. The leading actress remains in India and the supporting cast is scattered across several countries.
The audience is divided between those who cannot wait and those who cannot stop chuckling.
The script, however, has acquired a necessary crescendo. On Monday, Reuters reported that Hasina had formally requested a new Bangladeshi passport and National Identity Card.
Her lawyers at London's Matrix Chambers wrote to the Bangladesh High Commission in New Delhi, seeking replacement documents after the reported revocation of her existing ones.
Hasina said she intended to return in December and surrender before a court. Her aides said the date will be announced once the formalities are completed.
A woman who governed Bangladesh for one and half decade with the brute force of a dictator, controlled its whole security establishment and presided over elections whose outcomes rarely troubled the imagination is now waiting for paperwork from the government of her staunch opposition.
The country's politics has produced quite a few stranger reversals but nothing probably has been quite so “administratively satisfying.”
To appreciate the December spectacle, one must return to 2004.
Abdul Jalil, then general secretary of the Awami League, had announced that the BNP-led government of Khaleda Zia would fall by April 30. He was confident and the deadline was firm. The party had a secret weapon…a trump card.
What was this card? Nobody outside the leadership seemed to know. Jalil promised to reveal it at the appropriate moment. The country waited in baited breath. On April 13, he assured journalists that the government would be forced out before the deadline. The trump card, he said, would be played in the third week of April.
Even Sheikh Hasina contributed a wonderfully elastic prediction. If the government did not fall on this 30th, it would fall on another 30th. A political deadline had been converted into a recurring calendar appointment.
Meanwhile, the incumbent Prime Minister Tarique Rahman, then a senior BNP leader, had other plans. On April 21, as the Awami League attempted to besiege Hawa Bhaban in Banani, Tarique and his younger brother Arafat Rahman took part in a friendly cricket match on a nearby field.
Tarique captained one side, Arafat the other. Tarique's team won.
The following day's newspaper carried a photograph of Arafat showing his elder brother batting techniques, with the match described as an effort to play down the opposition's siege.
Well, it was, let’s say, a quite extraordinary piece of political counter-programming. The opposition was preparing to overthrow the government. The then government's most influential young operator was playing cricket.
Then came April 30.
Khaleda Zia's government did not fall and Jalil's trump card did not materialise. The Awami League's leadership began explaining why the deadline had never been quite as definitive as everybody remembered.
Jalil admitted difficulties in implementing the plan. Obaidul Kader, then his deputy, described the deadline as a political strategy rather than a commitment by the party president. The trump card remained safely in the deck.
Twenty-two years later, the roles have reversed. Tarique Rahman is prime minister. Sheikh Hasina is in exile. And the Awami League is once again asking Bangladesh to circle a date on its calendar.
Only this time the promised event is not the fall of a government. It is the arrival of an ousted prime minister sentenced to death.
Hasina's circumstances are rather less promising than Jalil's were.
She fled Bangladesh on August 5, 2024, following a student-led, people-powered revolution that ended her rule. A United Nations investigation estimated that as many as 1,400 people were killed during the crackdown.
In November 2025, the International Crimes Tribunal sentenced her to death in absentia for crimes against humanity. Hasina denies responsibility and disputes the legitimacy of the proceedings.
Her Awami League is banned from political activities. Many senior party figures are imprisoned or abroad. India has not agreed to Bangladesh's extradition requests. Yet Hasina insists she will return.
"If death is my destiny, I would rather die on the soil of my own country, among my own people," she told the Associated Press. The declaration of course has the grandeur of political martyrdom but the practical arrangements remain less impressive.
BNP Acting Secretary General Ruhul Kabir Rizvi has asked whether she intends to arrive by parachute or helicopter, and whether she plans to land in Dhaka or Gopalganj.
National Citizen Party convener Nahid Islam has offered a less welcoming assessment. "There is no chance of [Hasina] Apa coming to this country in any December. Even if she comes, the gallows are ready for her, Inshallah."
Information State Minister Yaser Khan Chowdhury has gone further, offering to provide her with an air ticket. The government, in other words, has no shortage of welcoming committees. Their ideas of hospitality differ somewhat from Hasina's.
Meanwhile, the country's “most consequential political homecoming” was being advertised through a village loudspeaker.
In Naogaon's Manda, activists used a loudspeaker mounted on a battery-powered autorickshaw to announce Hasina's December return. Police arrested two local leaders of the banned Chhatra League and Swechchhasebak League and seized the vehicle.
Well, December obviously gives her supporters a deadline and her opponents a target. And it gives the media a continuing story. If the month passes without her arrival, another explanation can be found. There are, after all, twelve months in a year.
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Faisal Mahmud is the Managing Editor of Daily Waadaa