Comrades at the trough
In Bangladesh, one would be bemused to find out the ramification of offering a government car to an old “revolutionary.” The country has already conducted this experiment often enough to remove most scientific doubt.
Take a politician who has spent decades denouncing bourgeois exploitation, oligarchy, imperialism, crony capitalism and the assorted wickedness of the ruling class. Add a ministerial portfolio or a parliamentary seat obtained through a larger party. Stir gently. Before long the comrade may discover that the dictatorship of the proletariat can wait until after the next cabinet meeting.
No two men illustrate this transformation more vividly than Hasanul Haq Inu and Rashed Khan Menon. Their political histories are substantial enough that caricature is unfair. Inu was a Liberation War organiser, Marxist revolutionary, leader of the Jatiya Samajtantrik Dal (JASAD), participant in armed politics, political prisoner and eventually parliamentarian. Menon belongs to an equally old tradition of Bangladeshi left politics.
Yet both became pillars of the Awami League-led ‘dictatorial’ political order under Sheikh Hasina. Inu served as information minister and became one of the government’s most energetic public defenders. Menon served as Education Minister as well as Aviation and Tourism Minister.
The transformation was so conspicuous that “Inu-Menon” acquired a meaning larger than the two men themselves. In everyday political invective it came to evoke a particular species…the revolutionary who has discovered the catering facilities of the establishment.
That joke conceals a serious question. Why has a country with ‘spectacular inequality,’ dreadful labour conditions, recurrent industrial disasters, concentrations of capital and millions of precarious workers failed to produce a formidable democratic left? Bangladesh ought, on paper, to be splendid Marxist territory. Instead, its organised left has become what one academic interviewed for a Carnegie Endowment study called “microscopic”.
Its parties fragment, reunite, fragment again, issue statements, hold discussions and periodically attach themselves to somebody much larger. Even their splits have become a national joke; Prothom Alo recently described the fragmentation as resembling the breaking down of matter into “molecules and atoms”.
‘Democratic’ obsolescence
The answer begins in 1991, when parliamentary democracy returned after military rule. The BNP ‘unexpectedly’ won the election, defeating the Awami League. This mattered for the left because the Awami League, with its secular nationalist history and centre-left inheritance, had always appeared the more natural large political home for progressive parties.
But the restoration of democracy did not create an open ideological marketplace. It produced something much more Bangladeshi…a winner-takes-most competition between two enormous patronage machines.
The BNP and Awami League became gateways to the state. Access mattered enormously in an economy where licences, bank loans, contracts, government appointments, regulatory indulgence and political protection could determine who accumulated wealth and who merely accumulated principles.
It would be technically imprecise to describe Bangladesh as a classic rentier state; it does not live principally on oil or externally generated state rents. But as a political society it developed distinctly rentier habits. Political proximity could generate economic opportunity, and economic success increasingly required political accommodation. The crucial commodity was access.
A SANEM (local think-tank) presentation on the evolution of Bangladesh’s state-business relationship captures the process with bloodless academic vocabulary. It describes the post-2014 system as a “Dominant Party System”, notes unprecedented “partyarchal control” over business associations and argues that business actors had growing incentives to demonstrate loyalty to the ruling order. Rent allocation, it says, became increasingly influenced by partisan considerations.
Its description of businesses as “willing political clients” in a system of “clientelistic incorporation” could equally serve as a useful guide to understanding what happened to sections of the political left.
The capitalist understood the arrangement immediately. The revolutionary took slightly longer, because he first had to finish explaining Gramsci.
By the time the Awami League returned to power in 1996, the structural problem facing independent left politics was already obvious. The socialist vocabulary of the 1970s had survived rather better than socialist political organisation.
The Soviet Union had disappeared. Trade unions had been steadily incorporated into partisan structures. Workers increasingly belonged not to an autonomous class movement but to labour fronts affiliated with the major parties. This process weakened the left’s historic access to its natural constituency and that coalition politics after 1991 deepened its dependency on larger parties.
The left therefore faced an unpleasant choice…build slowly among workers and peasants without much money, media attention or prospect of office; or join an alliance with a large party and acquire seats, relevance and possibly ministries.
Bangladesh is not famous for making asceticism politically rewarding.
A rare breed
Some resisted though. The Communist Party of Bangladesh, Bangladesh Samajtantrik Dal and independent left activists continued campaigning on labour rights, energy policy, environmental destruction and inequality. It would be absurd to collapse the entire Bangladeshi left into Inu and Menon. Genuine activists have been beaten, jailed, marginalised and occasionally killed for taking positions against powerful interests.
Left organisations have often appeared where mainstream parties preferred not to…at factory gates, protests over natural resources and campaigns against environmentally destructive projects. Their electoral reward has been close to nothing.
In the most recent parliamentary election of 2026, candidates of a left alliance contested 149 constituencies and all lost; every candidate also lost his or her deposit. Prothom Alo noted the particularly awkward fact that parties whose constitutions and speeches revolve around workers, peasants and the poor have failed to gain meaningful support in industrial areas, poor northern districts, agricultural regions or among the urban middle class.
There is something almost magnificent about ‘a workers’ party without workers.’
This failure has consequences. Political ideology is easier to maintain when it provides a plausible road to political power. Once it becomes electorally sterile, ideology risks turning into either religion or costume. Bangladesh’s left has managed a little of both.
The campus is where the costume remains most visible. Public universities have long supplied recruits to left organisations, often intelligent young men and women from lower-middle-class or modest backgrounds arriving in Dhaka from districts where political and social life may be ‘considerably more conservative.’ For some, left politics offers genuine conviction. For others, it offers something sociologically interesting… admission to an intellectual fraternity.
One learns the vocabulary. Marx first, naturally; then Gramsci, Althusser, Foucault, Bourdieu, Spivak and whichever Frenchman is currently being used to explain a tea stall in Modhur Canteen or Hakim Chattar. Suddenly the bewildering experience of class mobility has a glossary. Cultural capital can compensate psychologically for the absence of financial capital.
There is nothing uniquely Bangladeshi about this. Universities everywhere turn awkward young people into people who can say “hegemonic discourse” without laughing. But in Bangladesh the process collides with a brutal economic reality. The graduate eventually needs an income.
And here the revolutionary confronts the rentier society.
A movement that cannot offer electoral power, serious institutions, viable professional networks or a mass constituency cannot easily sustain its cadres into middle age. The young activist may be rich in theory and poor in everything accepted by a landlord. At 21, precarity is bohemian. At 31, with parents, children, rent and school fees, it acquires another name.
The temptation is therefore not mysterious. The large political machine can provide what the small ideological party cannot: connections, employment, contracts, appointments, influence, social status and proximity to decision-making. The system does not have to persuade the leftist that capitalism is wonderful. It merely has to persuade him that his particular participation in the arrangement is historically necessary.
This is how patronage achieves its finest intellectual trick. Opportunism is rarely presented to oneself as opportunism. It arrives dressed as strategy.
Jumping the boat
One does not join the establishment for a parliamentary seat. One joins to prevent communalism. One does not defend an increasingly authoritarian government because one enjoys access to power. One defends the secular constitutional order. One does not overlook abuses by allies. One recognises the principal contradiction.
Bangladesh’s secular-Islamist divide made this rationalisation exceptionally potent.
A research published by Carnegie Endowment for International Peace found that the left suffers from a persistent public reputation for atheism and elitism, while many leftists themselves view the rise of religious conservatism as an existential political problem. The 2013 Shahbag movement sharpened this divide dramatically. Islamist rhetoric frequently treated secularism as hostility to Islam; secular activists increasingly saw Islamist mobilisation not merely as an electoral rival but as a threat to the character of the republic.
For an Awami League government seeking progressive allies, this was enormously convenient.
If the choice could be framed as Hasina or Islamisation, every abuse of the government became secondary. Elections, repression, corruption, disappearances, institutional capture: these could be acknowledged, deplored and then filed beneath the larger civilisational emergency. The authoritarian ruler did not need leftists to love authoritarianism. She merely needed them to fear the alternative more.
Inu became an especially striking case. Having once participated in an armed movement against an Awami League government, he eventually became information minister under another. During Hasina’s rule he was among the administration’s most outspoken defenders. In June this year the International Crimes Tribunal convicted him on three crimes-against-humanity charges arising from the suppression of the 2024 uprising, sentencing him to three ten-year terms to run concurrently. Inu rejected the verdict as the product of a “farcical trial”, and his family said it would pursue legal remedies.
The historical irony is almost too perfectly constructed. A man who began his career believing the Awami League insufficiently revolutionary ended it, or at least reached its latest chapter, accused and convicted of helping an Awami League government suppress a popular uprising.
Yet concentrating solely on Inu and Menon would allow the broader left off too easily. They are symptoms of an ecosystem.
The deeper problem is intellectual obsolescence combined with material dependency. Bangladesh has changed astonishingly since the 1970s. Garment capitalism created millions of industrial workers, migration transformed villages, remittances altered class relations, women entered paid employment on a huge scale, cities expanded chaotically, Islamic movements changed, social media destroyed old information monopolies and a new entrepreneurial class emerged.
Yet parts of the left still speak as though the country were awaiting translation into the correct Soviet pamphlet.
Even sympathetic assessments are brutal. A report in The Business Standard found leftist movement weakened by structural stagnation, internal division, declining participation and an inability to compete with newer mass movements. Anthropologist Manosh Chowdhury told the newspaper that the “crisis concerned not simply numbers but political relevance;” he also criticised “rigid organisational cultures that privilege loyalty.” The same article quotes Communist Party leader Ruhin Hossain Prince acknowledging the “damaging perception of leftists as atheists.”
Yet theory continues to fill the space abandoned by organizations.
A ‘toxic’ doctrination
This is why Bangladeshi left discourse can sometimes become ferociously doctrinaire precisely when left politics is practically weakest. When you cannot command a constituency, you can at least command terminology. When the factory worker ignores you, there remains the consolation of correcting somebody’s definition of “subaltern” on Facebook.
Meanwhile, political language itself is migrating elsewhere. Nafisa Tanjeem observes, in an essay on Pinaki Bhattacharya, that populists can appropriate recognisably left-wing arguments—anti-elitism, anti-globalisation, sovereignty and suspicion of technocracy—and combine them with very different ideological projects. Whatever one thinks of her analysis of Pinaki, the broader phenomenon is revealing…political vocabularies no longer belong securely to the ideological traditions that produced them.
The left’s problem, then, is not that Bangladesh has become insufficiently Marxist. It is that Bangladeshi society has produced enormous questions about class, labour, capital and power while organised Marxists have often been elsewhere discussing Marxism.
This brings us back to the government car.
A patronage state does not merely corrupt individuals. It changes the price structure of political behaviour. Independence becomes expensive; loyalty becomes remunerative. A small party can spend 30 years constructing an organisation and win 900 votes, or its leader can negotiate one constituency with a major party and enter parliament. Once this becomes normal, ideological politics begins selecting against its most principled practitioners.
The principled activist remains outside, poor, irrelevant and wait-for-it, half-educated. The adaptable one rises. His rise then teaches the next generation what success looks like. Thus Inu-Menon becomes not merely an insult but a career model.
The tragedy is that Bangladesh has rarely needed a serious democratic left more. A political economy characterised by concentrated wealth, weak unions, politically connected capital, urban precarity and enormous inequality ought to provide fertile ground. SANEM’s description of increasingly powerful business interests and clientelistic incorporation should be a left-wing organiser’s dream dossier. Instead, the institutions capable of converting these grievances into mass democratic politics remain feeble.
The lesson should not be that leftists are uniquely corruptible. They are not. Islamists, nationalists, liberals and conservatives all become philosophical about patronage when the patronage is theirs. The more interesting point is that Bangladesh’s winner-takes-all system punishes ideological independence and rewards incorporation. The left merely makes the contradiction funnier because nobody else arrives at the trough carrying so many books about the evils of troughs.
Nor is religion the answer to its predicament. Treating ordinary Muslim belief as evidence of impending theocracy has been one of the left’s least productive habits. It alienates precisely the working and lower-middle classes it claims to represent, then confirms the old accusation that Bangladeshi leftism is an urban cultural identity rather than a mass politics. A genuinely indigenous left would have to understand the society before correcting it. That means fewer imported templates and more empirical curiosity.
Perhaps the left can recover. History has a habit of reviving ideas just after respectable people pronounce them dead. But recovery would require abandoning the fantasy that possessing the correct vocabulary is equivalent to possessing a constituency. It would require building organisations capable of allowing activists to remain independent rather than spending their adulthood waiting to be absorbed by whichever major party offers protection.
Above all, it would require accepting a rather Marxist proposition… material incentives matter.
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Faisal Mahmud is the Managing Editor of Daily Waadaa