History is not an alibi
Sheikh Hasina is attempting to shape the narrative of her political future before she attempts to reshape her broken party. In recent weeks, the ousted prime minister first published an opinion article in The Indian Express, presenting herself as a democratic leader unjustly removed from office and portraying the Awami League as the indispensable custodian of national identity.
And then, in an interview with Reuters, she went further, declaring that she and other exiled senior party leaders would return to Bangladesh by December to surrender to the authorities. She framed this homecoming as the beginning of a grand political comeback.
The confidence of that declaration deserves scrutiny. It assumes that history itself guarantees redemption, suggesting that the Awami League’s role in Bangladesh’s liberation and development is sufficient to erase the grim bloody record of its years in power. It asks the nation to remember sacrifices made long ago while overlooking atrocities in the recent past.
Yet history is not an alibi. No political movement, however foundational to a nation’s birth, is permanently exempt from democratic judgment.
No serious observer can deny the Awami League’s historic contribution to Bangladesh. The party led the Language Movement, articulated the Six-Point demand, guided the struggle for independence, and, under Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, gave political expression to the aspirations of a nation seeking freedom.
Those achievements belong permanently to history. They cannot be erased by contemporary political hostility. But history confers honour…not immunity. A political party may possess a glorious past and still fail catastrophically in the present.
A liberation movement can become intolerant of dissent. A leader may inherit a remarkable legacy and yet systematically weaken the very institutions that legacy was meant to strengthen. Democratic accountability exists precisely because history alone cannot determine political legitimacy.
That is the central weakness running through Hasina’s recent interventions. They are rich in memory but poor in reflection, cataloguing victories while evading responsibility. She wrote in her op-ed that her absence does not mean silence.
Yet millions of Bangladeshis are asking a different question: if her absence is not silence, is it accountability? Is it remorse? Is it recognition of the suffering endured by families who lost children, parents, and friends during the July uprising? Is it an acknowledgement of the years marked by enforced disappearances, arbitrary detentions, a shrinking civic space, manipulated elections, the intimidation of journalists, and the steady erosion of institutional independence?
These questions remain unanswered because Hasina continues to frame every criticism of her government as persecution and every demand for accountability as political vengeance. She portrays herself primarily as the victim of an illegitimate campaign rather than the leader of a government whose actions produced the greatest political rupture in Bangladesh since independence.
That argument demands extraordinary historical amnesia. An ousted prime minister cannot simply dismiss allegations involving killings, torture, and institutional decay as fabrication without confronting the evidence.
A government that remained in power for fifteen years cannot plausibly explain a nationwide popular uprising solely through foreign conspiracies or opposition plots. A leader who exercised overwhelming authority over the state cannot speak only as a victim while declining to answer for those who became victims under her administration.
The Awami League’s greatest crisis today is not that it has lost office. Political parties routinely lose elections, recover, and return. Its deeper crisis is its continuing inability—or unwillingness—to understand why so many Bangladeshis ultimately rejected it.
The July uprising was the culmination of years of accumulated frustration with unchecked executive power, corruption, police excesses, a highly politicised administration, rising economic pressures, and youth unemployment. Many Bangladeshis gradually came to believe that the state no longer belonged equally to all citizens.
The police increasingly appeared to serve partisan interests, the civil service was widely viewed as politically aligned, and judicial independence seemed compromised by executive influence. Elections increasingly resembled administrative exercises rather than competitive democratic contests. Student politics, once associated with idealism, became synonymous with intimidation and patronage.
Yet this is precisely the conversation Hasina avoids. Instead, she returns repeatedly to the infrastructure achievements of her governments: the Padma Bridge, the Dhaka Metro Rail, the Karnaphuli Tunnel, expanded electricity generation, and social safety programmes.
Bangladesh undoubtedly experienced impressive gains in infrastructure and economic growth during her tenure. The question, however, is whether development alone can substitute for democratic legitimacy. Infrastructure is never politically neutral. Roads and power plants matter profoundly, but they cannot erase concerns about how public power is exercised.
Flagship projects became the subject of persistent allegations involving inflated costs and weak transparency. Development became the principal justification for concentrating political power.
That formula rarely succeeds indefinitely. Economic growth does not eliminate the desire for political dignity. New highways cannot replace public trust, and rising GDP cannot answer allegations of enforced disappearance. Concrete alone cannot resolve questions of justice.
Bangladesh does not need selective history; it needs complete history. It must honour the Awami League’s massive contribution to national independence while also remembering the tragic victims of state repression, dead students, compromised elections, and Bangladesh’s democratic future.
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The writer is a political analyst. He can be reached at mwtanvir@gmail.com