When she was sentenced to death by a court in Dhaka last November, Sheikh Hasina Wajed, the ousted prime minister of Bangladesh, was typically defiant. From the New Delhi bungalow allotted to her by the government of India, she said she was “very proud” of her “record on human rights and development.” But as Bangladeshis took to the streets to celebrate the verdict, which after all was symbolic, they remembered a very different legacy.
Hasina first served as prime minister from 1996 to 2001, then came to power again in 2009. Over the subsequent fifteen years, according to the Bangladeshi human rights organization Ain o Salish Kendra, her security forces carried out two thousand extrajudicial killings. They abducted more than 1,800 people and detained them in a network of secret sites known as Aynaghor, or the House of Mirrors. (A commission investigating these disappearances believes that the real figure may be two to three times greater.) Relying on brute force and a pliant judiciary, Hasina launched an assault on the country’s main opposition parties, the center-right Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) and the hard-line religious Jamaat-e-Islami. She brought more than two million court cases against these political opponents, who proved unable to organize any effective opposition. Few public figures dared to criticize her openly; people of all classes and backgrounds had been disappeared for less.
Hasina projected an image of herself as a grand developer of both the country’s infrastructure and its social standards. When I toured Dhaka’s premier arts academy after her fall, I found hundreds of portraits she had commissioned of herself, including some in which her pet projects—nuclear power plants and three-lane highways—emerge from the folds of her saris. Between 2010 and 2020 the country’s economy grew by about 7 percent each year, largely from remittances sent by the eight million Bangladeshis who have migrated abroad and on the backs of the four million people, mostly women, who work in overcrowded factories producing garments for export to the West. Millions were lifted out of poverty and millions enrolled at newly constructed schools, but it is difficult to know exactly how transformative these changes were, because Hasina’s party, the Awami League, controlled all methods of data collection. The oligarchs grew richer than ever before: bureaucrats and businessmen close to the regime siphoned a reported $16 billion a year out of the country for their own benefit. This was one of the largest state-backed embezzlement schemes in history—in a country of 170 million people, 40 million of whom, according to the UN, live in extreme poverty.
As she prepared for her third consecutive sham election, which took place in January 2024, she boasted with characteristic understatement that it was “not that easy to overthrow me through a democratic system.” She had cowed the press, bought the elite, and shuttered the opposition—an impressive feat of state capture. And through it all, she retained the support of foreign allies—principally India, the EU, and the US—who were delighted to have a strong secular partner in one of the world’s most populous Muslim countries. “People couldn’t imagine a future outside of Hasina’s rule,” Mahfuz Anam, one of the country’s most prominent newspaper publishers, told me. “So they all fell in line.”
They stayed in line until the summer of 2024. On July 10 public university students in Dhaka took to the streets to protest the regime’s abuse of a quota system for government jobs for the benefit of its own loyalists. At first the demonstrations were led by a small number of student activists, who organized within their dormitories. But after Hasina attempted to muzzle the students, tens of thousands of ordinary Bangladeshis joined them in the monsoon rain to rebuke a decade and a half of democratic backsliding.
In response, beginning on July 15, the police and the thugs of the Awami League’s youth wing were deployed against unarmed civilians. Tanks rolled onto the streets and military helicopters flew low overhead as the army showed its support for the government. (The extent of the army’s use of lethal force remains disputed.) Together, the regime’s forces killed more than a thousand people and injured more than 10,000. But they couldn’t stem the tide of what became known as the Monsoon Revolution.
On August 4 Hasina called a meeting of her security commanders and ordered them to carry on shooting, but they could read the writing on the wall. Hasina’s own nephew Sheikh Fazle Noor Taposh, the powerful mayor of South Dhaka, had already been seen boarding a flight to Singapore. The following day, August 5, the army finally rejected Hasina’s order to fire on civilians. She had no choice but to leave the prime minister’s residence before the protesters could find her. By 3:00 PM she had entered Indian airspace, on her way to a new life of exile.
That afternoon, Bangladeshis celebrated their victory on the streets where they had been relentlessly attacked for three weeks. They sang Bengali folk songs dating from the anticolonial struggles against the British Raj and graffitied walls with proclamations of their newfound freedom. Nusrat Tabassum, one of the students who led the movement, told me with tears in her eyes that when she heard Hasina had left the country, she knelt down on the road and prayed. Men walked out of prison and into the halls of power. Others blinked in sunlight they hadn’t seen in years of secret detention. Hasina’s ministers rushed to the border. Some made it to India, Singapore, and the West. Others did not. Eleven of them are still detained in Dhaka, awaiting trial.
On August 6, 2024, a handful of students, some of whom had suddenly become national heroes after being tortured by police the previous month, went to the Banga Bhavan in central Dhaka. The stucco complex, surrounded by a grand lawn, was once used by the colonial governor and now houses the country’s figurehead president, Mohammed Shahabuddin. The students met with the army chief—General Waker-uz-Zaman, who is related to Hasina by marriage—and about a dozen high-ranking officers. A single hour was allotted for their discussion, but the talks continued for almost seven. Together they were negotiating the future of Bangladesh.
Three days earlier, on the eve of the revolution, the students had invited the eighty-four-year-old Nobel Peace Prize–winning economist Muhammad Yunus, whom Hasina had persecuted for years in the country’s pliant courts, to lead an interim government of national unity. On the night of Hasina’s fall, they announced their plan to the public. But the army brass had different ideas; according to one participant in the meeting on August 6, whose account was confirmed by two others, the generals wanted a “technocratic” government led by “anyone but Yunus,” whose “international reputation,” they feared, would make it difficult to challenge him.
The students insisted on Yunus’s leadership as well as the inclusion of student representatives in the interim government as guarantees of the change they had fought for. “Without that, it would have been just like a military government,” said one of the student leaders who was at the meeting. Bolstered by an enormous demonstration outside the Banga Bhavan, the students won the argument.
On August 8 Yunus flew home from Paris, where he had been attending the Olympics. He pledged to reform the state and right the wrongs of the past, describing the moment as Bangladesh’s “second independence” and a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.” But as he settled into the vacant prime minister’s office, the terms of his authority remained unclear. His Nobel Prize afforded him support both inside and outside the country, but still he served at the invitation of the student revolutionaries, who themselves had disparate, contradictory, sometimes vengeful impulses.
Consequently, Yunus failed to stop the reprisals that followed the revolution. Shortly after Hasina landed in Delhi, crowds looted her official residence, burned down the Awami League’s headquarters, and lynched dozens of her party’s members. Yunus later issued a blanket amnesty for everything the protesters had done before August 8—not that he could have stopped the violence even if he’d wanted to. The police had deserted their stations, fearing retribution for their part in the killing of protesters. Hundreds of people deemed close to the old regime—including a few of Hasina’s senior officials but also journalists, lawyers, and retired members of Parliament who likely bore no responsibility for her government’s crimes—were jailed on trumped-up charges of murdering protesters in July. They remain imprisoned today, joined by dozens of others in the months since.
Yunus, as chief adviser to the new interim government, asked members of the country’s battered civil society to help him move the state toward real democracy. He appointed a government of academics, activists, and retired bureaucrats and formed eleven separate commissions to recommend reforms in every sector of governance, from the judiciary to labor rights.
Initially, Yunus spoke of staying in government for up to four years to implement these reforms, but his attempt floundered. Lacking a coherent platform, he faced demands from every direction, including various interest groups embedded within the government bureaucracy he relied on. Several members of the government told me that their own officials were resistant to change; some remained loyal to the old regime or the oligarchs, while others were biding their time until the arrival of a new elected government.
“They don’t want to do what we say because they think it will be a liability for them later,” Mahfuj Alam, who served as de facto information minister until late last year, told me in his office at the Secretariat, a vast and crumbling government complex in downtown Dhaka. Last August, on the first anniversary of Hasina’s fall, Yunus announced that elections would be held in February, though the country is still largely unreformed, and the conditions that enabled Hasina’s autocracy remain in place.
Meanwhile the students, flush with victory and anger, have sought to keep the revolutionary spirit of 2024 alive. Before last April’s Bengali New Year celebrations, art students at Dhaka University created a fourteen-foot-tall papier-mâché effigy of Hasina, complete with blood dripping from enormous fangs, to lead the colorful parade of floats that marks each year’s festivities. When I visited the campus the evening before, its normally verdant lawn was charred and smoldering. “Miscreants,” I was told, had crept in to destroy the float, but artists were working through the night, under police protection, to produce a replacement before dawn.
“The military is the only institution that is holding the country together right now,” Mir Ahmad bin Quasem Arman, a British-trained lawyer who was detained in secret military custody for eight years under Hasina, told me in Dhaka last year. The army remains more powerful than any other group; it is the only meaningful guarantor of security in a country where mob violence has become common, and Bangladeshis know it. “If the military were to take power tomorrow, the people would support them,” the student activist Umama Fatema said in exasperation.
It wouldn’t be the first time. In 1975 a group of mid-ranking officers deposed Hasina’s father, Mujibur Rahman, the first prime minister of Bangladesh. Just a few years after its independence, famine, crime, and political violence were raging in the young country. Members of the Bengal Lancers, an elite cavalry regiment, killed Mujib and almost every member of his family, including his nine-year-old son, Hasina’s brother. Many were glad to see him go—Mujib had become despotic, as would his daughter—but the violence of the colonels begat only more violence. Over the next four decades, Bangladeshis lived through four coups, four additional coup attempts, and seventeen years of military rule.
As one of her family’s few survivors, Hasina always distrusted the military, but she could never discount it completely. After she came to power for the second time, in 2009, she used Indian diplomatic and intelligence support to purge its ranks of suspected opponents. From then on, Hasina and the military were closely aligned; the army assisted in her campaign of political repression, while she took care not to diminish its powers and privileges. The army continued to occupy the dense jungle of the Chittagong Hill Tracts, pursue its own business interests, and manage a network of cantonments—military cities within cities that take up vast swaths of real estate in the overcrowded country.
Hasina may be gone, but the army is now stronger than ever. Though it has denied that it wants to take over directly—General Waker told Al Jazeera last year that direct rule was not the military’s “cup of tea”—it is intent on keeping its power and resisting accountability for the crimes of the past. Since Hasina’s fall, the army has worked hard to prevent victims of disappearance from seeing justice.
Nabila Idris, a member of the Yunus government’s Commission of Inquiry on Enforced Disappearances, has spent the past year collecting evidence from victims and perpetrators alike. Between 2009 and 2015, she explained, those abducted were people who had been involved in Islamist or opposition politics. But after that, she said, “you begin to see some people being picked up without any political connections at all.” Hasina portrayed the crackdown as part of the “war on terror.” Her forces used indiscriminate and extrajudicial detention, torture, and killing to put down Islamist militant groups in the jungles of northern Bangladesh, then used the same tactics on thousands of civilians they perceived as opponents.
The units were under formal civilian control, but they were staffed by senior officers who were transferred in and out of the regular army. Idris told me that the US, the UK, and at least two EU countries regularly provided training to units implicated in extrajudicial killings and disappearances. “Victims say they were brought to detention centers and questioned by a ‘white man’ or…someone they believed was American,” she said. The commission has also pointed to evidence of Indian involvement. Multiple victims have testified that they heard Hindi being spoken in their secret detention cells. According to the report, Hasina’s opponents were also regularly abducted and transferred across the 2,500-mile-long border with India. Narendra Modi’s government was one of her staunchest allies.
A number of determined Bangladeshis are now struggling to hold the security forces accountable. For Hasinur Rahman, that struggle began within hours of Hasina’s flight. A decorated lieutenant colonel who worked in counterterrorism, Hasin was abducted in 2011 and again in 2018. During his first detention, some of his fellow prisoners were people he had picked up himself years earlier. The second time, he was held for three and a half years in a secret detention facility in the Dhaka headquarters of the army’s intelligence agency; he recognized it from his time in the army.
On August 5, 2024, as jubilant crowds filled the streets to celebrate the student movement’s victory, Hasin went to those headquarters to demand the release of the roughly twenty prisoners he believed were inside. He was joined by a handful of other victims, including Maroof Zaman, a diplomat who was abducted in 2017. They issued an ultimatum to the officers on duty: “If you don’t release [the prisoners], we will bring thousands of people and break [the cells] down ourselves.” A brigadier assured them they would release “whoever they had” in the next twenty-four hours. Zaman recalled that one of the officers told them they couldn’t release any more after that, “because there are no more left alive in Bangladesh.”
Before dawn on August 6 the army released a handful of men in various locations around the country. But hundreds or possibly thousands more remain missing, including Sajedul Islam Sumon, a BNP activist who was abducted in 2013. In 2014 his sister Sanjida Islam Tulee founded Maayer Dak, or Mother’s Call, an organization for the families of the disappeared. On August 6 Tulee joined a group of victims’ relatives at the gate of the intelligence building. They waited for three days before the commanding officer, Major General Hamidul Haque, agreed to see her and other victims’ family members, along with UN representatives. “We handed over a list of 158 names, but he kept saying there was no one there,” Tulee recalled. “Then we started to get scared.”
Arman, the attorney, has joined Tulee and other victims to campaign for justice. But nine months after his release, Arman told me he was still afraid to go outside. He has received “indirect messages” from the security forces warning that he is “creating too much noise.” At least half a dozen other victims have received direct or indirect threats from their former captors since the change of government. In September the military raided Tulee’s home and arrested her surviving brother. She was able to use her connections with journalists, politicians, and the UN, and the military returned him in under an hour.
“The moment Yunus occupied the top position, everyone held their breath, expecting he would do a huge reshuffle,” Arman said. “But that didn’t happen, so the security forces began…to flex their muscles.” Last May it became clear that a draft law designed to prosecute perpetrators of enforced disappearances would not apply retroactively. Those who had participated in enforced disappearances under Hasina will be allowed to slip away.
Meanwhile Idris and her colleagues work day in and day out in the face of threats from “big men with big guns.” When I asked her what she planned to do after finalizing her list of the disappeared, she joked, “You mean if they don’t kill me first?”
Rani Yan Yan also bitterly regrets the army’s continued impunity. Yan Yan is queen of the Chakma, the largest indigenous tribe in the Chittagong Hill Tracts, a vast ridge of hills and jungle that once formed the eastern frontier of British India. Now the area is the domain of the Bangladesh Army. Tens of thousands of military and allied paramilitary personnel are stationed there to police some one million indigenous people, who do not speak the same language or observe the same customs.
Thirty years ago the jungle stretched uninterrupted into India and Myanmar, but in recent years the army has tightened its control over the Hill Tracts with a network of new paved roads. Today indigenous people must obtain permission from the military simply to buy food or move from village to village. From the terrace of the old colonial club in the port city of Chittagong, you can see the green feet of the Hill Tracts—but you can’t travel there freely. News is almost totally suppressed; information is harder to come by than dochoani, the twice-distilled rice wine that is ubiquitous in the hills but prohibited in Bangladesh.
“We live in a constant state of fear,” Yan Yan told me.
You know that anything can happen and there won’t be any justice served. If you speak up, you can be taken away from your home and falsely charged. If you move from one place to another, you can be harassed by the soldiers at the checkpoint. If you pass the camp…you can be forced to provide free labor. If you are assaulted and the perpetrator is a Bengali, you can’t do anything…. And if you are killed, the media will call you a terrorist.
When Bangladesh won its independence in 1971, the non-Muslim, non-Bengali tribes of the region were marginalized by a constitution that declared that “the people of Bangladesh shall be known as Bangalees.” The government ignored their desire to protect their property and customs, and in the late 1970s the army began importing Bengali Muslim settlers from the plains. Together they displaced indigenous people from the hillside fields that their tribes had sown and slashed and burned, according to the customs of their ancestors, for centuries.
The latest census showed that indigenous people in the Hill Tracts are now outnumbered by settlers. Settlers exploit land that belongs to indigenous tribes, Yan Yan explained, while the army exerts “the full force of its authority” to fight a rumbling indigenous insurgency. The region is a kind of training ground for the army; campaigns there give Bangladeshi troops experience in combat, which qualifies them for selective, well-paid UN peacekeeping missions.
Standing up for the rights of indigenous people in the Hill Tracts is a risky business. In 2018 two women from the Marma community were raped, allegedly by soldiers, near Rangamati, the region’s largest town and former capital. Yan Yan and a colleague went to visit the victims in the hospital, only to be beaten up by assailants they recognized as soldiers in plain clothes. Soon after, Yan Yan left Rangamati with her son. She may be a privileged aristocrat, honored by the US State Department for her antiracism campaigns, but like everyone in the Hill Tracts she lives at the mercy of the Bangladesh Army.
When Hasina fell, Yan Yan hoped things would finally change. During the protests, indigenous students had stood shoulder to shoulder with Bengali Muslims. But when the interim government selected its officials, the students conceded the administration of the Chittagong Hill Tracts to the army, as Asif Mahmud, one of the student negotiators at the August 6 meeting, later admitted. When Yan Yan learned of this concession, she said, “We knew things wouldn’t change for us.”
By September 2024 tensions in the Hill Tracts had erupted into mob vioence. Settlers killed at least four indigenous people and set fire to dozens of indigenous homes and businesses, while the army opened fire on protesters. Several eyewitnesses I spoke to expressed incredulity that mob violence could occur in such heavily militarized towns without the tacit support of the army. The situation today is so desperate that more than a third of one tribe, the Bawm, has fled through the jungle to Mizoram, in the remotest corner of India, joining earlier generations of refugees from the Hill Tracts.
Many indigenous Bangladeshis hoped that the Yunus government would improve their lives by establishing democratic institutions of local government, for example, or by codifying indigenous land rights. The government had pledged to do both in a 1997 peace deal that, according to the UN, was never implemented. But Yunus has proved powerless to effect any such changes, and the army has made its influence felt.
Yunus may have been dealt a poor hand, but many feel that he has played it badly. A number of people serving on government commissions complained that nothing was done after they delivered their reports. For instance, in December 2024 the economist Debapriya Bhattacharya produced a four-hundred-page paper at the government’s request, detailing financial corruption and proposing new mechanisms for collecting economic data. In March he told me that none of his recommendations had been acted on. Yunus’s supporters were further disillusioned after he failed to support the Women’s Affairs Reform Commission—which he had set up himself—after it came under sustained, vitriolic attack from the religious right in April.
Across town I found the suave plutocrats of the BNP eagerly expecting to take power in this February’s elections, a three-way race they are likely to win. Since the government banned Hasina’s Awami League last May—marginalizing the roughly one fifth of the electorate that, polls suggest, still supports it—the BNP has become the largest political party in the country. Its leaders don’t think much of the interim government’s performance either. Tabith Awal, who is favored to be the next mayor of North Dhaka, said that his party was originally prepared to allow the government more time to enact its reforms but now they were “just in election mode.” Sitting in his office in the hotel he owns in North Dhaka, the BNP stalwart Amir Khosru Chowdhury mocked the interim government’s proposals for reform: “Five wise guys sitting around the table cannot decide what’s good for Bangladesh. That’s not democracy.”
The young leaders of the movement that toppled Hasina, by contrast, are demanding “maximum reforms,” including to the electoral system, the judiciary, and the police. In February 2025 they returned to the streets on which they had deposed a dictator to launch the new National Citizen Party. Unfortunately, the former revolutionaries’ prestige and popularity diminished rapidly as they struggled to define themselves in the post-Hasina era.
In a room decorated with paintings of the uprising’s “martyrs,” I met the party’s twenty-seven-year-old leader, Nahid Islam. “We just want two things,” he told me, “justice and change.” But it became clear that the party couldn’t agree on what exactly they wanted to change, or how to go about changing it. In December most of the party’s female leadership resigned when Nahid announced an alliance with the Jamaat-e-Islami, the socially conservative religious party.
In an old, inaccessible part of Dhaka, the Jamaat’s leaders were busy reconstructing their party—literally, because last year Hasina’s henchmen destroyed the building I visited the year before to meet Mia Golam Parwar, who presides over the most effective Islamist organization in South Asia. Rhapsodizing about the “beauty of democracy,” Parwar, who spent seven and a half years in jail under Hasina, told me he welcomed the interim government’s proposal to excise the word “secularism” from the preamble to the constitution but was perturbed by the proposal to replace it with “pluralism.” “It’s not necessary,” he said. “Islam is enough.”
“Our popularity is increasing day by day,” Parwar continued from behind his impressive red beard. A few months later his party’s youth wing, the Islami Chhatra Shibir, which has a long history of violence, won control of Dhaka University’s student union, and the halls that spawned last year’s uprising resounded with chants of “Hijab! Hijab!”
The failures of the interim government have allowed charismatic politicians, both old and new, to step into the power vacuum. In my conversations with BNP leaders, they talked about how they were already giving orders to local officials, even though they are not yet formally in power. The Jamaat, for its part, has mobilized considerable resources to offer education, health care, and security services to a grateful public. And Yunus knows he owes his position of authority to the young revolutionaries. So when they decided in February 2025 to destroy sites associated with the Awami League across the country, he did not prevent them from rolling heavy machinery into the house where Mujibur Rahman plotted the independence of Bangladesh and was later murdered. The crowd demolished it, brick by brick, only three miles from Yunus’s own residence.
Not long afterward, I crossed the Shahbagh intersection, which separates the city’s dense historic center from its modern expansion, on my way to visit the National Museum known as Jadoo Ghar, or Magic House. Once the Mughal emperors kept a garden here, and the mud around Shahbagh is still flecked with lotus and jasmine petals, fallen from dozens of flower stalls that ply a sleepy trade opposite the museum. At the height of the 2024 protests, thousands of Bangladeshis gathered here to announce that their movement had boiled down to a “one-point demand”: Hasina’s resignation.
I had come with the human rights lawyer Sara Hossain to see an exhibition of press photography from the uprising. We saw images of students braving police batons, teenage girls choking on tear gas, minorities standing up to be counted. Hossain lingered over a picture of two women raising their fists, ribbons the deep green of the Bangladeshi flag tied around their temples, their dupatta veils drenched in the rain. “If only we could go back to about 4:00 PM on the fifth of August,” she said. “We just had so much hope.”
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