As an angry mob bore down on the palatial official residence of Bangladeshi prime minister Sheikh Hasina, it suddenly became decision time. Should she stay, hoping to negotiate her way out of this predicament? Or should she flee?

It was around noon, August 5, 2024, in Dhaka, a drizzly day, over 30 degrees. Protests against Hasina’s rule, known as the July, or Monsoon, Revolution, had been growing for weeks despite her regime’s attempts to brutally repress them. Now it appeared the crowds, in their thousands, were no longer satisfied with merely chanting. Hasina’s family and her advisers urged her to leave the Ganabhaban, as the residence in Dhaka’s centre is known, but still she lingered.

When they told her the safety of her convoy of cars could no longer be guaranteed, she finally made up her mind. She scurried to a last-chance helicopter with family and aides, taking only what they could carry in suitcases. As the protesters overcame guards and barged through the gates of her now-former home, waving flags and looting whatever they could find, Hasina was gone.

By all accounts, she was whisked to a military air base to be ushered on to a Bangladesh Air Force transport plane, which took off a little after 3pm for India, a long-time ally of her administration. Once in Indian airspace, the plane was joined by two fighter jets. “We escaped death by just 20-25 minutes,” Hasina would later claim.

It was a rapid fall from grace for the woman once considered a beacon of Bangladeshi democracy but who had increasingly leaned authoritarian. The daughter of Bangladesh’s founding president, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, she and her party, the Awami League, had been complicit in manipulating elections, silencing political opponents and, in the end, allowing police and military to fire on protesters, killing some 1400 including women and children.

Hasina is now believed to be living in the upmarket neighbourhood of the Indian capital known as Lutyen’s Delhi, named for the Victorian-era British architect who designed many of its buildings. On November 17, a Bangladeshi tribunal found her guilty of crimes against humanity for her role in the crackdown in 2024 and sentenced her to death, the chief prosecutor calling the episode a “freshly blood-soaked chapter of history”.

But the Bangladesh government’s demands that India hand over the 78-year-old have so far been ignored – a standoff that threatens amicable relations between neighbours in a volatile part of the world. How did Bangladesh descend into chaos? Who runs the place now? What is likely to happen to Sheikh Hasina – and to Bangladesh?

What just happened?

Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, is routinely described as a “megacity”. With some 24 million people (40 million if you include the greater area), it is easily one of the world’s most crowded metropolises – in the eighth most populous country, with 171 million people.

Much of the country is pancake flat, sitting across the world’s largest river delta, squeezed on three sides by India and the Bay of Bengal on the fourth, whose monsoonal rains routinely cause the rivers Jamuna, Padma (the main distributary of the Ganges) and Meghna to burst their banks, submerging villages and farmland for weeks at a time.

Between 300,000 and 500,000 rural migrants arrive in the capital each year, many hoping to join the thriving textile industry (which accounts for some 85 per cent of the nation’s export goods), others making ends meet as ship breakers or street vendors.

Many end up in makeshift housing with jerry-rigged electricity and unreliable water supplies (some 4 million people live in Dhaka’s slum districts, according to estimates). “Factory workers, especially in garments, have better cash incomes than many rural earners but face long hours, safety and job security issues,” says Lutfun Nahar Lata, a senior lecturer in sociology and social policy at the University of Melbourne. (More than 1000 gar­ment work­ers were crushed to death in the Rana Plaza tragedy of 2013 when an eight-storey factory collapsed. It was not, sadly, an isolated incident.)

Dhaka’s poorly maintained roads are frequently jammed not only with the usual motorbikes and buses but with at least 100,000 pedal-powered rickshaws (based on a 2019 survey by the Bangladesh Institute of Labour Studies, there may well be more today). Pollution, the ever-present threat of floods, tenuous access to healthcare and creaking infrastructure add to the reasons The Economist Intelligence Unit this year ranked Dhaka third last of 173 cities for its “liveability”, a nose ahead of politically fraught Tripoli and Damascus.

Dhaka is nevertheless a vibrant metropolis with a well-educated middle class, a young and energetic population (half of Bangladesh is under the age of 26; Australia’s median age is 38) and, until very recently, an economic track record that would have seemed a pipe dream when Bangladesh became an independent nation in 1971, and the then US secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, famously referred to it as an economic-aid “basket case”.

“Dhaka has transformed dramatically over the last 30 years,” says Lata, who studied the challenges faced by Dhaka’s urban poor for her PhD and a subsequent book. “Low-rise neighbourhoods and paddy edges have given way to sprawling urban neighbourhoods, high-rise apartments and new transport corridors. Economically, there’s been a huge shift toward manufacturing. A visible consumer middle class coexists with entrenched urban poverty, and the city’s rhythms, mobility patterns and skylines have altered.”

Still, says Lata, “Many who are ‘middle class’ in consumption terms remain vulnerable to shocks such as job loss, food price spikes, floods and so on.”

It was in this febrile environment that student groups complained in 2024 about the lack of opportunities for graduates. Their protests were, initially, targeted at a controversial policy that reserved a proportion of sought-after government jobs for war veterans and their children – many of whom had connections to the ruling party, the Awami League.

It was not a new complaint, having been raised before and ending up in the courts, but this time it grew to encompass wider grievances: a cost-of-living crisis, a stalling economy, endemic corruption, opaque election results (opposition parties had boycotted the January 2024 election after thousands of their leaders and activists were imprisoned in the run-up to the poll) and widespread human rights violations.

“Freedom of expression was one of the biggest concerns during Hasina’s period,” says Mubashar Hasan, an Australian academic of Bangladeshi origin now at Western Sydney University. A commission set up by the country’s interim government to investigate the disappearance of those critical of the regime later estimated more than 3000 people had been abducted and systematically tortured in secret facilities known as the Aynaghar, or House of Mirrors, a program it said was “systematically designed over 15 years to remain undetectable”.

‘They put me in a cell. They asked me, why did I do a PhD? What was my opinion on the growing crisis? Why did I write in foreign media?’

Mubashar Hasan, now at Western Sydney University, tells of his experience in Bangladesh

Hasan was detained by Hasina’s secret police in 2017 for 44 days after being snatched off the street at gunpoint, hustled into a minibus, blindfolded and beaten. “Then they put me in a cell. They asked me, why did I do a PhD? What was my opinion on the growing crisis? Why did I write in foreign media? I said, ‘Being an academic, it’s a good thing.’ They said, ‘No, you are someone’s asset [a spy].’ ”

Unlike the many others who found themselves in a similar situation, Hasan was suddenly let go, possibly, he believes because he had been consulting with the United Nations and there was pressure from international human rights groups. But he was given strong hints that it wouldn’t be safe for him to pursue his career in Bangladesh. “I strongly believe I was ‘disappeared’ for my anti-government criticism, my social media writings for human rights, against extra-judicial killings, and my research investigating how Bangladeshi Muslim youths are defining their idea of Islam.” He left for Japan and eventually relocated to Australia on a skilled migration visa.

As the students were joined by the wider aggrieved population in 2024, the government announced a shoot-to-kill curfew. The death toll mounted – estimated at 1400 by the UN – but did nothing to quell the protests against Hasina. “The dam broke and people from all walks of life came out to demand her resignation and a return to democracy,” writes Shafqat Munir, a senior research fellow at the Bangladesh Institute of Peace and Security Studies. “It was led by students who refused to cower down in the face of violence. It was these young people’s spirit of sacrifice that ultimately brought everyone, including the elderly, out onto the streets. Tens of thousands were mobilised through social media, with smartphones becoming powerful tools of dissent opposed to the government’s firearms.”

Fast-forward to November this year and crowds cheered in Dhaka when Bangladesh’s International Crimes Tribunal found Hasina guilty of human rights abuses (which she denies) and sentenced her to death. According to the chief prosecutor, “In the uprising of 2024, countless innocent, unarmed, and ordinary dissenters against discrimination and the government were subjected to indiscriminate killings and appalling violence by the accused in this case. Under the orders, leadership, and control of the accused, members of state forces, political parties, and affiliated organisations committed crimes against humanity, including murder, maiming, arbitrary arrests, torture, enforced disappearances, obstruction of medical treatment, and the heinous act of burning the dead and the living together.”

He argued the crimes were prosecutable under international law. Still, Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt, an emeritus professor at ANU with extensive research interests in Bangladesh, notes that human rights organisations have questioned the legitimacy of the conviction. The UN has condemned the death sentence itself, which in Bangladesh is usually by hanging, as has Amnesty International, which said the trial was not fair.

Meanwhile, another court has subsequently sentenced Hasina to 21 years in prison on charges of corruption related to allocations of land in a government project. It has also emerged that Hasina allegedly presided over what amounts to one of the biggest bank heists in history, with between $30 billion and $50 billion apparently stolen by cronies from the central bank in the form of fake loans to select companies, never to be repaid, and the cash funnelled overseas.

Hasina’s niece, British Labour MP Tulip Siddiq, has also been put on trial in her absence by the Bangladesh Anti-Corruption Commission, accused of influencing Sheikh Hasina to secure a plot of land for her family members – allegations she denies. A group of lawyers has complained to the Bangladesh High Commissioner in Britain that the trial is “contrived and unfair”, that she has not been allowed due process such as the knowledge of the charges made against her or access to legal representation and that widespread media reports in Bangladesh have tainted her chance of a fair trial. If convicted, Siddiq could be sentenced to life imprisonment in her absence.

Who runs Bangladesh now?

Enter Muhammad Yunus, a well-respected economist and entrepreneur who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for his ideas about “microfinance”, a way of giving potentially life-changing loans to low-income people who lack access to traditional credit providers, particularly women.

As Hasina fled, others met to chart a path forward: President Mohammed Shahabuddin, military heads and student leaders. They agreed to reach out to Yunus, who turned 85 in June, and ask him: would he lead an interim government and help to restore Bangladesh to accountable democracy?

According to the BBC, he accepted immediately, telling a group of journalists: “I’m doing this because this is what the youth of the country wanted, and I wanted to help them to do it.”

He was sworn in on August 8, 2024, as the interim government’s “chief adviser” and began work on reforming the Bangladeshi way of governance, inviting a host of political parties to contribute their views. Yunus recently released the product of the commissions’ work, a manifesto known as the July National Charter, laying out constitutional reforms designed to curb authoritarian tendencies in future governments. These include a 10-year term limit for prime ministers, and empowering the president, until now largely a ceremonial role, to independently appoint the heads of six key state institutions including the national bank and the public service.

‘The people of Bangladesh have suffered for the past 17 years. People are looking forward to better in future.’

Abdullah Yousuf, editor in chief of Bangladeshi community newspaper Suprovat Sydney

It’s a lot of reform, says Abdullah Yousuf, editor in chief of Bangladeshi community newspaper Suprovat Sydney. “I believe if it continues, there’s going to be a big change in a short time,” he tells us. “The people of Bangladesh have suffered for the past 17 years. People are looking forward to better in future.”

For much of its history, Bangladesh has lurched between flawed democracy and bouts of military rule, with the army seemingly on standby to attempt a coup should an elected government appear shaky. Most of the time, power has swung between two major parties, the Awami League and the Bangladesh National Party.

“They have historically had the largest amount of resources, base and patronage,” says Michael Kugelman, a leading South Asia analyst based at the Wilson Centre’s South Asia Institute in Washington, DC. “They’ve also been adept at leveraging their clout to form alliances with other parties that help them obtain or maintain power. Bangladesh’s military used to exert significant levels of power, more than it has in recent years, and that arguably constrained the emergence of new parties with policy positions critical of the state.”

How did Bangladesh get here?

Before its independence in 1971, what we now call Bangladesh was part of Bengal, the largest administrative territory in British India. When the British finally exited India in 1947, they feared instability would lead to religious and racial violence. Their solution was to reshape a hodge-podge of princely states and their own directly ruled provinces into two vast new nations, “partitioned” on religious grounds: the Hindu-majority Union of India and the Muslim-majority Dominion of Pakistan.

The new nation of Pakistan (a portmanteau apparently dreamed up by a civil servant) was, somewhat inconveniently, granted two separate territories some 1600 kilometres apart: West Pakistan, to India’s north-west, and East Bengal, carved out of Bengal, in India’s south-east (and later renamed East Pakistan).

Partition was ‘a nightmare for the thousands of families who suddenly found themselves uprooted in a land they had inhabited for generations’.

The Partition Museum, New Delhi

This partition, hastily drawn up by the departing British and set to take effect at midnight on August 14-15, resulted in chaos. “Partitioning India’s fluid religious landscape on the basis of religion would lead to violence on an epic scale, as unexpected as it was brutal,” writes historian Sam Dalrymple in his new account of the birth of modern South Asia, Shattered Lands. According to Delhi’s Partition Museum, the period was “a nightmare for the thousands of families who suddenly found themselves uprooted in a land they had inhabited for generations. Law and order broke down, and there were large-scale massacres and looting as families left their homeland to trudge across the new, arbitrarily drawn borders.”

Almost from the start, there was friction between the two halves of Pakistan, with East Pakistan (the more populous of the two) complaining their affairs were being run from the West. It didn’t help matters when West Pakistan mandated that the only state language would be Urdu, not the East’s native Bengali. Both languages were eventually recognised in Pakistan’s constitution of 1956 but the damage was done. By 1961, many discontented East Pakistanis had their eye on independence.

That was the year Mujibur Rahman, later known as Mujib, helped form the Free Bengali Revolutionary Council and sought support, albeit unsuccessfully, from Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru for an armed insurgency against Pakistan’s regime. Rahman had been a founding member, in 1949, of the Awami League; in 1970 the League won enough seats in the Pakistani general election to rule the country. Those in West Pakistan were, however, unwilling to cede power.

Events escalated when West Pakistan sent plainclothes troops into East Pakistan to assert the government’s authority, so-called Operation Searchlight. In March 1971, Mujib told the people of East Pakistan to prepare for all-out war – and was subsequently jailed in West Pakistan. Yet Mujib’s partisans and other guerillas, in a loose coalition known as the Mukti Bahini (the Liberation Army), put up significant resistance to government forces, as some 10 million refugees fled across the border into India.

“Ultimately, Bangladesh became somewhat inevitable the moment that the Pakistani Army ordered Operation Searchlight,” historian Sam Dalrymple tells us from India. “The crackdown was so brutal that within months, one in 12 Pakistani civilians had become a refugee in India. Millions of Bengali men, women and children subsequently resolved to fight for independence, even though many of them had actually earlier been Pakistani nationalists.”

In December, India, which had been supplying the rebels, decided to intervene overtly – the third time it had gone to full-scale war against Pakistan. “Civilians of both countries cowered in fear as bomber planes darted over their cities,” Dalrymple writes. “Even Dacca’s Intercontinental Hotel – officially a ‘neutral zone’ thanks to a demand from the Red Cross – would regularly see dogfights play out overhead. The hotel itself began to resemble ‘a railway station’ as civilians, Red Cross observers – and even a poodle – tried to cram themselves within the safety of its walls, and each morning the staff had to use magnet fishing poles to remove shrapnel from the swimming pool.”

By mid-December, it was all over. Outgunned Pakistan surrendered. East Pakistan became Bangladesh, meaning the Land of Bengal. Mujib, released from jail, was installed as the new nation’s first prime minister in 1972.

But wartime rulers aren’t always good peacetime rulers. After the fledgling nation suffered from a global economic shock in 1972-73 and terrible floods and famine in 1974, unrest led Mujib to try out authoritarian rule at the start of 1975: he banned most newspapers, dissolved the parliamentary system and declared one-party rule, merging several parties into the Bangladesh Krishak Sramik Awami League.

It was such an unpopular move that in August 1975, he was assassinated by a group of army officers, along with several family members, at his home. The coup d’etat ushered in Bangladesh’s first period of military rule.

Today Mujib is widely remembered both as the Father of Bangladesh and a prime minister whose legacy is “complicated”, says Lata. “The heroic architect of national liberation and the leader who faced almost insurmountable structural constraints in the fragile birth of a new state.” In 1971, she tells us, “Bangladesh inherited a devastated landscape with millions displaced, food systems disrupted, infrastructure destroyed and a civil administration riddled with vacancies and mistrust. Even well-designed institutions would have struggled under these circumstances.”

Mujib’s legacy is also intertwined with that of his daughter, Sheikh Hasina, who was prime minister from 1996 to 2001 and again from 2009 until she was routed last year. While her Awami League has now been banned from participating in elections, she continues to behave as if she retains a leadership role, says Michael Kugelman. “She very much claims to be in charge, and continues to conduct party business from India. This adds to India’s tensions with Dhaka because not only is she being hosted in New Delhi, but she’s also being given ample freedom to give political speeches and speak fairly freely, on the whole, which includes rejecting the legal process against her.”

It is unclear if she ever technically resigned. A letter purported to be her official resignation has been circulated but President Shahabuddin said he never received it and on Facebook the Awami League said the letter was fake. “Sheikh Hasina did not follow any formal resignation procedure; she flew straight from Tejgaon [central Dhaka] to India. Instead of spreading these rumours, focus on solving the country’s problems.”

What will happen next in Bangladesh?

Yunus has announced that elections will be held in February (before the Muslim fasting period of Ramadan, which begins February 16) and that there will be a referendum to approve, or not, the recommendations of the July Charter. “Through this, we shall enter a new Bangladesh,” he said in a televised address in November, urging the parties that supported the uprising to ensure fair elections. “Otherwise, the nation will face grave peril – a concern I have expressed repeatedly.”

Yunus has shown little interest in staying on beyond then and is believed to have already threatened to step down, citing unwelcome pressure from some critics who have complained he has not moved quickly enough to achieve what some students believed would be overnight change. At the end of July, Meenakshi Ganguly, deputy Asia director at Human Rights Watch, observed the interim government was “juggling an unreformed security sector, sometimes violent religious hardliners and political groups that seem more focused on extracting vengeance on Hasina’s supporters than protecting Bangladeshis’ rights”.

‘I suspect Yunus will be pleased to return to private life after the election. He’s likely exhausted.’

Michael Kugelman, South Asia analyst at the Wilson Centre’s South Asia Institute

Ganguly reported allegations that the interim government had rounded up and arbitrarily detained hundreds of Awami League supporters “in what appears to mirror the partisan actions of the past” – which the government denied.

There have also been reports of mob violence, particularly against minority Hindus, and a rise in Islamic extremism, particularly directed towards women and, specifically, their choice of clothing. “A streak of Islamist extremism that had long lurked beneath the country’s secular facade is bubbling to the surface,” observed The New York Times in April, citing interviews with representatives of several Islamist parties and organisations who said they were working to push Bangladesh in a more fundamentalist direction.

“I suspect Yunus will be pleased to return to private life after the election. He’s likely exhausted,” says Kugelman. “Yunus has good intentions, is committed to democracy and genuinely believes in the reform process that his interim government sought to oversee. But at the end of the day, he’s an academic, an ideas person, and not an implementer or policymaker.” Newspaper editor Abdullah Yousuf agrees. “He’s doing good. He doesn’t want to stay longer because of the pressure of the people. I think he will go to the election and then, you know, go his own way. But if he stays, I think it will be better for our country, for Bangladesh.”

The vacuum left by the now-proscribed Awami League is most likely to be filled by its long-term rival, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, founded in 1978 by military officer Ziaur Rahman (widely known as Zia), a leading fighter in the war of independence. The BNP won the 1979, 1991, 1996 and 2001 elections but was subsequently squeezed out of contention by Hasina’s Awami League, with BNP leaders claiming they had been subjected to politically motivated legal actions to sideline them.

‘India is caught between the devil and the deep blue sea. It won’t turn on Hasina, as it never turns on its close friends, and Hasina is one of its friends.’

Michael Kugelman, South Asia analyst at the Wilson Centre’s South Asia Institute

Like the Awami League, the BNP is dynastic. After Zia’s assassination in 1981 his widow, Khaleda Zia, went on to lead the party and served as prime minister from 1991 to 1996 and from 2001 to 2006. She is now largely out of the picture, thanks to legal and health issues, but her son Tarique Rahman is poised to return from London to succeed her, says Kugelman. “He may be Bangladesh’s next PM,” he tells us. “It’s hard to imagine any scenario under which the BNP doesn’t lead the next government. There might be a wildcard scenario in which Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami (an Islamist party) ends up on top. But in all likelihood, it’s the BNP, the only party to have the resources, the base, the patronage and so much else to bring it to victory.”

Incidentally, Hasina also has a son waiting in the wings, Sajeeb Wazed, who has been vocal from the US, says Kugelman. “Given current circumstances, there’s no way he would try to return to Bangladesh any time soon. But then again, who knows what could happen down the road. Hasina has other family members, including a sister, Sheikh Rehana, who are very much in the picture too.”

As for Hasina herself, there were expectations after her escape that she might try to seek asylum in the United States or Britain. By remaining in India, she continues to be a presence in Bangladesh and a complication for her hosts. Bangladesh’s foreign ministry has said for India to harbour Hasina was a “grave act of unfriendly behaviour” and called it “a travesty of justice for any other country to grant asylum to these individuals convicted of crimes against humanity”.

“This is a geopolitical victory for Pakistan,” suggests ANU’s Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt. Even if Bangladesh were to actually convince India to extradite Hasina and then executed her, it would likely cause great domestic unrest, she says. “The Awami League has millions of supporters within the country. The political and social consequences would be tremendous.”

‘The effects of Partition are definitely still being felt today. In fact, its divides grow ever wider.’

Historian Sam Dalrymple

Kugelman notes: “India is caught between the devil and the deep blue sea. It won’t turn on Hasina, as it never turns on its close friends, and Hasina is one of its friends. But by continuing to host Hasina, New Delhi may be squandering an opportunity to try to patch up ties with the Bangladesh government that emerges post-election. No matter who leads the next government, it will likely want Hasina back and not be happy that India isn’t relinquishing her.”

However it plays out over the next few months we can certainly expect plenty of volatility, says Lahiri-Dutt. “No election in Bangladesh goes without bloodshed.”

More broadly, says Dalrymple, “The effects of Partition are definitely still being felt today. In fact, its divides grow ever wider. We see it in the conflicts in Kashmir, Baluchistan and northeast India, with the continued demonisation of minorities across South Asia, and with the civil wars in Burma and Yemen. Each of these has their origins in the partition of Britain’s Indian Empire.”

Mubashar Hasan, meantime, was able to return to Bangladesh last November, where his family still lives. “A lot of Bangladeshi writers, journalists and political activists who were repressed by Hasina’s government and used to live in exile are going back and living in Bangladesh permanently,” he tells us, though he has no intention of following suit. In Sydney in the past year, he has been trying his hand at stand-up comedy “as a means to find laughter and heal that deep trauma I endured. So far it’s been fantastic. I am very grateful. I don’t think Bangladesh would ever give me that freedom.”

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