On 5 August 2024, Bangladesh experienced the phenomenon regime change after a 15-year hiatus of staticity under Sheikh Hasina’s authoritarian rule, which began on 6 January 2009. The day Sheikh Hasina resigned as Prime Minister and fled the country will forever be regarded as the second liberation of Bangladesh – a liberation from the so-called liberators.
As Nobel laureate Dr Muhammad Yunus, who has been appointed as the Chief Advisor (equivalent to Prime Minister) of the interim government in Bangladesh, accurately described: “We were an occupied country as long as she [Hasina] was in power. She behaved like an occupying force, a dictator, a general, controlling everything. Today, all the people of Bangladesh feel liberated.”
Bangladeshis worldwide celebrated the end of the Awami League’s oppressive rule by distributing traditional Bengali sweets on the streets, embracing the spirit of national liberation once more. In my opinion, the people’s revolution, which led to the permanent eradication of the fascist Awami League from Bangladesh’s political landscape on 5 August 2024, should be considered as a major world event, comparable to the Storming of the Bastille on 14 July 1789, during the French Revolution and the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. The people of Bangladesh have demonstrated the essence of the Latin axiom, Vox Populi, Vox Dei meaning the voice of the people is the voice of God.
This event will likely have a deterrent effect on Asian dictators, who may now fear facing a similar fate as Sheikh Hasina in Bangladesh. According to the Kelsenian theory of revolutionary legality as applied by Chief Justice of Pakistan Muhammad Munir in the State vs Dosso (1958) case, in reference to the doctrine of necessity, it was ruled that “a glorious revolution or successful coup d’etat is an internationally recognised method of regime change”; hence, once a new regime has gained control over the State, it has essentially created a new legal order, rendering itself legitimate. The doctrine of necessity and the Kelsenian theory of revolutionary legality, therefore, make the new regime in Bangladesh ‘kosher’ in terms of its political and constitutional legitimacy.
The prevailing narrative in Bangladesh is that the country was colonised by the West Pakistani elite for 23 years between 1947 and 1971. If one considers the 15-year period of Sheikh Hasina’s totalitarian regime, there are clear parallels to the hardships and suffering experienced under the military dictatorship of General Yahya Khan in the erstwhile East Pakistan. These include gross human rights abuses, such as habeas corpus violations, extrajudicial killings, restrictions on freedom of speech and assembly, and the harassment of political opponents and critics. It is worth recalling that the Bangladesh Liberation War was triggered by General Yahya Khan and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s refusal to recognise the results of the 1970 Pakistan general election. This was the first election in independent Pakistan under the one-man, one-vote, first-past-the-post system based on universal adult suffrage, in which the Awami League won 160 out of 300 (53.3%) general seats in the National Assembly of Pakistan, making Sheikh Mujibur Rahman the Prime Minister-Elect of Pakistan, although he was never allowed to assume office by General Yahya Khan.
Sheikh Hasina has won five general elections in Bangladesh: 1996, 2008, 2014, 2018 and 2024. It is well-known that the last three elections (2014, 2018 and 2024) were explicitly rigged by the incumbent Awami League regime. This shows that, in reality, Sheikh Hasina stole the electoral mandate of the Bangladeshi people, mirroring the actions of the Pakistani military when her father won the 1970 general election in Pakistan. The difference is that Sheikh Mujibur Rahman still managed to win the majority of seats in the 1970 Pakistan general election despite the military establishment being against him, while the ballot process in Bangladesh was entirely rigged in the 2014, 2018 and 2024 general elections.
The rise and fall of Sheikh Hasina in Bangladesh’s political history and the study of regime oscillations bring to mind a verse from Surah Al-Imran in the Holy Quran: “Say, ‘O Allah, Owner of Sovereignty, You give sovereignty to whom You will and You take sovereignty away from whom You will. You honor whom You will and You humble whom You will. In Your hand is [all] good. Indeed, You are over all things competent.'” (3:26, Quran, Sahih International Translation)
I conceptualise the political history of Bangladesh as an ongoing cycle of regime oscillations. I have similarly categorised Pakistan in my book titled Regime Oscillations and Disruptions in the Democratic Transition of Pakistan: The Causal Mechanism of Civilian Elite Disunity” (Mishra, 2023). I define regime oscillations as “the phenomenon of frequent regime transitions within a specific time period, which may involve back-and-forth pendulum swings from one regime type to another.”
In their paper titled ‘The Elite Variable in Democratic Transitions and Breakdowns’, published in the American Sociological Review (1989), John Higley and Michael G Burton theorise that “Stable democratic regimes depend heavily on the ‘consensual unity’ of national elites. So long as elites remain disunified, political regimes are unstable, a condition which makes democratic transitions and democratic breakdowns merely temporary oscillations in the forms unstable regimes take.” This implies that as long as the configuration of national elites does not transform from disunity to unity, a country will remain trapped in a vicious cycle of regime oscillations. Given the long history of frequent regime changes in Bangladesh and the continuing polarisation among the country’s civilian political elites, I see no reason to believe that Bangladesh has escaped this perpetual cycle of regime oscillations.
In conclusion, Bangladesh achieved its first liberation from Pakistani military dictatorship on 26 March 1971, and its second liberation from the “liberators” on 5 August 2024. The second liberation of Bangladesh from the Awami League has made the country a twice-born nation-state. It is now time to move beyond the last 53 years of continuous bloodshed and regime oscillations, marked by massive human suffering, and to create a Second Bangladeshi Republic based on the universal values of freedom and democracy. This can only be achieved through the consensual unity of the civilian political elite of Bangladesh.
