Dhaka, Bangladesh – As Ripon boatman Mridha washed his feet early in the morning after a night of fishing in Bangladesh’s mighty Padma River, his eyes scanned the walls and shutters of the neighborhood market shops.
Until recently, the neighborhood in central Bangladesh’s Rajbari district was covered in large posters and banners, which featured the faces of local politicians belonging to former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s Awami League party.
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Today, those signs are gone, leaving few traces of a party that ruled Bangladesh for 15 years before a student-led uprising in 2024 toppled Hasina’s government with an iron fist and forced it to step down. exile in Indiahis close ally.
After the uprising, Hasina’s Awami League was banned from all political activity, while a special court, ironically founded by Hasina herself in 2010 to try political opponents, sentenced her to death in absentia for her role in the killing of more than 1,400 people during the protests.
On February 12, this country of 170 million inhabitants must vote for the first time. parliamentary election since Hasina’s ouster.
Mridha, a long-time Awami League voter, said he felt little enthusiasm for the election after the party he supported was banned. He could still vote, but he faces a dilemma over who to support since the Awami League boat symbol will not appear on the ballot paper.
The boatman, aged around 50, said his family feared that if they did not vote they could be identified as Awami League supporters in a country where Hasina and her party now draw widespread anger for the decades of killings, enforced disappearances, torture and political repression they oversaw.
Under Hasina’s rule, the Jamaat-e-Islami party and the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) – the two biggest opponents of the Awami League – were systematically persecuted. The Jamaat was banned, some of its leaders were executed and many others were imprisoned. Thousands of BNP leaders have been arrested, including former Prime Minister Khaleda Zia, who died in December. His son, Tarique Rahman, current leader of the BNP, lived in exile in London for 17 years before returning to Bangladesh in December.
Widespread political violence continues to disrupt election preparations in Bangladesh, with leaders from the BNP, Jamaat and other parties. killed in recent weeks. But now, like their counterparts in other parties, the common supporters of the Awami League also no longer enjoy immunity from the anger triggered by the actions of their leaders.
“If we don’t vote, we risk being singled out,” Mridha told Al Jazeera. “Then our family will go to the voting center. »
Conversations with longtime Awami League voters in areas where the party once dominated reveal a divided mood.
While many say they will continue to go to voting centers, others say they may not vote at all.
Like Solaiman Mia, a rickshaw puller in Gopalganj, a stronghold of the Hasina family and the birthplace of her father and founder of Bangladesh, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, whose grave is in the district south of Dhaka, an enduring symbol of the Awami League’s powerful hold on the region. Hasina has won huge victories in Gopalganj in every election since 1991.
Mia is unequivocal: he and his family would not vote this year. “An election without the boat on the ballot is not an election,” he told Al Jazeera, a sentiment shared by many Gopalganj residents.
“The Awami League will return”
In the Gulistan region of central Dhaka is the headquarters of the Awami League, now abandoned after being vandalized and burned during the uprising. Since then, the building has been used as a shelter by the homeless and parts of it as a public toilet.
Outside the office, street vendor Abdul Hamid says he has not seen Awami League activists near the area in months.
“You won’t find any Awami League supporters here,” he said. “Even if someone is a supporter, he will never admit it. The Awami League has faced crises before, but it has never almost disappeared like this.”
Nearby, another street vendor, Sagor, sells wool scarves draped with the symbols of the BNP and its former ally and now rival, the The James-Islassas-Ismay.
“Party scarves are selling well,” he said as pedestrians surrounded him.
Some Awami League supporters, however, remain optimistic about the party’s resurgence.
Arman, a former leader of the Bangladesh Chhatra League, the student wing of the Awami League, said the party may maintain strategic silence, but it is far too entrenched to disappear from Bangladesh politics.
“The Awami League will come back,” he told Al Jazeera. “And when he does, he will come back with Sheikh Hasina.”
But Rezaul Karim Rony, a Dhaka-based political analyst and editor-in-chief of Joban magazine, is not so sure. He believes surviving the February elections will be difficult for the Awami League.
“If an election takes place without the Awami League, its voters will gradually experience some form of reconciliation at the local level,” Rony told Al Jazeera. “They will be absorbed locally – aligning themselves with the influential forces or parties that dominate their regions – and begin to rebuild their daily lives that way. »
As a result, Rony said, it will be difficult for the Awami League to regain its support base once the elections are over. He said that while a section of the party’s supporters still see no future for the party without Hasina, a significant group within it is frustrated with her authoritarian rule when she was in power.
“With supporters divided, with or without Hasina, returning to its previous political position is extremely difficult – almost impossible – for the Awami League,” Rony said.
“It looks like a political erasure”
Other analysts argue that a recent surge in support for Jamaat-e-Islami could, paradoxically, offer a reference point for a possible future revival of the Awami League. The Jamaat supported Pakistan during the Bangladesh War of Independence in 1971, a role that its detractors – including Hasina – have repeatedly used to challenge its credibility.
The party was banned twice and its top leaders were hanged and imprisoned during Hasina’s rule. He nevertheless survived and is now – according to polls – on the verge of his best ever performance in the February elections.
“The Jamaat’s current level of activism, influence and assertiveness – what could even be described as a display of dominance – can paradoxically be seen as a kind of blessing for the Awami League,” Anu Muhammad, a retired economics professor from Jahangirnagar University, told Al Jazeera.
Muhammad said the Awami League’s appeal extends far beyond its formal political structure, making its total political obliteration unlikely. “There is more to the Awami League than its leaders,” he said. “It has to do with cultural, social and other forces.”
A pre-election survey by the International Republican Institute, a US think tank focused on democratic governance, suggests that the Awami League still retains a support base of around 11 percent.
However, the party does not appear in the current movement election campaignand its leaders were instead seen organizing events from India, including a controversial event Hasina’s speech – his first since his ouster – at a “Save Democracy in Bangladesh” event at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club in New Delhi.
“To overthrow the puppet regime of this foreign-serving national enemy at all costs, the brave sons and daughters of Bangladesh must defend and restore the Constitution written with the blood of martyrs, reclaim our independence, safeguard our sovereignty and revive our democracy,” Hasina said in a pre-recorded audio message.
Dhaka, furious, said it was “surprised and shocked” that Indian authorities had allowed such an event to take place.
However, at home, Hasina’s party has struggled to assert its political relevance, raising questions about its survival.
Michael Kugelman, senior fellow for South Asia at the Atlantic Council, argued that by strict democratic standards, a Bangladesh election without the Awami League cannot be considered fully credible, calling the vote an “election with an asterisk.”
At the same time, he argued, the Awami League had – in the eyes of many Bangladeshis – lost its right to be treated as a legitimate party because of the crackdown overseen by Hasina and her previous efforts to change the rules of the electoral game. The 2014, 2018 and 2024 elections – which Hasina won by a landslide – were all widely seen as manipulated, with opposition boycotts and crackdowns on her rivals.
Still, Kugelman said the nature of dynastic political parties in South Asia is such that they rarely die.
“Even though the Awami League is in bad shape, it is essentially out of the political landscape in Bangladesh indefinitely; a potential future return should certainly not be ruled out. Political circumstances can change very quickly,” he told Al Jazeera.
Kugelman likened the party’s current crisis to that which its bitter rival, the BNP, suffered under Hasina’s regime, when the main opposition party struggled to mount a meaningful political or electoral challenge – only to re-emerge today as the likeliest contender for power.
He said the Awami League would likely adopt a “wait and see strategy”. As long as Hasina remains politically active, she “will likely want to stay in the game” and may also announce her US-based son Sajeeb Wazed as her dynastic successor.
“It might take a while,” Kugelman said. “Given the way politics plays out in this region, it can be quite volatile. If an opening appears in the future and the Awami League is in a better position to function as a viable political force, it could well come back. But for now, it’s essentially dead in the water.”
This does not bode well for Mridha, Rajbari’s boatman, for whom the uncertainty over his party’s future is deeply troubling.
“My father spoke about the difficulties faced by the Awami League after Bangabandhu. [as Hasina’s father is fondly called] was assassinated,” he said, referring to Rahman’s assassination in a 1975 military coup that plunged the Awami League into its first major crisis.
“But this year feels like a political erasure.”
