The former PM Sheikh Hasina has blamed the US for her ouster -- a narrative she carefully crafted over the past two years when she openly claimed the US wanted to change her regime.
The Awami League government over the last decade has deteriorated its relationship with the United States when Washington gradually became vocal about the alleged human rights violations and democratic backsliding after two disputed elections. The Sheikh Hasina government viewed this as gross meddling in Dhaka’s internal affairs.
Even now, when her regime has been ousted by a popular movement led by Generation Z students which eventually became a movement of all classes of people, the Awami League fails to understand that their fall is a work of their own.
From coming to power in 2009 with a swooping majority to this downfall, they have made every wrong decision that is possible for a political party over the last decade and covered that up with repression, rampant corruption, silencing dissenting voices, and enforced disappearances.
After an undisputed election run of 2014 boycotted by BNP and its allies, 153 of the 300 directly elected seats went uncontested to the Awami League-led grand alliance without a single vote cast. The party became confident when the violent resistance by the opposition couldn’t shake the boat. Since then, a crackdown on political opposition and enforced disappearances became the norm.
In a democratic system, elected officials are accountable to their voters who bring them to power. And when half of them get elected without a vote, a political party doesn’t remain liable to its voters. This is exactly what happened.
The previous government became more and more dependent on the police and administration, which helped her party engineer another rigged election in 2018. All dissenting voices had been silenced, and corruption became rampant.
Even after all this, most people in one way or another had silent support towards her iron-fisted grip due to the lack of an effective and better alternative. Even during the early days of the 2024 quota movement, the protesters' position was not against the government. Their demand even resonated with many in the ruling party.
If our political history has taught us something since 1952, it is that no power has ever won against the indomitable youth of this country
However, the Awami League after winning another controversial election on January 7, 2024, with all its wisdom, decided to place itself in confrontation with the student protests. A party that has so long been detached from the people placed itself against the entire youth by ordering killings that claimed more than 600 lives, as per the latest UN fact-finding mission. And it didn’t stop there. Harassing and arbitrary detainment of school and college kids eventually forced parents, teachers, lawyers, and even day labourers into a mass movement that forced Sheikh Hasina to flee the country, an unprecedented phenomenon in the political history of Bangladesh. Most of her party workers were left in the direct line of fire.
If our political history has taught us something since 1952, it is that no power has ever won against the indomitable youth of this country. So when the Awami League blames the invisible hand for their fall it is an insult to all the people who have died due to their egotistic response to a legitimate demand.
The fall of the Awami League is one of their own making. It was their political mishandling that led to their fall. It wasn’t an external power that ordered the ruling party’s student wing to confront the agitating students and it wasn’t an external power that ordered the police to fire live rounds and indiscriminate fire from helicopters toward school, college, and university students.
Awami League’s fall can be directly attributed to their detachment from reality and abandonment of politics for people. The political legacy they have left behind today is not the one where they led the War of Liberation or “Digital Bangladesh” or made us one of the fastest growing economies. It is, unfortunately, one that left the whole country in ruins.
The winds of July will blow for a long time. And this generation will remember what was done to them by this regime, which once had the full support of the youth. Memories of Abu Sayed and countless others will echo through their minds with an ironclad commitment that never again will one political party be allowed to have so much control without accountability to its people first.
Tanmoy Dhar is a freelance contributor.
