The demand to outlaw the Awami League has once again bubbled up from the streets and lecture halls, carried on the megaphones of students whose uprising last July still feels raw against their skin. Many of them are literally scarred; the bullet wounds have not yet sealed, the families of the dead are still groping for a grammar of mourning, and the state has shown no meaningful progress toward justice.
Meanwhile the party’s fugitive grandees, lounging across the border in India, offer not contrition but thin-lipped threats of what they will do “when we return.” Small wonder that despair thickens into rage. The interim government -- elevated, lest we forget, on the steep sacrifices of those very demonstrators -- must treat the call for a ban with the delicacy of handling live ordnance.
But can one truly proscribe a party of the AL’s girth, a party that claims the affections of millions? And if one can, on what grounds and by what mechanism? Since the August fall of Sheikh Hasina’s government I have argued, perhaps tiresomely, that there are three specific, legally defensible reasons to remove the party from the nation’s political bloodstream.
Allow me to lay them out.
1. A clear-and-present threat to national security
The party’s continued existence, under present circumstances, is a case study in conflicted loyalties. The entire AL leadership is now ensconced in India, under the explicit hospitality of New Delhi and, so the rumors go, the attentive care of Indian intelligence. Should ALwriggle back into power, whose interests would it be structurally bound to protect -- the electorate at home or the benefactor across the border who sheltered it in exile?
There is an uncomfortable symmetry here. Bangladesh, a country that keeps a disproportionately large army for a nation its size, justifies the expense largely on the need to deter two potential adversaries: India and Myanmar. How, then, does one square that doctrine with a major political party whose survival now hinges on Indian patronage? Either the Army is superfluous -- an expensive, brass-buttoned vanity -- or AL’s dependent relationship with India is intolerable. The citizenry deserves a sober national debate on exactly this paradox.
2. A party twice convicted of strangling democracy
Modern democracies, even the most permissive, routinely draw red lines against actors who intend to weaponize elections in order to bury democracy itself. Europe, that supposed cradle of liberalism, has banned nearly a dozen such parties in the past half-century. The difficulty, of course, is proving intent. With AL, intent is no longer hypothetical; it is documentary.
The party has twice walked through the front door of the ballot box and promptly padlocked it from the inside. The first time was almost 50 years ago: After winning the 1973 election, it outlawed all other parties in 1974 and birthed the notorious one-party BAKSAL state. The second offense began in 2009, when AL, freshly elected, set off a decade-long run of sham elections and opposition suppression that rendered the Constitution a decorative relic. No other Bangladeshi party can boast such a double conviction for democratic homicide. Are we prepared to grant them a third attempt?
3. Grave human-rights abuses and crimes against humanity
Only one political organization in Bangladesh’s history can be credited with institutionalizing enforced disappearance -- an act considered a crime against humanity under international law. That organization is, alas, AL. Previous governments, including the khaki-clad ones, engaged, to be sure, in sporadic abductions, but none erected a machinery of systematic vanishing.
Worse, AL presided over some of the most blood-soaked crowd control in South Asia’s recent memory. From the 2013 crackdowns, when security forces gunned down protesters by the dozen in a single afternoon, to the more recent slaughter of nearly 2,000 demonstrators in the span of three summer weeks in 2024, the statistics read like the autopsy of a society rather than governance. One could argue -- one should argue -- that this record alone disqualifies the party from re-entry into polite democratic company.
The counter-argument … and why it fails
Skeptics point out that the AL commands a vast social base; banning it, they say, would disenfranchise multitudes. History offers an unflattering retort: The Nazi Party, whose electoral triumphs were verifiably massive, was nevertheless outlawed in post-war Germany. Numerical heft cannot launder a movement dedicated to authoritarian ends. The serious question, rather, is how to reabsorb AL’s ordinary foot soldiers -- those untainted by criminal allegations -- into the mainstream of public life once the party banner is folded away. That practical task awaits the imagination of all democratic actors.
A path forward
I submit that both the prohibition of the AL and the broader constitutional guardrails needed to prevent any future hijacking of democracy be placed before the electorate in a national referendum. The government has, by executive order, frozen the party’s operations but it still needs to publish a clear road map toward the vote. Only in this way can the state honour the blood that paved its current tenure. A government born of martyrdom cannot, in good conscience, ignore the martyrs’ most fervent demand.
The question, then, is not whether banning AL is “political” or “rational.” It is whether the republic, chastened by experience and mindful of its dead, will finally act to secure a democratic order that no faction, however storied or popular, can again subvert.
Sultan Mohammed Zakaria is Joint Convenor, National Citizens’ Party.
