Bangladesh’s Liberation Under Siege
On December 16, 1971, Lieutenant General A.A.K. Niazi signed the instrument of surrender in Dhaka, marking the birth of Bangladesh and the defeat of a genocidal military campaign that had claimed hundreds of thousands of lives. Fifty-four years later, as Bangladesh prepares to observe Victory Day, the foundational principles of that liberation: nationalism, secularism, socialism and democracy, stand in ruins. The statues of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman have been torn down. The party that led the liberation struggle has been banned. Its leader and former prime minister, Sheikh Hasina, has been sentenced to death in absentia. And the political forces that collaborated with the Pakistani military in 1971, most notably Jamaat-e-Islami, are once again ascendant in national politics. What we are witnessing is not merely a change of government but an attempted erasure of Bangladesh’s founding identity, orchestrated through the convergence of US imperial interests and domestic religious fundamentalism.
The compact of 1971
The Bangladesh Liberation War was never simply about territorial separation from Pakistan. It represented a decisive rejection of the two-nation theory that had partitioned the subcontinent along religious lines in 1947. The Bangla Bhasha Movement of 1952, which provided the cultural foundation for Bengali nationalism, asserted that linguistic and cultural identity, not religious affiliation, would define the political community. When Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s Awami League won the 1970 elections and was denied power by the Pakistani military establishment, the liberation struggle that followed crystallized around four constitutional pillars: nationalism, secularism, socialism, and democracy.
The 1972 Constitution gave institutional expression to these principles. Article 12 specifically mandated the elimination of communalism, prohibited granting political status to any religion, and forbade the abuse of religion for political purposes. This was not an abstract commitment to Western-style secularism but a direct response to the lived experience of genocide. The Pakistani military’s campaign of mass murder, rape, and destruction had been actively supported by religion-based parties, particularly Jamaat-e-Islami, whose members organized collaborationist militias such as the Razakar, Al-Badr, and Al-Shams. These forces participated in the systematic targeting of Bengali nationalists, Hindu minorities, and intellectuals. The constitutional ban on religion-based politics emerged organically from the liberation movement’s determination that such atrocities would never recur.
The assassination of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman on August 15, 1975, along with most of his family, inaugurated a systematic dismantling of this founding compact. General Ziaur Rahman’s military regime replaced “secularism” with “Absolute Trust and Faith in the Almighty Allah” through the 1977 constitutional amendment and lifted the ban on religion-based political parties. Jamaat-e-Islami, whose leaders had fled to Pakistan after 1971, returned to political life. The declaration of Islam as the state religion in 1988 completed the constitutional counter-revolution. Yet even through these reversals, the memory of 1971 and the institutional framework of the Awami League preserved a contested space for secular nationalism. The war crimes trials initiated under Sheikh Hasina’s government between 2010 and 2016, which resulted in the conviction and execution of several Jamaat leaders for their role in the 1971 genocide, represented the most significant attempt to reckon with this history and defend the liberation’s legacy.
The geopolitics of regime change
The events of August 2024 must be understood within the broader context of great power competition in the Indo-Pacific. Bangladesh occupies a position of exceptional strategic significance. Situated at the confluence of South and Southeast Asia, with a coastline on the Bay of Bengal through which approximately one quarter of global maritime trade passes, it represents what US strategic planners have identified as a crucial node in the architecture of China containment. The US Indo-Pacific Strategy, operationalized through the Quad alliance and a network of military partnerships, requires cooperative governments throughout the region. Bangladesh under Sheikh Hasina, with its extensive economic ties to China through the Belt and Road Initiative and its refusal to provide military facilities to the United States, particularly on St. Martin’s Island, represented an obstacle to this strategy.
Sheikh Hasina herself claimed, in statements reported by Indian media, that a “country of white-skinned people” was attempting to destabilize her government because she refused to compromise Bangladesh’s sovereignty. The chronology is suggestive. In May 2024, US officials visited Dhaka to discuss the Indo-Pacific Strategy. Within weeks, protests that had begun over civil service job quotas transformed into a broader movement demanding Hasina’s resignation. By August 5, she had fled the country. The speed with which the United States embraced the interim government under Muhammad Yunus, including a USD 202 million USAID package and President Biden’s meeting with Yunus at the UN General Assembly in September, indicates a level of prior coordination that demands scrutiny.
Chinese analysts have been explicit about their concerns. Scholars at Chinese research institutions have noted that Bangladesh’s geopolitical position makes it a potential “gamechanger” in South Asian politics if the United States succeeds in reshaping its political orientation. The interim government’s early diplomatic overtures to Washington, combined with its cooling of relations with India, suggest that these concerns are well-founded. The pattern is familiar from Pakistan, where Imran Khan has alleged US involvement in his 2022 ouster, and from numerous other instances across the Global South where governments pursuing independent foreign policies have faced destabilization.
The fundamentalist vehicle
The domestic instrument for this realignment has been the rehabilitation of religious fundamentalist forces. The interim government’s lifting of the ban on Jamaat-e-Islami, imposed under anti-terrorism legislation, has enabled a party whose leaders were convicted of genocide to re-enter political life. The growing influence of Hefazat-e-Islam, which had previously mobilized against secular bloggers and successfully pressured for the removal of a Lady Justice statue from the Supreme Court premises in 2017, signals a broader shift in the political climate. The destruction of Mujibur Rahman’s statues and the Bangabandhu Memorial Museum in August 2024 was not random vandalism but symbolic annihilation of the secular nationalist legacy.
The consequences for religious minorities have been severe. According to the Bangladesh Hindu Buddhist Christian Unity Council, over 2,000 incidents of communal violence occurred in the weeks following Hasina’s ouster, including attacks on temples and the destruction of Hindu-owned properties. A UN report documented 2,924 attacks against religious minority communities in July 2024. The arrest of ISKCON priest Chinmoy Das in late 2024 provoked international concern. These are not isolated incidents but symptoms of a systematic unravelling of the pluralist social fabric that the 1972 Constitution sought to protect.
The 2026 elections, scheduled for February 12, will be conducted with the Awami League banned and its leader sentenced to death. The death sentence handed down by the International Crimes Tribunal on November 17, 2025, was delivered in absentia, without Hasina being represented by counsel of her choosing. Human Rights Watch said that the proceedings as failing to meet international fair trial standards. Whatever one’s assessment of Hasina’s governance record, the exclusion of the country’s largest political party from electoral competition makes a mockery of democratic principles. The Awami League’s characterization of the upcoming polls as elections “held for appearance, power decided in advance” contains more than rhetorical force.
On the occasion of Bangladesh’s Victory Day, the question confronting Bangladesh is whether the liberation of 1971 will survive the forces now arrayed against it. The secular, sovereign nation that emerged from the sacrifice of millions is being dismantled by a coalition of imperial interests seeking a strategic advantage in the Indo-Pacific and domestic fundamentalist forces seeking to complete the counter-revolution begun in 1975. The destruction of Bangabandhu’s memory is not incidental to this project but central to it. For what is being erased is not merely a political leader but the very idea of Bangladesh as a nation defined by linguistic and cultural identity rather than religious affiliation.
The struggle over Bangladesh is ultimately a struggle over whether the Global South can chart independent paths of development or must submit to the strategic imperatives of declining imperial powers. The forces that opposed Bangladesh’s birth in 1971, that collaborated in genocide, that have spent five decades working to undo the liberation’s progressive content, are today closer to victory than at any point since independence. Whether they succeed will depend not only on the resilience of secular and democratic forces within Bangladesh but on the solidarity of progressive movements across the region and the world. The liberation is not yet complete. It may never be complete. But on December 16, it is under siege as never before.
Atul Chandra is the Co-Coordinator of the Asia Desk at the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.
Courtesy: Peoples Dispatch
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