Bangladesh after the election: what happened to the July Revolution?

A year and a half ago, Bangladesh’s July Revolution inspired the whole world. After 15 years of Hasina’s dictatorship, the Bangladeshi masses – led by the students – flooded the stage of history and swept her and her Awami League away. Ecstatic hopes were vested in the interim government of Muhammed Yunus, who was supposed to usher in a new era of reform.

A year and a half later, those hopes have been dashed. The Yunus government has achieved next to nothing. The country is in chaos. The student leaders have, for the most part, succeeded in betraying and destroying all the hopes vested in them. Demoralisation and disenchantment prevail. Things are gradually returning to how they were before. 

Now, the long-awaited election has handed power to the Bangladeshi Nationalist Party, Bangladesh’s other corrupt dynastic party. 

After such an epic revolutionary upsurge, how have things come to this?

Yunus’ government of bankers, capitalists and students

In the immediate aftermath of the revolution, it really did look to millions like a new Bangladesh was being born. Student committees had spread across the country, and in many cases workers and ordinary people were also being drawn in. The police fled and, in their place, neighbourhood self-defence groups sprang up to control the streets. Students even volunteered to clean up the debris of the revolution, as they now saw Bangladesh as their own. 

Had a leadership existed to generalise the example of these committees, to really draw in the workers, and had it fought to seize power into the hands of these committees, then a radically different path would have opened. The old Awami League state could have been smashed. The power of the wealthy clique of families and foreign multinationals that dominate Bangladesh would have been seriously threatened.

But this possibility was destroyed by the student leaders’ fatal decision to shake hands with Hasina’s generals. Rather than carrying the revolution the whole way, rather than targeting the economic power that lay beneath every dictator in Bangladeshi history, the students, with no perspective or party of their own, agreed to hand power back to the ‘responsible authorities’. Together with the army, they helped form an interim government comprising bourgeois ‘experts’, and they picked the liberal, Nobel Prize-winning banker Muhammed Yunus to head it. 

Yunus was a man who, in the words of one of the student-ministers, would be “acceptable to everyone”. On the one hand, he joined in on the chorus of praise for the “heroes of the revolution” and celebrated the fall of Hasina’s “fascism”. He pandered to the student leaders who had been raised up by the revolution and even brought two of them – Nahid Islam and Asif Mahmud – into his new cabinet. 

On the other hand, Yunus pleaded for patience and national unity, so that the government could work on reforming Bangladesh. As he put it, “the whole revolution is about reform”. One of his first actions was to publicly shake hands with magnates of industry who, just weeks before, had reaffirmed their support for Hasina against ‘terrorism’ via a live broadcast. He even called for the rehabilitation of the Awami League, which one of his ministers described as “our pride”!

Of course, the interim government had to go along with the ‘revolutionary’ masquerade. But it had only one real concern: to bring a close to the revolution, to restore the authority and legitimacy of the state, and to restore law and order.

For Yunus and the class behind him, the revolution had gone far enough. The destabilising ‘anarchy’ was costing them hundreds of millions. Even worse, it was raising the hopes of the workers and poor that the uprising – for which thousands had been martyred – would bring about a change in their own station. They had to be disabused of this illusion. The months after the July Revolution saw a wave of strikes and factory blockades by workers fighting against their own ‘little Hasinas’. Like the students’ demands before them, the workers’ demands were answered with live fire.

The ‘revolutionary’ agenda of the Yunus government, therefore, consisted in making a lot of promises… while guaranteeing business as usual, i.e., the ability of foreign capitalists to ruthlessly exploit the workers of Bangladesh.

Of course, the interim government had to go along with the ‘revolutionary’ masquerade. But it had only one real concern: to bring a close to the revolution, to restore the authority and legitimacy of the state, and to restore law and order / Image: own work

All sorts of commissions were set up to suggest all sorts of reforms. But most of the Awami League-era judges and civil servants have remained in post. Only 60 police officers were ever arrested for the counter-revolutionary massacres. The security services, the army, even the Rapid Action Battalion – a paramilitary police force notorious for torture – were all kept intact. Torture and murder in custody continue as before. All that has changed is the colour of their uniforms.

The acquiescence of the student leaders was absolutely instrumental in all this. Both in and out of government, they conferred all their authority on Yunus and the reconstructed old order. They amplified and gave legitimacy to his calls for ‘all anti-fascist forces to unite’, thereby chaining the masses of Bangladesh to the capitalists who had been in opposition, or who had newly invented an anti-Hasina backstory for themselves. They were the ones who created what illusions exist in Yunus and his cabinet of capitalists.

For services rendered, they have been handsomely repaid. The student ministers who entered government feathered their nests – indeed, the entire Yunus cabinet has got richer while Bangladesh has sunk deeper into poverty.

No authority

Against the inertia of the government, Bangladesh has been moved by a series of revolutionary aftershocks. A deputy commissioner of the Dhaka Metropolitan Police described: 

“It feels like Dhaka has become ‘a city of demonstrations’ – people break into government offices, just to make their demands heard”.

This has been aided by the total collapse in the authority of the police. Over 1,400 were murdered by the police in July and August 2024. The massacre turned the protests into a revolution. As the masses rose across the country, most of Bangladesh’s police stations were burned to the ground. In terror, police commanders fled, and the force went ‘on strike’ (read: into hiding).

Temporarily, the army was given magistracy powers and sent to police the streets. But as the Chief of the Army Staff, Waker-Uz-Zaman warned, “the army is meant for defending the nation, not for policing”, adding: “meddling in politics is harmful for the army”.

The army is the real backbone of the Yunus regime. Should the need arise for it to clamp down on the masses, given that the rank and file did not join the army to repress the people, it would most certainly split. There would then be no backstop to guarantee the stability of any government of property, let alone that of Yunus. Therefore, Yunus has had to try to reimpose the old unreconstructed police force, but now with rock bottom morale and no authority.

Throughout the last year, there have been numerous cases of mobs storming police stations to free prisoners or beating up police who were trying to arrest them. In many cases, the cops have been forced to stand by and watch powerlessly as the crowds have their way. 

Therefore, with the heavy hand of Hasina replaced with the frail hand of Yunus, and with the power of mass action fresh in the minds of Bangladeshis, all and sundry have taken to the streets to press their own demands.

The workers’ districts saw months of protests, strikes and sit-ins to raise the minimum wage. Eventually, the bosses were forced to concede a wage rise. But since then, protests have continued over unpaid wages. In total, three workers have been murdered by the authorities for protesting in Yunus’ ‘new Bangladesh’.

In total, three workers have been murdered by the authorities for protesting in Yunus’ ‘new Bangladesh’ / Image: আরমান হোসাইন, Facebook

In Dhaka, government buildings have been under repeated siege from teachers, bank clerks, civil servants and even paramilitary troops, each trying to force their own set of demands. 

The student leaders, while they still enjoyed support, were able to organise protests to force their will. Right after the revolution, a protest was organised to throw the chief justice of Bangladesh out of office. Later, in February 2025, students led a ‘bulldozer march’ to demolish the house of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, Hasina’s father. Finally, national protests in May 2025 forced Yunus into the only consequential decision of his tenure: the banning of the Awami League.

As we predicted immediately after the revolution:

“Whatever liberal, democratic reforms they pass will come from the pressure of the masses on the streets, reflecting not their ‘clever’ negotiating, but the fact that the army feels itself under duress from the revolutionary masses.”

In consequence, thousands of the Awami League’s lowest-level thugs were arrested in Operation Devil Hunt, along with a handful of high-profile ministers. As for the tops, most had already fled into exile and could only be tried in absentia. However, as we have seen, the real cogs of the regime – state functionaries and businessmen – have evaded any serious justice, and continue to serve under the new leadership.

Economic chaos

In any case, these two big disruptions to the status quo – the banning of the Awami League and the weakening of the police – have had profound side effects. 

With the police paralysed – and with a thousand guns looted during the revolution remaining unrecovered – Bangladesh has been plagued by a huge crime wave. Robberies, muggings, kidnappings, rapes and murders have spiked. Criminal gangs have reemerged, as many of their leaders were able to simply waltz out of jail during the police strike. There have been over 150 incidents of mob beatings and killings: in some cases, crowds have armed themselves to fend off muggers; in others, religious minorities have been lynched.

Meanwhile, a chaotic free-for-all struggle broke out to fill the vacuum left by the Awami League. Under the Awami League dictatorship, the party enjoyed a monopoly on patronage. The country was one of the most corrupt in the world, but there was a certain stability and predictability to it. As one senior police officer explained:

“During the Awami League era, police often worked in tandem with the ruling party leaders, who mediated local disputes… That structure is gone. Now multiple factions… are trying to control markets, transport hubs and government tenders,”

Now everything is up for grabs. A chaotic turf war has been taking place over the control of everything from bus routes to brick kilns, fish markets and student accommodation, all of which can be used to extort a fee. 

Such matters are resolved with cash and guns. Bribery is rife, and there have been hundreds of cases of political violence: people have been killed over internet cables, scrap yards, and unpaid protection fees.

The July Revolution was sparked by revulsion towards the corruption of the Awami League. But the inrush of gangsters trying to fill the space occupied by the Awami League proves precisely that the capitalists in Bangladesh only exist through corruption, robbery and looting.

The capitalist state exists only as a tool to enable the criminal enrichment of this class and to protect their ill-gotten gains. There is no other type of ‘nicer’ capitalism or more ‘democratic’ politics possible.

More than anything, Bangladeshi politics resembles a struggle between rival mafias seeking to fill the place of the old mob of gangsters. All the parties have been involved in this shameful feeding frenzy.

As a result of all of this, the economic situation has grown worse. The flight of Awami League businessmen from the revolution led to hundreds of garment factories collapsing. 130,000 garment workers were made redundant, adding to the 2.6 million already unemployed. Those jobs have not returned, as capitalists refuse to invest amid such instability.

The flight of Awami League businessmen from the revolution led to hundreds of garment factories collapsing. 130,000 garment workers were made redundant, adding to the 2.6 million already unemployed / Image: Wikimedia commons

Inflation is rising, and the economy is staggering under massive debts. 22 percent of government revenue goes simply to pay interest on loans. In response, the unelected Yunus government has not only implemented austerity, but shrank the annual budget for the first time in the country’s history, signalling that the days of the Bangladeshi Tiger – which buoyed Hasina’s rule for 15 years – are at an end. 

On top of that, Bangladesh’s golden goose – the textile industry – is under threat. It is increasingly coming to depend on cheap yarn from India. This is firstly putting Bangladesh’s own yarn industry under threat, and secondly is leaving the textile industry exposed should India cut off this trade – and Bangladeshi-Indian relations are at an all time low.

Faced with all these compounding crises, the Yunus government has been totally paralysed and unable to carry out any of its promised ‘reforms’. At one stage, Yunus is even reported to have considered resigning, saying he felt he was being “held hostage” by the political chaos. Evidently, no one else could be found to do any better.

‘Free and fair’ elections

This was the shambolic backdrop to last week's elections. Yunus has long wanted to hand power over, like a hot potato, and get back to banking. The generals, fearing the growing instability, had been even more eager to hurry on elections, with or without reforms. As General Waker-Uz-Zaman put it:

“Bangladesh needs political stability. This is only possible through an elected government.”

And who is supposed to bring this ‘stability’ that the capitalists so desperately need?

In the year and a half since Hasina was brought down, the student leaders had systematically demobilised the masses, the government had betrayed every promise made in the heady days after the July Revolution, and politics had become a disgusting spectacle of corrupt gangs scrambling for loot.

With no point of reference with any confidence among the masses, the election naturally bifurcated into a race between two long-established parties: the dynastic Bangladeshi National Party (BNP), which descends from the counter-revolutionary dictatorship of Ziaur Rahman, and Jamaat-e-Islami (JI), which descends from the counter-revolutionary razakars of 1971. Both have been in power before. Indeed, before Hasina’s tenure, they had governed in coalition together.

The JI is an Islamist party with links to the Muslim Brotherhood. It has been an extremely conservative, religiously sectarian party. When it was in power with the BNP, it used the state to crack down on religious minorities.

In the wake of the July Revolution, however, it totally changed its tune. The national leadership opportunistically rebranded themselves as crusaders for social justice, economic reform and anti-corruption. They even ran their first-ever Hindu candidate! Shafiqur Rahman, its leader, praised the July Revolution as a second independence – ironic, given how JI fought against the first. 

The party gained credibility from the fact that, under Hasina, they were harshly persecuted. Its change of face, its links to the poor through involvement in charity work, and, most importantly, the fact that it was the only alternative to the flagrantly corrupt BNP, lay behind its meteoric rise during the campaign, which saw it make an unprecedented sweep of the student union elections, a bellwether for Bangladeshi politics.

The BNP, meanwhile, was historically an Islamist and US-leaning party of dynasts and capitalists who were in competition with the dominating clique of dynasts and capitalists around the Awami League, which was always more secular and India-leaning. These two dynasties have exchanged power for most of Bangladesh’s history. 

Shafiqur Rahman, leader of the JI, and Tarique Rahman, leader of the BNP

For the election, the BNP also rebranded itself as secular anti-corruption crusaders, a ‘lesser evil’ to the JI. However, their record speaks for itself. During the BNP’s last tenure (in coalition with the JI), Bangladesh was the most corrupt country on Earth. Its new leader, Tarique Rahman – now Prime Minister of Bangladesh – was once described in a leaked US diplomatic cable as “a symbol of kleptocratic government and violent politics”, notorious for “flagrantly and frequently demanding bribes”. He is a typical gangster of the patronage politics of Bangladesh. 

Before the election, the party tried to rein in its worst excesses to make itself more electable. Thousands of BNP activists were purged from the party. One BNP candidate even begged his comrades:

“I am pleading with folded hands – please do not engage in extortion until the 12th [of February, election day],"

But this did not stop the scramble. BNP activists have been involved in the vast majority of cases of political violence over the last year and a half. Even within the party, a no-holds-barred struggle has taken place between candidates jockeying for lucrative political positions, which are a means to make money.

One BNP student activist running against a senior BNP figure told Al Jazeera: “They told me they would break my arms and legs if I stayed active in the campaign.” This is a lot closer to the real nature of the election race than the honeyed words of the national politicians.

In Bangladesh, the wealth that the capitalists and their hangers-on accrue passes through the hands of the state. It is the state that dishes out contracts, land, licenses and police protection. It is the state that mediates between foreign capital and Bengali businessmen. Political power is the real money maker, and therefore, Bangladeshi ‘democracy’ has always consisted in a bloody struggle to gain control of, and monopolise, these means to dole out patronage, assemble an army of minions, and carve out a lucrative fiefdom. No wonder that almost half the candidates in the race were taka millionaires, desirous of consolidating their positions. 

Where were the students?

In all this, one might ask: where were the students who spearheaded the July Revolution? 

By the time of the race, the student leaders’ authority had been totally disintegrated by their slavish support of Yunus and by their transformation into typical careerist politicians.

In August 2024, such was the authority of the student leaders that had they called for the formation of a revolutionary party based around a programme of democratic and social demands to lift the masses out of poverty, such a party would have instantly become a mass force. It would have swept away all in front of it.

The leaders formed no such party. Only in May 2025, at the behest of Yunus, did they decide to set up their own party: the National Citizen Party. It promised, vaguely, a second republic, democracy, and an end to corruption.

Its leaders, however, bear responsibility for all of the actions of the interim government of the last 18 months. In the end, they are no different from any of the other parties, which also talk about ‘reform’ and ending corruption – corruption which the NCP leaders are now also tainted with.

In the immediate aftermath of the July Revolution, every careerist immediately turned up at government offices demanding jobs, brandishing real or fictional credentials as ‘student coordinators’ of the movement. But the tone was set by the most prominent student leaders themselves. Student leaders have been seen returning to their hometowns flanked by hundred-car convoys. Others have used their positions to engage in extortion and corruption. An NCP coordinator was caught on camera, for instance, demanding money to call off a protest that he had called.

The most bitter irony of the whole betrayal by the student leaders concerns how the central demand of the July 2024 student movement was treated.

The main student demand in July 2024, which resonated with millions of Bangladeshis, was to get rid of quotas for government jobs for the family members of the martyrs of the War of Independence of 1971. Everyone knew such quotas were merely used to reward Hasina’s loyal stooges.

We argued at the time that the only way to seriously combat the corrupt use of job places was to inscribe the demand for jobs for all. Only a socialist planned economy could guarantee such a thing.

What, instead, has the Yunus government done? The quotas were indeed repealed… and replaced with job quotas for the family members of the martyrs of the 2024 July Revolution! In other words, the patronage system of the old clique is thrown out, and a new patronage system for a new clique is introduced.

There was nothing fundamental to distinguish the NCP programmatically in these elections. Anyone wanting to vote for an outsider instead of the BNP would have voted for the JI. Eventually, the NCP ended up in an electoral pact with the JI, erasing any distinction whatsoever. 

The only visible exception to the shameful careerism and co-option of the student leaders was Osman Hadi. Hadi was a founder of Inqilab Moncho (Revolutionary Platform), a student party born out of the revolution, who had stood at the forefront of demonstrations, like the campaign to ban the Awami League. 

Hadi’s politics were extremely contradictory: he mixed populism with Islamism and called for a national unity government against India. But he also criticised the corruption of the BNP and the NCP.  His plebeian style of agitation and his distance from the other student leaders turned him into a viral figure, a seemingly untainted fighter for the ideals of the July Revolution. 

He was planning to run as an independent in the elections. But in December 2025, Hadi was shot in the head by an assassin. Immediately, he was turned into a martyr. Huge anti-India demonstrations sprang up across the country.

But these were not like the revolutionary demonstrations of July 2024. In July, the masses had a clear leadership in the students, and clear demands in the fight against the quota system and for the downfall of Hasina. The masses centred their indignation on the corrupt Hasina clique.

A year and a half later, Hasina is gone, but conditions have worsened. There is no clarity as to where to go next. The desperate and embattled demonstrators could only strike out blindly at what they saw as the symbolic remnants of the secular, Indian-backed old regime. 

In the December protests, the Indian consulate was besieged. The houses of ex-Awami leaders were burned down, as was the house of a BNP leader. A Hindu man was lynched and set on fire by a mob. Secular cultural institutions were firebombed. The offices of the main Bangladeshi newspapers were torched. 

Democracy in Bangladesh?

In the end, the ‘free and fair’ elections – which featured the bombing of a polling centre, and attempts to stuff ballots and buy votes – were won by Tarique Rahman of the BNP. Playing on legitimate fears that the JI would roll back women's rights, it won by a landslide, taking 212 seats, compared to the JI’s 77 and the NCP’s… six.

Less than 60 percent turned out for what was touted as the most important election in Bangladeshi history. One rickshaw driver summed up the mood:

“We missed the opportunity. People gave their lives in July for nothing…

“I will still vote, not because I expect change, but because there is nothing else left to do. I don’t believe the election would alter my life – or the country – in any meaningful way.”

This rickshaw driver has summed up in a few sentences the whole betrayal of the liberal opposition, not only in Bangladesh, but in all of the so-called ‘Gen Z’ revolutions. The masses saw their opportunity. They gave their lives to take it. The liberal opposition leaders said, ‘no, wait for elections.’ They helped the system survive its moment of crisis, and once the elections come about, the masses go along dejected, disillusioned, voting ‘because there is nothing else left to do.’ 

At the same time as the election, Bangladeshi’s were asked to vote in a referendum on the constitution. This was Yunus’ parting gift, a liberal wishlist of reforms to be enacted by the next government. It is a noble piece of paper which envisions turning Bangladesh into a stable bourgeois democracy with a series of checks and balances and an impartial state bureaucracy.

It was passed, and with the masses bowing their heads while the orgy of corruption and place-seeking goes on above them, it will become a dead letter. Similarly, after the revolution in 1990 brought down the dictatorship of General Ershad, the BNP and the AL also promised free and fair elections, an independent judiciary and other democratic reforms. But once the masses had receded, the parties turned on each other to fight a violent turf war over the state, which eventually resulted in the rise of the Hasina dictatorship.

But the lesson of this whole, tragic process is that protest and revolution in themselves are not enough. Capitalism and its state must be abolished. But that requires a party shorn of illusions in liberalism and Nobel Prize winners, one that fights to place the workers themselves in power

This is in the nature of Bangladeshi capitalism. Whereas the advanced capitalist countries possess a strong, affluent and independent bourgeoisie that has been able to afford a few scraps for the masses to cement illusions in ‘democracy’, Bangladesh’s weak, comprador capitalist class depends for their existence on foreign multinationals. 

A leaked conversation from the US embassy in Bangladesh candidly revealed the real setup. At the time, the US, wary that the BNP would “destroy itself through internecine corruption”, was extending feelers to the JI. In the recording, the official reassures female journalists that the JI will remain in hock to the multinationals:

“Bangladesh’s entire economy, 20 percent of your exports to the United States, depend on a series of socially liberal clothing chains and clothing brands… if there are no more orders, there will be no Bangladeshi economy… We want [the JI] to be our friends, because we want to be able to pick up the phone and say ‘that thing you just said. So here’s how that’s going to play out.’”

The entire economic ‘miracle’ is built around the fact that these buyers – the real masters of Bangladesh – can super-exploit millions of Bangladeshi labourers at some of the cheapest wages in the world. 

In Bangladesh, that necessitates a constant striving towards repressive order. To maintain this profitable setup, millions of workers must be held in conditions of near slavery. There can be no serious talk of enduring democratic rights in this situation, as it would undermine the competitive rates of Bengali textiles.

On the other hand, as the state is the middleman between transcontinental conglomerates and local exploiters, the fortunes of the capitalists of Bangladesh depend on their relationship with the ruling party. With massive kickbacks to be made, whatever dynasty has the upper hand will strive to monopolise its hold on this honeypot. The system is one of winner-takes-all – there can be no impartiality here. 

A stable, uncorrupt, liberal democracy is ruled out. Although it might preach unity today, the BNP will strive to consolidate power, eliminate its competition and, above all, restore the unquestioned monopoly on violence of the police and the army.

All this will not be so simple. Amid a global crisis of capitalism, the Bangladeshi economy is sliding ever deeper into crisis. Millions more are falling into desperate poverty, which will make the oncoming orgy of corruption even more provocative in the eyes of the masses. As discontent grows, new flare-ups and mass protests will be inevitable. 

But the lesson of this whole, tragic process is that protest and revolution in themselves are not enough. Capitalism and its state must be abolished. But that requires a party shorn of illusions in liberalism and Nobel Prize winners, one that fights to place the workers themselves in power. Without it, it will be the Islamists who gain from the growing disenchantment. 

The same lesson screams out from all the Gen Z revolutions. Unless these revolutionary masses are armed with a party of their own, a revolutionary communist party that strives to replace the dictatorship of capital with the dictatorship of the proletariat, things will go awry. In each of these cases, the old order may have been disrupted, but all the horrors of yesterday are returning with a vengeance.

The crisis of Bangladesh, of Sri Lanka, of Nepal – the crisis of mankind is the crisis of revolutionary leadership. That leadership must be built with the greatest possible urgency. There is no other way out.