Sheikh Hasina: How the daughter of a slain leader went from democratic hope to authoritarian casualty

Mujib-centric politicking and an over-reliance on Bangladesh’s founding impulse seem to have led to the longest-serving Prime Minister’s downfall.

A college student paints graffiti on a wall at Dhaka University in the capital on August 12. Students who led the weeks of protests that toppled autocratic premier Sheikh Hasina are back on the streets to give the capital Dhaka a makeover. | Photo Credit: MUNIR UZ ZAMAN/AFP

At the crack of dawn on August 15, 1975, a group of renegade officers of the Bangladesh Army’s First Armoured Division stormed into Dhanmondi 32, Dhaka, and gunned down Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujib-ur-Rahman, his wife, sons, and 10-year-old grandson. His daughters, Sheikh Hasina and Sheikh Rehana, were spared only by virtue of them being abroad on that fateful day. Half a century later, 10 days to the exact date, Hasina would be forced to make an ignominious and hasty airborne exit out of Dhaka to India, where she had found refuge 50 years ago after her father’s assassination.

Across June and July 2024, a wave of student-led protests (first against a judicially reinstated quota system and then against the detention of student leaders) snowballed into larger protests with a single-point agenda: Hasina’s resignation. While she invited protesters for talks, the continued heavy-handedness of security forces on the ground prompted a final “March to Dhaka” across the country.

By the time Hasina succumbed, resigned, and flew out of the country on August 5, Bangladesh had lost approximately 300 lives to the clashes and ushered in a new military-backed interim government led by long-time Hasina critic—2006 Nobel Peace Prize awardee Muhammad Yunus. With her political future teetering at the finish line, how did Hasina come to this point after securing her fourth consecutive and fifth overall prime ministerial term in January 2024?

In the early 2000s, when Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s National Security Adviser Brijesh Mishra sought to offer her policy advice, Sheikh Hasina curtly reminded him: “As a friend of India… I will address all your concerns, but don’t tell me how to run my country.” Hasina’s ties with New Delhi have been defined by the personal relationship built over the years with Delhi’s leaders, a consistent struggle to reconcile the personal with Bangladesh’s political, and an attempt at letting the former power the latter—which succeeded for a while.

Indira Gandhi’s refuge to Hasina in 1975 lit an enduring fire of friendship with Hasina in Delhi, but it also gave rise to the expectations that India would have from Bangladesh in return a symbiotic relationship with a nation that had not let go of its violent birth pangs and was not necessarily predisposed to overly amicable bilateral ties with India. Hasina’s political gambit was to nourish this relationship, draw tangible benefits, use these to present a strong domestic case for firm India-Bangladesh ties and thwart the anti-India politics of the opposition, led by the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) and Islamist parties such as the Jamaat-e-Islami. As a first-time premier, Hasina kept a watchful eye on the opposition and catered to it as a credible constituency.

Initial missteps

Hasina’s initial missteps with India were evident in her first prime ministerial tenure (1996-2001). India raced to secure multiple successful deals (a 30-year water-sharing agreement and the long-sought Chittagong Hill Tracts Accord). However, as Avinash Paliwal, the author of India’s Near East: A New History, says, Hasina’s pace in signing the deals came at a huge political cost, with the BNP accusing the Ganga water deal of being skewed in India’s favour, and Hasina’s government was forced into a minority.

Evidently, Hasina’s keenness to rely on these deals did not translate into domestic political gains, showing her initial inability to weather the domestic cost, leading to her ouster in 2001. In any case, Delhi-Dhaka ties soured considerably after a Bangladesh Rifles (BDR) contingent killed 16 personnel from India’s Border Security Force (BSF) in Meghalaya in 2001, even as India seemed willing to let Hasina take time to deliver on other key demands (such as the extradition of ULFA-I general secretary Anup Chetia or access to the Chittagong and Mongla ports).

India’s ties with Bangladesh predictably tanked during Khaleda Zia’s tenure from 2001 onwards, with a watershed defence cooperation agreement with China in 2002, increasing contacts with Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), frequent skirmishes between the BSF and the Bangaldesh Rifles (BDR), and resistance to allow Indian transit trade through Bangladeshi ports. The latter pushed India to circumvent Bangladesh and undertake an ambitious sea-land corridor through Myanmar’s Sittwe port (the Kaladan Project) that could connect to India’s north-eastern region.

In hindsight, it is evident that both the United Progressive Alliance government in New Delhi and the BNP government in Dhaka attempted to mend ties, but the temptation of anti-India politics always prevailed in Bangladesh. Both under Khaleda Zia and the military caretaker government between 2007 and 2009, it was relatively easier for Hasina to campaign for better ties with India as it dovetailed with other planks that characterised opposition politics.

People take photos in front of anti-government graffitis on a vandalised mural depicting Bangladesh’s founding father Sheikh Mujibur Rahman days after a student-led uprising ended the 15-year rule of his daughter Sheikh Hasina in Dhaka on August 10. | Photo Credit: LUIS TATO/AFP

It is her second tenure as Prime Minister that featured events that arguably eroded Hasina’s political will to worry about the casualties of pro-India politics. In the 2010-11 period (which featured mutual prime ministerial visits between Dhaka and New Delhi), Hasina stalled the opening of Chittagong and Mongla to India while defending a crucial power deal with New Delhi to treat Bangladesh’s electricity shortfall. This drew immense opposition ire and claims of infringement on Bangladeshi sovereignty.

A thorny issue

A particularly thorny issue was the demarcation of boundaries on which Hasina staked her political reputation in vain. In any case, the beginning of her second term was marked by the bloodbath from a mutiny by the BDR, now known as the Border Guard Bangladesh, which claimed the lives of 74 individuals, including its Director General, and threatened to plunge the country into enough instability to force Hasina’s ouster. Here, Hasina made a choice. With the Indian military ready to intervene, she made it her principal instrument of leverage to stay the Army chief’s hand against the mutineers.

Regardless of whether Hasina viewed the India card as a carte blanche, it became evident from then on that her appetite for balancing multiple domestic constituencies when dealing with India had reduced significantly. After at least three controversial elections marred by progressively worse clampdowns on the opposition and charges of rigging, Hasina eventually oversaw the resolution of most of the legacy disputes with India, including border demarcation, without having to heed opposition resistance. Under Hasina, India even secured permanent access to Chattogram (official name of Chittagong) and Mongla ports by 2023.

Having cultivated an equally strong relationship with the Narendra Modi government (from 2014), she oversaw the zenith of India-Bangladesh ties between 2022 and 2024, even as some key disputes remained (such as sharing the Teesta’s waters). On the other hand, Hasina’s well-entrenched relationship with Delhi also allowed her a bigger appetite for widening ties with China; the biggest testament to this was an unprecedented deal for two Type 035 submarines in 2016 and a new Chinese built submarine base at the mouth of the Bay of Bengal in 2023.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Bangladesh PM Sheikh Hasina during a ceremonial reception for Bangladesh PM at Rashtrapati Bhawan, in New Delhi on June 22. | Photo Credit: SUSHIL KUMAR VERMA

Naturally, for the BNP and its allies, opposition to Hasina became inextricably linked to their opposition to India. Hasina’s iron hand against basic democratic freedoms that forced the opposition out of the formal political space by 2019 only enhanced this sentiment. In August 2024, the combined resistance that brewed for over 15 years boiled over. In the end, the most potent external instrument that aided Hasina even against other external threats (such as an increasingly critical Washington) evolved into one of her many vulnerabilities.

Hasina’s opponents find political space

Hasina’s increasingly unilateral approach to policymaking with India was symptomatic of a larger malaise. Her gradual disinclination to regard opposition politics as credible or legitimate and her inclination for brute force burnt her political wick. Right from the beginning, she made the Awami League’s role in freedom fighting and Sheikh Mujib’s legacy her political centrepiece.

While this made her opposition to the Jamaat-e-Islami more fundamental (since the Jamaat carried the tainted legacy of siding with the Pakistan Army in the 1971 massacres), Gen. Zia-ur-Rahman’s BNP offered a greater challenge. The BNP countered Hasina’s politics of nationalism with its own, rooted in Rahman’s legacy of being a hero of the Liberation War, claiming as much agency in Bangladesh politics as Hasina. Zia-ur-Rahman’s assassination by renegade officers in 1981 (like Mujib’s in 1975) gave his wife Khaleda Zia greater ability to encroach on Hasina’s platform.

Hasina’s opponents, such as the Jamaat, found enough political space (including Cabinet berths) in the BNP governments of 1991 and 2001 in continuation of the Zia-ur-Rahman military-led government’s policy of providing greater space to Islamist parties after 1977, revoking an earlier ban on religious parties and obliterating secularism as one of the four state principles.

Hasina, on the other hand, spearheaded the movement for Jamaat’s formal political ostracisation with redoubled efforts after 2009. She lobbied for a war crimes tribunal to try its members who sided with Pakistan in 1971 and attempted to ban the party in 2013 when the Dhaka High Court cancelled its registration as a party on account of its charter, which effectively rejected Bangladeshi sovereignty. Hasina also justifiably rejected several of the Jamaat’s Islamist demands such as a blasphemy law.

However, such politics did not mean that Hasina was opposed to Islamism in Bangladesh; like the BNP, the Awami League also sought the support of many Islamist parties. A prime example of this was her co-opting of the ultraconservative Islamist group Hefazat-e-Islam, which was behind anti-India protests during Modi’s visit to Bangladesh in 2021. She conceded to several of their Islamist demands; she even earned the moniker “Mother of Qawmi” from Hefazat leaders for recognising Qawmi degrees on a par with university qualifications.

Prior to the 2018 elections, the Awami League’s alliance included 61 Islamist parties (both registered and unregistered). However, as Bangladeshi political scientist Ali Riaz says, this was driven more by ideological affinity rather than electoral considerations given the paltry vote share of most of these parties (for instance, the Jamaat-e-Islami’s vote share dropped from 12.13 per cent in 1991 to 4.48 per cent in 2008). As Riaz cautions, parties such as the Jamaat were sought to be banned not because of their Islamism but their Pakistan connection.

Hasina’s efforts against the Jamaat since then have always been an attempt to consolidate her legacy as a standard-bearer of Bangladeshi nationalism, one of her many tools to decimate the opposition space. This claim to leadership through Mujib’s legacy was evident until her final days in power, especially as she implicitly compared student protesters to “razakars” (Pakistan Army loyalists in 1971). That she saw the BNP through the same lens was evident in her clampdown on the party, especially between 2018 (Khaleda Zia’s arrest) and 2023 (bans on several of BNP’s activities and publications). In the end, protesters turned her nationalism against her, chanting “Ami ke? Tumi ke? Rajakar rajakar” (Who am I? Who are you? Razakar razakar).

Khaleda Zia waves to supporters after she was arrested in Dhaka on September 3, 2007. | Photo Credit: PAVEL RAHMAN/AP

The role that India played in Hasina’s career should take nothing away from the agency she herself has exercised as a politician. Despite the seemingly iron-clad relationship with New Delhi, before her 2017 visit to New Delhi, Hasina publicly blamed India’s Research & Analysis Wing for helping the BNP unseat her in 2001 over interests linked to natural gas. In an election year, Hasina’s political tack to undermine the BNP’s charge of being too close to India reflected her ability to risk Indian sensitivities. She weathered the risk, with India-Bangladesh ties only waxing and waxing.

Hasina and the Army

Between August and November 1975, Bangladesh had witnessed a coup, a counter-coup, and a second counter-coup. While the first killed the Bangabandhu and his kin, the last led to the Army chief Zia-ur-Rahman’s eventual elevation to President in 1977. In the lead-up to Mujib’s death, the political and military leadership in Bangladesh was embroiled in Byzantian conspiracy and mistrust. Mujib’s retention of a personal martial force, his banning of all political parties except the Awami League, and allegations of corruption, all contributed to the plot.

However, a key factor was his revulsion of those soldiers of the Bangladesh Army who had stayed on with the Pakistan Army in the Liberation War without joining the rebel ranks of the Mukti Bahini. When Hasina returned to Dhaka as the president of the Awami League in 1981, the Bangladesh Army was shedding the discrimination within its ranks that her father had desired (to eliminate pro-Pakistan sentiments).

The Bangladesh Army then was a force with a double inheritance: the legacies, traditions, and cultures of the British Indian Army and the Pakistan Army of which it was a direct successor. Following the turbulence of the Liberation War, officers across the rank and file of the Army had to negotiate the new politics of liberation and a distinct Bangladeshi identity.

Since the man who led this force then (Zia-ur-Rahman) was himself an officer decorated by the Pakistan Army for gallantry in the 1965 war against India, it was natural that both the Bangladesh Army and the BNP would be coloured by anti-India sentiments in addition to those that already simmered. A constant apprehension of Indian military intervention characterised even those officers responsible for the multiple coups. Evidently, despite their shared colonial past, Bangladesh’s civil-military relations since its independence have aligned more closely with Pakistan’s experience than India’s, stopping just short of becoming a garrison state like Pakistan.

As a result, Hasina arguably learnt early on that the Bangladesh Army had become what Ayesha Siddiqa, the author of Military Inc.: Inside Pakistan’s Military Economy, characterises as an “arbitrator military” with an active interest in dividing state power. Hence, even as Hasina and Khaleda Zia jointly mobilised against General Hussain Muhammad Ershad’s military rule (1983-1990) in its twilight years, the Awami League partnered with Ershad for the most part of this period. Ershad’s initial support for Hasina after she wrested power from Khaleda Zia in 1996 was crucial for her government and is testimony to Hasina’s ability to navigate Army politics. When President Iajuddin Ahmed declared an emergency in 2007, resulting from Hasina’s boycott of elections under his caretaker government owing to perceptions that he was partial to Khaleda Zia, it led to yet another coup by the Army Chief General Mooed Uddin Ahmed.

While both “Battling Begums” were arrested on corruption charges in 2007 (soon released), Hasina arguably garnered more valuable lessons on how to keep the Army in the barracks. Guided by this experience, she abolished the constitutional provision for a caretaker government in 2011.

Having herself led the charge to insert the provision in the Constitution in 1996 at the end of Khaleda Zia’s first term and fighting her first successful elections under a caretaker setup, she now feared being at the other end of the spectrum. The Bangladesh Army thus would not take power for the next 15 years, and the Awami League would allow no caretaker governments for three successive elections. Just three years into Hasina’s second prime ministerial stint, the Army even thwarted an attempted coup by a section of mid-ranking Islamist hardliners within the Army in December 2011.

How did Hasina manage this? By heaping money on defence and avoiding public conflict with Army chiefs. Between 2008 and 2017, Bangladesh’s defence spending rose by 123 per cent, according to a report in The Economist from 2021 that pointed to Hasina’s strange silence on an Al Jazeera documentary on alleged corruption by the then Army Chief Gen. Aziz Ahmed.

The Bangladesh Army also amassed wealth for its officer cadre (which Ayesha Siddiqa terms MILBUS, or “military capital used for the personal benefit of military fraternity”) through the Sena Kalyan Sangstha and the Bangladesh Army Welfare Trust, which bears an uncanny resemblance to Pakistan’s Army Welfare Trust. Today, retired Army officers run several organisations that add to MILBUS, such as the Sena Kalyan Insurance, with a retired Brigadier General serving as MD and CEO. Even as the US effectively sanctioned (designated) Gen. Aziz Ahmed in May 2024, Hasina pushed back against US criticism, continuing to refrain from speaking out against Aziz.

Bangladesh’s civil-military milieu at present has an interesting character. General Waqar-uz-Zaman, the incumbent Army chief, is related to Hasina by marriage; his wife is her cousin and the daughter of former Army chief General Mustafizur Rahman (1997 to 2000). This, however, did not translate into overt support for Hasina, with Zaman protecting his public image (and the Army’s image by extension) and seeking to uphold the Army’s perception as a stabilising force amidst the turmoil. Troops refused to open fire on civilians, thus refusing to become complicit in Hasina’s authoritarian tactics.

Over-extending the Army’s role in the future would only dent its credibility, given the freshly mobilised youth’s demands for greater democratic space. It is perhaps testimony to the goodwill that Hasina built over the years with the men in uniform that they facilitated her hasty exit from Dhaka.

Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus speaks to the media in Dhaka on August 8. | Photo Credit: MONIRUL ALAM/EPA-EFE

In hindsight, the violence-ridden history of her personal and political life, coupled with her nationalistic brand of politics, profoundly shaped her approach to leadership. It pushed her incrementally towards authoritarianism, for survival more than anything else. Even as young student leaders stood behind the octogenarian Muhammad Yunus as he took oath as the interim Prime Minister, Bangladesh’s “second liberation” from Hasina has been marked by chaos and targeted violence against Bangladesh’s minorities, particularly Hindus, by Islamist mobs in the immediate aftermath of her exit. While this testifies to Hasina’s ability to have kept such violence (largely, not completely) in check, it also points to her failure to build enduring guardrails against religiously motivated extremist elements. More broadly, it also proves that Hasina’s stewardship of Bangladesh’s upward economic trajectory across the last decade did not guarantee national stability or popular support for her, since it came at the cost of fundamental political freedoms.

Hoping to avoid being removed from power (at best) or sharing her father’s fate (at worst), Hasina may have inflicted a far greater tragedy on herself, her party, and her father’s legacy. Perhaps most symbolic of this irony is young protesters pulling down Bangabandhu’s statue, reminiscent of Iraqis toppling Saddam Hussein’s statue in 2003. For Iraq, it was the culmination of the rule of a despot through a US invasion that had little legal basis. For Bangladesh, it was a casualty of Hasina’s Mujib-centric politicking and an over-reliance on the country’s founding impulse up until the moment it meant nothing.

Bantirani Patrois a Research Associate at the Centre for Air Power Studies, New Delhi and a NASP Fellow at the Takshashila Institution, Bengaluru.

Bashir Ali Abbasis a Research Associate at the Council for Strategic and Defense Studies, New Delhi, and a South Asia Fellow at the Stimson Center, Washington, DC.

Views expressed are strictly the authors’ own.