How South Asia’s Uprisings Are Reshaping Party Politics — And What Bangladesh Gets Wrong |
The Pulse | Politics | South Asia
How South Asia’s Uprisings Are Reshaping Party Politics — And What Bangladesh Gets Wrong
Nepal and Sri Lanka responded to comparable uprisings by redesigning the rules of the game. Bangladesh removed the opposing team from the field and called it a victory.
Victory celebrations at the Shahbagh in Dhaka, Bangladesh, after the resignation of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, August 5, 2024.
Three countries. Three uprisings. Three very different answers to the same constitutional question: what do you do with a political party that abused power?
In Nepal, the Maoists — whose decade-long armed insurgency killed several thousand people — were brought inside the constitutional order and eventually governed the country. In Sri Lanka, the Rajapaksa political dynasty, whose government presided over an economic collapse that drove citizens to storm the presidential palace in 2022, was electorally punished but left legally intact. In Bangladesh, the Awami League (AL), the party that led the country’s independence struggle in 1971 and drove rapid infrastructure and economic growth under the government of Sheikh Hasina, but faced criticism for alleged democratic backsliding and authoritarianism, was ousted from power in August 2024 in a mass uprising. The AL has been formally banned by parliament as a terrorist organization, its registration suspended, and its supporters facing up to 14 years in prison for any organized political activity.
The comparative record suggests Bangladesh has chosen the worst of the three available paths.
Bangladesh: Accountability as Legal Extinction
The Anti-Terrorism (Amendment) Act 2026, passed by the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP)-led parliament on 8 April 2026, converted what the interim government had begun via an emergency ordinance into permanent law — the total prohibition of all activities of the AL, its affiliates, and its student wings. Meetings, publications, social media posts, and public gatherings are all banned pending completion of trials of AL leaders, including Hasina, before Bangladesh’s International Crimes Tribunal. The Election Commission has suspended the party’s registration. Indeed, Bangladesh’s February 2026 elections — the first since the July 2024 uprising — proceeded without the participation of a party that won nearly half the national vote as recently as 2008.
The constitutional defects are serious. Article 38 of Bangladesh’s constitution protects freedom of association, permitting restrictions only for organizations that promote violence, destroy communal harmony, or are constitutionally inconsistent in their aims. The Awami League — founded in 1949, a consistent electoral participant, and the party of liberation — meets none of those criteria as a matter of constitutional law. Article 39, which protects expression, is equally violated by a law that criminalizes any public statement made on the party’s behalf. And the targeting logic inverts criminal law’s foundational principle: the International Crimes Tribunal exists to try specific individuals for specific acts. Using pending individual trials as the predicate for an organizational ban on the entire party converts individual liability into collective proscription — a constitutional move that no established legal system in the region has endorsed when applied to a major political party.
Constitutional lawyer Barrister Tania Amir captured the doctrinal stakes precisely. Banning the AL, she said, is “challenging the very edifice of democracy.” That is not a defense of the AL’s conduct in government. It is a recognition that formal constitutionalism — a parliamentary vote, a signed statute, elections duly held — can coexist with, and produce, the practical extinction of political pluralism.
LSE constitutional scholar Tarunabh Khaitan has described this as killing a constitution with a thousand cuts: the accumulation of individually defensible legal acts whose cumulative effect dismantles the competitive order that formal law claims to protect. Bangladesh’s party ban is a compressed, single-act version of that pathology. Anti-terrorism law has been deployed to accomplish what no openly unconstitutional measure could: the removal of the principal opposition from political life, under parliamentary cover.
The systemic result is a reconfigured party system in which the AL’s historic electoral constituency — roughly a third of the electorate — is represented by no legally functioning party.........