On August 5, two years to the day after a mass uprising drove Sheikh Hasina from power, she announced from India that she would return to Bangladesh in December.
Read as a forecast, the statement is implausible. Read as a signal, it is easy to decode. To a scattered and demoralized Awami League, it says that the leader is still here and intra-party succession has not yet begun.
Much of the reaction – triumphal in some quarters, alarmed in others – collapses three distinct questions into one. Whether Hasina sets foot in Bangladesh, whether the Awami League returns to competitive democratic politics and whether Hasina governs again are separate outcomes with separate causal requirements.
On present evidence, the first is conceivable, the second is plausible over a horizon of years, and the third is close to foreclosed.
Convicted in absentia in November 2025 and sentenced to death over the killing of protesters during the 2024 uprising, Hasina would return from India into custody rather than on a pedestal.
The deeper obstacle comes into focus when this moment is set against 1981, the last time Hasina came home from exile in India.
Then, she returned as the surviving daughter of the founding father, six years after his assassination, having never held office. She carried inherited legitimacy and no record of her own. A fractured party needed a symbol capable of unifying it against a military government, and she supplied one.
Those terms are now reversed. She would return as a 15-year incumbent with a capital conviction, a documented record of repression and a party brand fused to that record. What made 1981 work was the absence of a political past, a clean slate she no longer enjoys.
Three findings from comparative politics account for the rest.
The first point is that authoritarian rulers survive not only because people support them, but because important groups continue to stand behind them. Milan Svolik explains that dictators depend on powerful elites and institutions to stay in power.
These may include the military, police, government officials, business leaders, party workers, and local political figures. These elites back the regime as long as they are assured the party will hold. When they begin to believe that the ruler is going to fall, they may stop supporting the regime.
This helps explain what happened in Bangladesh in August 2024. The mass uprising not only forced Hasina to leave power. It also showed that her government could no longer fully control the situation or guarantee her political survival.
Once this weakness became clear, it became easier and safer for important actors inside the system to distance themselves from her government. Loyalty, in other words, is a bet on survival in politics.
Now India gives her a safe place to stay and a platform from which she can speak. But having a safe place abroad is not the same as controlling the government at home.
No external patron can rebuild from abroad the domestic machinery that converted her authority into obedience. Any restoration would need the acquiescence of the very actors who withdrew it, including the army, the courts, the student organizations of July, and the parties now in office. No plausible coalition among them wants her back.
The second finding concerns the price of a one-person-centered power structure. Samuel Huntington judged political organizations by their adaptability, complexity, autonomy and coherence, the qualities that let an institution outlive any individual within it. But the Awami League has clearly failed on this front.
Barbara Geddes and her collaborators have shown the consequences at the point of collapse. Personalist rulers who lose power are far more likely than the leaders of party regimes to end in exile, prison or worse, because personalization dismantles the institutional buffers that let a party sacrifice its leader and negotiate its own survival.
However, this does not mean Awami League is finished as a party.
James Loxton’s research on authoritarian successor parties documents how organizations born of fallen dictatorships, among them Chile’s UDI, El Salvador’s ARENA, Taiwan’s Kuomintang and Indonesia’s Golkar, recover and win.
They all did so on a consistent formula: new leadership, explicit acceptance of the new constitutional order, retention of organizational assets and visible distance from the abuses that brought their old orders down.
That is the pattern Bangladesh should expect. The constituency survives, the symbol survives, but the fallen leader does not return to office.
The third finding moves the causal weight away from Hasina altogether. Voters judge the past through the present, as V.O. Key and later Morris Fiorina argue in describing the retrospective voter.
If the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) government delivers price stability, order without repression, genuine political competition and credible institutional reform, demand for an Awami League return to power will atrophy.
If it fails or reproduces the winner-takes-all habits it inherited from Hasina’s era, nostalgia will do the work that no Awami League campaign could. Accountability for the killings and disappearances of 2024 is not optional. Impunity would betray the victims and license the next government to repeat the offense.
But treating Awami League voters as collectively culpable would be self-defeating in the same way. The comparative record on party bans is that they relocate constituencies rather than dissolve them, as Turkey’s serial Islamist parties and Egypt after 2013 both suggest. A prohibited electorate does not disappear. It waits, and it remembers.
Bangladesh’s political balance is genuinely difficult. The answer is neither forgetting nor indiscriminate revenge. It is individual accountability, lawfully conducted, alongside a transparent route by which a reformed Awami League may re-enter politics peacefully.
Seen this way, Hasina’s December announcement is an act of internal party management rather than an actual plan to retake power.
It is rational for her and costly for them. Every month the Awami League keeps waiting for Hasina to lead again is another month it loses in building new leadership and preparing for a new political future.
The variables worth watching are not Hasina’s statements. They are whether any senior party figure begins to speak with independent authority; whether the government builds a lawful pathway to re-registration and on what conditions; whether the appellate courts revisit the verdicts delivered in absentia; whether the coalition of July 2024 holds or splinters; and whether inflation and policing improve or deteriorate.
A Hasina restoration would require nearly all of these to move at once and in the same direction. Hence the paradox facing Bangladesh’s oldest major party. Its route back to politics runs most clearly through abandoning the attempt to bring Hasina back to power.
And hence the warning to Bangladesh’s new rulers. Build another order in which the winner owns the state and the loser has no lawful future, and they will have rebuilt the thing the July 2024 uprising was against.
Hasina may yet return to Bangladesh, but for now, Bangladesh is unlikely to return to Hasina.
Md Obaidullah is a PhD student in the Department of Politics at the University of Virginia and a visiting scholar in the Department of Development Studies at Daffodil International University, Dhaka. He can be reached at ycj2yt@virginia.edu
Md Sohrab Hossen is a PhD student in the Department of Political Science at the University of Utah. He can be reached at m.hossen@utah.edu
