Awami League, Bangladesh, BDElection 2026, Constitution, Current Affairs, Democracy, Opinion, Politics

Election Observation in Bangladesh: Scrutiny on Paper, Legitimacy in Practice

Jahanara Nuri 14 February 2026

Editorial Analysis re-published from TBR Bangladesh held its election amid serious constitutional violations, erosion of the rule of law, and persistent human rights abuses. This moment was not merely procedural; for many citizens, it became a struggle for political survival. Those who devoted their lives to liberating and building Bangladesh have faced renewed pressure from forces seeking to establish faith-based rule. They sided with Islamic Republic of Pakistan against the liberal-minded citizens of their own homeland. Many leaders of these hardline Islamist groups are linked to individuals implicated in the 1971 genocide. The July 2024 movement, often called a “colour revolution,” openly defied constitutional governance, the rule of law, and the legacy of Bangladesh’s liberation leadership. The Awami League, pro-liberation activists, ordinary supporters, and the Hindu community have been criminalized and subjected to arbitrary violence, mass arrests, false legal cases, and extortion of land and businesses. To date, nearly fifty Awami League leaders have died in prison without their cases reaching

court, many reportedly while still in handcuffs. Over a thousand grass-roots activists have been killed, and hundreds of thousands remain fugitives, with many deprived of their education at universities and medical colleges. That rupture triggered a violent period now exceeding sixteen months, marked by widespread repression and institutional breakdown. Hundreds of elected parliamentarians remain imprisoned, while the Prime Minister continues to live in exile under credible threats. The country’s largest political party has been barred from participation, and mass arrests have targeted its supporters. Under these conditions, the meaning of electoral consent and democratic legitimacy demands urgent re-examination. Bangladesh’s election now raises serious legitimacy concerns. Constitutional uncertainty, a history of unprecedented violence, and reported irregularities cast doubt on international observation and democratic credibility. The Washington Examiner reported that Bangladesh’s 2024 crisis began with student protests that escalated into deadly violence and were subsequently misread by key international actors. With the parliamentary election now concluded, the central question has shifted from anticipation to…

Bangladesh, Constitution, Politics

Current Constitutional Governance Crisis in Bangladesh: A Legal Postmortem

M Rafiqul Islam 7 February 2026

The interim government is obliged to demonstrate its legitimacy which cannot be invented or plucked from trees. Its legitimacy must come from only one source, called the Constitution of Bangladesh. Notwithstanding its unelected and precarious constitutional status, the interim government is acting like a ‘touch stone’ as if anything it touches and incorporates into the Constitution becomes inviolable law. Its two documents in particular, the July Charter and its referendum, fall far short of their constitutionality. They are ill-conceived and short-sighted rickety political conundrums at their best with ample potential for fierce political confrontations at their worst.

7 February 2026

(Keynote address to an international seminar on Bangladesh held in the Jubilee Seminar Hall of the New South Wales Parliament House, 6 Macquarie Street, Sydney on 2 February 2026 at 2-5 pm) Honourable Chair, distinguished guests, learned commentators, and dear audience, Let me begin by providing a brief context for this talk. Bangladesh commenced its journey of good governance under a popular and accountable democratic Constitution in 1972. Since 1975, it has been on a roller-coaster ride from parliamentary, presidential, martial law, military dominated turncoat democracy, a return to parliamentary government, and, most recently, an unelected interim government. The current interim government is the product of the political uprising in July 2024 which ousted the Sheikh Hasina administration that had been in power since 2008. Against this backdrop, this paper offers an academic lawyer’s opinion and legal analysis based strictly on the hard-core provisions of the Constitution of Bangladesh still in force without any inference and extrapolation. I will endeavour

to present this analysis simply, without diluting its legal rigour. Legal Status of the Interim Government Following the fall of Sheikh Hasina government, the Prime Minister departed for India. It was initially unclear whether she intented to led a government in exile, as has occurred in other historical contexts, such as the Sihanouk government of Cambodia, which went to China after he was overthrown and ran a government in exile parallel to the Pol Pot regime. No such attempt was made. Instead, a public declaration announced that Sheikh Hasina had resigned, although her resignation letter has never been disclosed despite public demands and a writ petition filed in the High Court Division. Subsequently, the President publicly admitted that he had never received any resignation letter. This situation created a governance vacuum. To address it, the President invoked Article 106 of the Constitution and sought an advisory opinion from the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court (AD). The Article 106 empowers…

Uncategorised

When Law Absolves Violence: Transitional Justice and the Manufacture of Innocence

Iconus Clustus 12 January 2026

This essay critically examines the Interim Government’s proposed indemnity for so-called “July fighters,” challenging its legal, moral, and philosophical foundations. It argues that the invocation of constitutional immunity, historical precedent, and “transitional justice” functions less as a framework for accountability than as a mechanism for pre-emptive absolution. By exposing the false equivalence drawn between the violence of July and the Liberation War of 1971, the misapplication of Article 46 of the Constitution, and the selective appropriation of Arab Spring and South African precedents, the piece demonstrates how legality is being moralised to shield violence from scrutiny. Ultimately, it contends that justice in periods of transition cannot be secured through indemnity that silences victims, forecloses investigation, and rewrites memory, but only through an honest confrontation with wrongdoing, even when committed in the name of resistance.

12 January 2026

Law as Moral Architecture in Times of Political Rupture This intervention does not proceed from the standpoint of legal practice or doctrinal arbitration. It approaches law as a normative and political instrument, one that distributes moral recognition, assigns legitimacy, and shapes collective memory. The concern here is not whether indemnity can be technically enacted, but what kind of moral order it constructs when enacted. This piece is prompted by a public statement issued by the Law Adviser to Bangladesh’s Interim Government, Asif Nazrul, in which he announced the preparation of an indemnity ordinance granting immunity to those described as “July fighters.” In the statement, disseminated through his official Facebook account and subsequently reproduced across national media, the proposed indemnity is justified on constitutional grounds, specifically Article 46, and framed as a legitimate instrument of transitional justice, with references to the 1971 Liberation War and post–Arab Spring precedents. [1,2,3,4] Taken together, these claims do not merely describe an impending legal measure;

they advance a normative reclassification of political violence itself. It is this reclassification, its assumptions, implications, and dangers, that the present critique seeks to interrogate. The proposal to grant indemnity to so-called [5] “July fighters” is being advanced as a measure of transitional justice, grounded in constitutional authority and comparative precedent. Yet upon closer examination, the proposal rests on a series of category errors, legal, historical, and moral, which together amount to a dangerous transformation of law into a mechanism of political absolution. This critique argues that the proposed indemnity framework does not merely risk injustice in individual cases; it reconfigures accountability itself, producing a hierarchy of legal subjects and institutionalising impunity under the guise of transition. References are used here not as appeals to authority, but as illustrations of recurring patterns in how societies attempt, and often fail, to reconcile power with justice. From Exception to Erasure: How Immunity Becomes Impunity Immunity in law is not a moral reward;…

Mythology, Philosophy, Politics

When Mahishasura Reigns: The Philosophical Return of Durga

Iconus Clustus 3 October 2025

When Mahishasura reigns, society is not merely misgoverned - it is unbalanced, hollowed, dragged backwards into the inertia of dependency. The gods stand powerless, their weapons broken, their pride undone. Yet history whispers: Shakti cannot be suppressed forever. Durga is not a miracle but a principle - vitality returning against sterility, sovereignty against tutelage, balance against distortion. Her arrival is inevitable when the night grows too dark, for the buffalo-demon always falls, and Shakti always rises.

3 October 2025

I. The Darkness Before the Awakening The myth begins in collapse. The gods, once radiant, find themselves stripped of power. Mahishasura, buffalo-headed and unrelenting, has seized the heavens. His reign is not one of wisdom or balance, but of brute force, arrogance, and the stubborn insistence of chaos against order. The gods wander, dispossessed, their weapons shattered, their authority mocked. Such is the texture of certain moments in history: the sense of a collective falling backwards, of progress reversed, of justice dismembered before our eyes. A society that once dreamt of light finds itself dragged back into a regressive night, ruled not by luminous sovereignty but by those who thrive on imbalance, who wear the mask of benevolence while feeding on dependency and distortion. The Puranic imagination teaches us to see such moments not merely as political accidents but as metaphysical ruptures. For when Mahishasura reigns, the world is not simply under poor administration - it is under siege by

forces that undermine the very principle of order, justice, and vitality. In such times, the question is not “who will win the next contest of power?” but rather: will Durga awaken? II. Durga as Shakti: The Ontology of Power When the gods admit their helplessness, Durga is born - not as a concession, but as the very force of life itself. The story is clear: the gods’ powers are insufficient; they must pool their energies, and out of their surrender emerges a new potency, radiant and terrible, beautiful and fierce. Durga is not simply another warrior in the field - she is Shakti, the animating energy without which the universe is inert. Philosophically, Shakti reveals that sovereignty is not an arrangement of offices, nor a set of technocratic instruments. It is vitality, the pulse of collective will, the raw, breathing energy of a people. Without Shakti, governance becomes a corpse animated by external wires, hollow and mechanical. When regressive orders…

Analysis, Awami League, Bangladesh, China, Constitution, Current Affairs, Democracy, Dr Yunus, Islamism, Journalism, Liberation War, Myanmar, Politics, Review

Sheikh Hasina: The Power of Leadership

Jahanara Nuri 28 September 2025

In the early nineties, Shahbagh dawned pale and mysterious. It rose like an ancient city from rice-washed waters. Streets glistened as if inked with dust from Nawabi bakharkhani and ashes. Stalls at crossings exhaled jasmine, tuberose, marigold. Restaurants thickened the air with parata, paya, dim vaja, and dal vuna. Rickshaws and cars rattled past like iron insects. From the crossing, standing before PG Hospital toward TSC, you saw the Northern Road slip toward Bangla Academy and the Science Building. It carried students, teachers, people — and the hushed footsteps of history itself. By nine o’clock, rickshaws jostled for space. The campus pulsed with the life of a nation anchored at Shahbagh. Dhaka University and Shahbagh bore history’s cruelty. They witnessed resistance, oppression, survival, and pride. Shahbagh was never just a marketplace for flowers, food, books, and medicine. It was also an altar of ideas and creative dreams. Writers and thinkers debated over tea, killing kings and generals with words. The tar on the streets around TSC drank blood every decade — not of clerics’, but

of young dreamers’. Socialist Student Union members, Student League, Secular bloggers, DU professors bled on its pavements, etching a red chapter in the history the city could not wash away. Assassins silenced voices one by one. When they struck my teacher, Dr. Humayun Azad, they carved permanent hatred into his face. He survived but lived only half in this world, until death claimed him in a German twilight, six months later. DU Student Union's 2025 election became a theatre. Rigged stages allowed supporters of Avijit Roy’s killers to take their seats. Since July 2024, 761 armed zealots, along with Jamaat-Shibir and the Islamic Alliance, have been roaming freely in the country, plotting a Caliphate on soil that had chosen freedom a hundred years earlier. A sharp question remains: why did no cleric fall to these assassins? Silence answers. It shows whose hands guided the knives and who threw the bombs and grenades. Many forces contended for Bangladesh’s soul, but none gnawed like the venom of religious politics led by Moudusit, Salafist Jamat E Islam, Islamic…