How Hasina made her fall inevitable

When Sheikh Hasina fled from the lawn of Gono Bhaban in an army helicopter shortly before midday on 5 August 2024, the authoritarian regime she fled had already been gutted from within.

Her departure ended fifteen uninterrupted years in power. But the institutions meant to hold her to account, parliament, the courts, the Election Commission, the police, had ceased to function as checks long before she did. They were dismantled by statute, by appointment, and by patronage, one amendment and one loyalist at a time. 

This is the paradox of the Hasina years. The woman who came to power through an election had created such a repressive regime that it can be hailed as a systematic dismantling of democratic institutions. The rituals of democracy survived. Elections were held, laws were passed, judgments were delivered. The substance did not. 

Bangladesh became a textbook case of what the Harvard scholars Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt call democratic backsliding, erosion conducted under the cover of legality, without a single coup. The economic story for which she was feted globally, the poverty reduction and the growth figures, ran in parallel and, in time, served as the alibi.

The abolition of the caretaker system was the original sin

In 2011, through the Fifteenth Amendment, the Awami League scrapped the non-partisan caretaker government, the neutral election-time administration introduced in 1996 that had delivered three broadly credible polls. The move was dressed in a Supreme Court verdict, authored by Chief Justice ABM Khairul Haque, who had been elevated in 2010 over two senior judges and who declared the caretaker system unconstitutional. Notably, the same court advised that the next two elections still be held under it to preserve public trust. That advice was ignored.

Bangladesh became a textbook case of what the Harvard scholars Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt call democratic backsliding, erosion conducted under the cover of legality, without a single coup.

With the umpire removed, the ruling party controlled the field. What followed were three stage-managed elections. In 2014, the opposition boycotted and 153 of 300 seats were won uncontested amid abysmal turnout. In 2018, described by the opposition as a mockery of democracy, a large share of ballots was reportedly stamped the night before polling, and the Awami League and its allies took 288 of 300 seats, leaving the BNP with seven. In 2024, the BNP was forced out again by prosecution and imprisonment, while the party fielded dummy candidates and its ally, the Jatiya Party, performed as a puppet opposition. No meaningful contest.

The courts were bent to the executive branch's will

A ruler seeking to escape scrutiny needs a compliant bench, and Hasina secured one by exploiting long-standing structural defects. The executive branch's dominance over judicial appointment and promotion had always shadowed the courts' independence. Hasina pressed that advantage to the hilt.

The decisive confrontation came over the Sixteenth Amendment of 2014, which restored to parliament the power to remove Supreme Court judges. When the Appellate Division under Chief Justice SK Sinha struck it down in 2017, Sinha was subjected to intense pressure, forced to resign, and driven from the country; his memoir later detailed the surveillance and intimidation directed at him by state intelligence. 

Below the apex court, the machinery was quietly captured. Around 2,800 party loyalists were installed as public prosecutors and general pleaders across the districts, turning the state's attorney service into a partisan instrument. Article 95 of the constitution was never given the enabling law that would prescribe qualifications for judges, leaving the government sweeping discretion to appoint whom it pleased. Justice, in practice, favoured the regime's allies. 

A High Court bench doubled Begum Khaleda Zia's jail term in 2018 while punishing its critics. The resignation of Chief Justice Obaidul Hasan and five Appellate Division judges within days of Hasina's fall was the final admission of how thoroughly the institution had been politicised.

Parliament was reduced to a chamber of stooges

If the courts were captured, the legislature was neutered by design. Article 70 of the constitution, which strips MPs of their seats if they vote against their own party, had long made a no-confidence motion against a prime minister unthinkable and turned members into prisoners of the parties. Hasina inherited this defect and weaponised it. MPs returned through the engineered polls of 2014, 2018 and 2024 owed their positions to her nomination alone, and behaved accordingly.

The opposition benches offered no relief. In the tenth and eleventh parliaments, the Jatiya Party served simultaneously as the official opposition and as part of the government, with three of its members holding ministerial posts and its chief, HM Ershad, appointed a special envoy of prime ministerial rank. An opposition that sits in cabinet is an opposition in name only. 

The hollowing extended into the Awami League itself. As early as the 2009 party council, Hasina denied delegates the right to elect the praesidium and purged the senior figures known as the STAR group, replacing collective leadership with personal loyalty. A one-person party produced, inevitably, a one-person government.

The law became a weapon against speech

The regime's most durable innovation was legal repression. The Digital Security Act of 2018 criminalised vaguely defined offences like hurting religious sentiment, tarnishing the image of the state, defaming the Liberation War or its leaders, and became the standard tool for silencing journalists, academics and activists. Amnesty International documented at least 433 people imprisoned under it. 

The writer Mushtaq Ahmed died in custody after nine months of detention for criticising the government's pandemic response; the cartoonist Ahmed Kabir Kishore was tortured. When the DSA drew international condemnation, the government revoked and repackaged it as the Cyber Security Act of 2023 — the same architecture under a gentler name.

Behind the statute lay a wider capture of the information space. Investigative reporters such as Rozina Islam were prosecuted for exposing corruption. Media ownership concentrated in the hands of party-aligned business groups, and, as the Dr Ali Riaz has shown, cross-holdings of politics, family and finance shaped who owned what. Intelligence agencies leaned on advertisers to starve independent titles, including this country's most prominent dailies. The cumulative result was measurable: Bangladesh ranked 165th of 180 countries in the 2024 World Press Freedom Index, the lowest in South Asia.

The state itself became a predator

The gravest cost was borne in blood. Across the fifteen years, abduction, arbitrary detention and extrajudicial killing became routine instruments against opponents. At least 2,699 extrajudicial killings and 677 enforced disappearances were tallied over the period. The Rapid Action Battalion, credibly linked to hundreds of these killings, was sanctioned by the United States Treasury in December 2021. A network of secret cells, since known as Aynaghar, held the disappeared beyond the reach of any court. 

Complementing the uniformed forces was the Bangladesh Chhatra League, the party's student wing, which functioned as a state-protected enforcer on campuses and was linked by Netra News to the killing of 24 students between 2009 and 2019.

That machinery met its limit in July and August 2024. When students protested the reinstatement of government job quotas, Hasina branded them Rajakar or collaborators and answered with live fire. The killing of the Rangpur student Abu Sayed turned a grievance into an uprising. 

By the estimate of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, as many as 1,400 people may have died before the government fell, most shot by security forces, with more than 11,700 arrested. It was the most lethal suppression of protest in the country's post-independence history.

The reckoning that legality could not forestall

The tragedy is that the repression was financed, in perception if not in fact, by a development narrative the world applauded. The former World Bank chief economist Kaushik Basu called Bangladesh an economic miracle in 2018; the World Economic Forum projected it as the next Asian Tiger. Yet the figures, as critics long argued, were burnished by data manipulation, and prosperity was never a substitute for consent. 

In a 2023 paper, Basu himself modelled why dictators worsen over time, and the economist Branko Milanovic distilled the finding. Once a ruler's path to power is littered with victims who would demand a reckoning, there is no exit. Hasina reached the summit and found the descent sealed.

Her ouster has opened that reckoning, and it should begin with an honest accounting of the method. Hasina's takeover wore no uniform, had no tanks or guns. It arrived as gazette notifications and appointment letters, as amendments passed by a tamed parliament and verdicts handed down by a friendly bench, as cases filed and advertising quietly withdrawn. A coup announces itself. This did not. 

And a state emptied from within, its shell left standing, is harder to repair than one seized outright: the soldier who suspends a constitution can be undone by restoring it, but the ruler who guts an institution while preserving its façade bequeaths a building that looks sound and works as a trap.