The illusion of a peaceful democratic transition in Bangladesh evaporated entirely this week as armored vehicles rolled back onto the streets of Dhaka and five other critical districts. Ostensibly ordered to prevent sabotage ahead of the 77th anniversary of the now-banned Awami League, the sudden deployment of the army and the Border Guard Bangladesh exposes a far more dangerous reality. The transitional authority, heavily influenced by the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, is discovering that erasing a century-old political apparatus requires the exact same authoritarian machinery used by the regime it overthrew. This is not a stable democracy in the making. It is a fragile state maintaining order through the barrel of a gun.
The rapid re-mobilization of troops under the In Aid to Civil Power mandate came just days after the military was supposedly withdrawn to its barracks, concluding nearly two years of continuous street deployment following the August 2024 ouster of Sheikh Hasina. By sending soldiers back into Dhaka, Gazipur, Narayanganj, Faridpur, Gopalganj, and Chattogram, the current administration has admitted that the police force remains broken and mistrusted. More crucially, it reveals a profound panic within the ruling establishment that the remnants of the old guard can still mobilize widespread dissent despite a formal ban under anti-terrorism laws.
The Irony of the Liberators
When Sheikh Hasina fled to India during the mass uprising of August 2024, the student-led movement promised an end to the draconian police state that had defined her fifteen-year rule. What has followed instead is a structural mirror image of the old regime. The formal banning of the Awami League on May 12, 2025, did not pacify the political sphere. It merely pushed a massive, deeply entrenched network of activists underground, transforming a visible political opposition into a volatile security threat.
The state now finds itself trapped in a cycle of preemptive suppression. Home Minister Salahuddin Ahmed claimed earlier this week that the Awami League no longer exists as an organization, yet his own ministry felt compelled to station thousands of troops and over 18,000 police officers across the capital alone just to stop people from hoisting party flags. If a political entity has been truly eradicated, it does not require a nationwide security alert, specialized counter-terrorism units, and military checkpoints at every entry point to the capital to prevent its ghost from marching.
The strategy of total exclusion has created a pressure cooker. By criminalizing all activities of the country's oldest political party—founded in 1949 when Bangladesh was still East Pakistan—the current dispensation has left millions of citizens who historically voted for or relied on that party infrastructure with zero avenues for legitimate political participation.
The Rising Toll of Custodial Vengeance
The immediate trigger for the military return was not just an upcoming calendar date, but a series of highly volatile flashpoints involving state violence. Tensions reached a boiling point following the deaths of two Awami League activists under deeply suspicious circumstances. On June 20, an activist died while in police custody in Faridpur. The following day, another succumbed to severe injuries in Barishal after a brutal police chase.
These deaths are not isolated incidents. They represent a systemic pattern of retributive violence that has plagued the country since the political shifts of late 2024. Independent human rights monitors and data from groups like the Human Rights Support Society paint a grim picture of the current state of judicial and extrajudicial accountability.
- Over 44,000 individuals have been arrested under sweeping "fascism" cases since August 2024.
- Mass legal filings routinely list thousands of unnamed defendants, allowing local law enforcement to sweep up any suspected dissenters at will.
- More than 100 custodial deaths were documented across various prisons in 2025 alone, with families consistently reporting visible signs of torture on returned bodies.
- Senior political figures, including former Water Resources Minister Ramesh Chandra Sen, have died while being held in provincial jails, with families alleging a deliberate denial of essential medical care.
When the state uses judicial processes to systematically eliminate an opposition, the rule of law becomes an empty phrase. The courts have been flooded with stacked murder charges related to the July uprising, applying a doctrine of collective guilt that ensures almost anyone affiliated with the previous administration can be detained indefinitely without bail.
Cracks in the Retribution Alliance
The severity of the current crackdown has begun to alarm even those who fought bitterly to remove Sheikh Hasina from power. In an extraordinary and rare development in Faridpur, senior local leaders of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party broke ranks with the national narrative to attend the funeral prayers of the activist who died in police custody. They openly criticized the law enforcement methods that led to his death.
This internal dissent highlights a growing realization among seasoned politicians that the current methods of governance are unsustainable. A veteran local politician, speaking on the condition of anonymity, noted that when you normalize torture and arbitrary arrest to destroy your yesterday enemy, you hand the state a weapon that will inevitably be used against you tomorrow. The civilian administration's total reliance on the military to maintain public order means that the true seat of power in Bangladesh has shifted back to the cantonments.
The youth leaders who formed the National Citizen Party following the 2024 uprising find themselves in an increasingly awkward position. They championed a new political era, yet they are watching that era being policed by the same traditional instruments of state terror, backed by a military that has now been granted extensive magisterial powers. This grant of judicial authority to uniformed soldiers allows them to arrest and detain civilians without standard legal warrants, completely bypassing an already compromised civil judiciary.
The Economic Mirage of Stability
While the political arena fractures, the economic consequences of permanent security mobilization are becoming impossible to ignore. Foreign investors do not flock to nations where the military must be deployed every few months to handle political anniversaries. The garment manufacturing sector, which serves as the economic backbone of the country, has faced repeated disruptions due to localized labor unrest and targeted security operations in manufacturing hubs like Gazipur and Narayanganj.
The deployment of the Border Guard Bangladesh to districts like Cox's Bazar and Moulvibazar under the guise of internal law and order further strains resources that are desperately needed to secure the nation's porous frontiers. By redirecting border security forces to perform routine domestic policing, the government is exposing its own lack of confidence in the standard police force, which has never fully recovered from the institutional collapse it suffered during the final days of the Hasina regime.
The administration’s current policy relies on the hope that if they keep the opposition suppressed long enough, a sense of normalcy will return. History suggests otherwise. The Awami League survived decades of military rule, assassinations, and splits; the BNP survived similar campaigns of state-sponsored elimination during Hasina’s tenure. The belief that a political tradition with deep rural roots can be completely dissolved by administrative decree and military checkpoints is an analytical blunder of the highest order.
The Looming Institutional Collapse
What we are witnessing in Bangladesh is not the birth of a reformed republic, but the dangerous consolidation of a security state that answers to no one. When an interim or transitional authority extends military deployment for nearly two years, withdraws it for a single week, and then immediately reinstates it at the first sign of local street protests, it has ceased to act as a civilian government. It is operating as a administrative front for a military command.
The true test of the current dispensation will not be its ability to prevent a handful of desperate underground activists from marching with banners on June 23. The true test will be whether it can govern without relying on the emergency provisions of the state. Every time an armored personnel carrier takes up a position at a major intersection in Dhaka, it signals to the world that the civilian institutions of Bangladesh are completely hollow.
The immediate casualties of this perpetual security state are the very democratic ideals that the student protesters bled for in the streets of Dhaka two years ago. The current administration has chosen a path of total exclusion and absolute security control, a strategy that requires an ever-increasing amount of force to maintain. As the military settles into its extended deployment until the end of June, the line between an interim democratic government and a permanent military regime grows thinner by the day. The state has successfully changed the face of the oppressor, but the structural machinery of oppression remains entirely untouched.
