On the face of it, last week’s election in Bangladesh marked a long overdue return to the country’s long-neglected democratic project. Over a year and a half after the autocratic matriarch Sheikh Hasina was overthrown by protestors, a liberal party – the Bangladesh National Party, or BNP – won a landslide in the first free election for 16 years. A hardline Islamist party was kept in check. The country voted overwhelmingly in favour of implementing the sweeping democratic reforms fielded by interim leader and Nobel Peace Prize-winner Mohammad Yunus. Reports of violence were few and far between, despite the country’s past trysts with post-election instability.

And yet, driving around Dhaka on the morning after the election, the city felt strangely eerie. The previous morning the streets had been packed with giddy voters: men in flowing white kurtas lining up in orderly queues outside polling stations, students sipping tea and chattering excitedly. Painted green trucks rigged up with loudspeakers zoomed through the crowded streets of the capital, belting catchy party jingles in a kind of gleeful sonic warfare. Now, there was a distinctly different feeling in the air. The office of the new prime minister, Tarique Rahman, was shuttered and closed; the streets outside the president’s house were bare; the BNP central office on Dhaka’s VIP Road was empty but for a few scattered journalists and lazy armed guards. Meanwhile, above the empty streets loomed Hasina’s half-built expressway, starkly noticeable, its unfinished concrete sections hanging over the city like ghosts.

Friday’s election, in which Rahman’s BNP secured nearly half of the votes, was the first since Sheikh Hasina, the country’s longest-serving Prime Minister, was ousted in 2024. The so-called ‘Monsoon Revolution’ – a bloody uprising in which upwards of 1,000 died and 10,000 were injured after the security forces open-fired on students – culminated in victory for the revolutionaries, who stormed the former prime minister’s old residence after hearing reports of her flight into exile in New Delhi. At long last, an autocrat had been ousted. Many of her opponents, disappeared for years inside secret prison complexes across the capital, emerged blinking into the light.

Flying to Dhaka 18 months later, I found a nation that was desperate for a fresh start. Many were unhappy with the performance of Yunus’ interim government, but beneath the veneer of optimism, a deeper sense of anxiety prevailed. The 18 months since Hasina’s ousting were scarred by violence: many supporters of the Awami League, Hasina’s party, had been lynched in revenge massacres. Press freedoms were as low as ever. Only 11 army generals who had collaborated with Hasina had been brought to justice; the rest slipped, unscathed, back into their old posts.

Perhaps most surprising, Jamaat-e-Islami, a hardline Islamist party banned under Hasina, had risen suddenly out of political obscurity. By the time I arrived in Bangladesh, a week before the election, it was clear they’d form a sizeable opposition. Although polls predicted a BNP victory, in Dhaka I spoke to women who were terrified Jamaat might sweep to an unexpected victory. One cause for concern was that the party hadn’t fielded a single female candidate. ‘If Jamaat comes to power, I’ll leave the country,’ Shima Akhter, a student revolutionary, told me outside Dhaka university on the eve of the election. ‘Hasina was bad – but at least she put women in positions of power. How can I vote for a party that thinks women cannot be leaders?’

The fight for secular democracy in Bangladesh has been a gruelling one. The country was cursed with a bloody beginning — its birth the result of a chain-reaction of events, each of seismic consequence. First came the cataclysmic Cyclone Bhola, which killed as many as half a million people — a storm so terrible it would later be named ‘the world’s deadliest tropical cyclone’. Then came the 1970 election, Pakistan’s first grand experiment with democracy: the Pakistan government’s feeble response to the cyclone infuriated East Pakistanis (now Bangladeshis) across the political spectrum and Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, a charismatic Bengali nationalist and Hasina’s father, rode the wave of resentment to a landslide victory. Yahya Khan, the then-military ruler of West Pakistan, refused to transfer power to Mujib and initiated a brutal military crackdown, the start of a nine-month liberation war and, eventually, a genocide – all of this with the tacit support of the US Administration of President Nixon. The liberation war ultimately resulted in the ethnic cleansing of anywhere between 300,000 to three million Bengalis in a systematic campaign of mass murder and genocidal sexual violence.

Bangladesh’s bloody beginning continues to leave deep wounds in the country’s politics. The political violence that has often haunted the country during elections dates back to the political faultlines forged during the country’s birth in 1971. First, between Bengali nationalists, who fought for independence, and those who opted to collaborate with the Pakistan army to oppose it – including Islamist parties like Jamaat-e-Islami, who fought for a united Pakistan on religious grounds. Another is a faultline within the Bengali nationalist tribe: between Sheikh Mujibur’s party, the Awami League, and the BNP, the party founded by Ziaur Rahman, Tarique Rahman’s father, and Bangladesh’s first military ruler.

The two parties – the Awami League and the BNP – have been in and out of power in Bangladesh almost since the country’s founding. The tension is exemplified by the two parties’ conflicting interpretations of 1971: Awami League supporters still virulently argue that Sheikh Mujibur announced Bangladesh’s independence, while many BNP supporters argue it was Rahman.

Political violence also emerged from the chaos and lawlessness of post-liberation Bangladesh, and the form of governance to which it gave birth. Already torn apart by bloodshed and internal fracture, the newly birthed democracy faced the assassination of its first leader, Sheikh Mujibur, in 1975 – an event that inaugurated a decade of military rule under Ziaur Rahman. Rahman, like Hussain Mohammad Ershad, who succeeded him as a military ruler in the 1980s, governed largely under martial law and staged rigged elections; Ershad went further, nullifying the presence of opposition parties through a combination of martial law, mass arrests of protesters and opposition leaders (both Hasina and Khaleda Zia, Tarique Rahman’s mother and Bangladesh’s first female prime minister, were placed under house arrest in 1985). Ershad’s eventual demise – and Bangladesh’s fractious transition to democracy – was enabled only by an unprecedented banding together of Khaleda Zia and her arch-rival Hasina, Bangladesh’s ‘begums’. Indeed, the Awami League’s supporters have repeatedly pointed out the irony of calling Friday’s election democratic, in light of the fact that Sheikh Mujibur’s party, which played a large role in introducing democracy to Bangladesh, was banned from competing.

Bangladesh has come a long way since then, but the democratic backsliding, instability and political violence, all legacies of 1971, still shape Bangladeshi politics. In Dhaka, some I spoke to attributed the eerie silence I experienced on Friday morning to a newfound calm, evidence that a country in turmoil had finally united in favour of stability. In part this may be true. Yet for others, the strange energy that persisted in the days following Rahman’s victory signified something darker: a deep-seated and haunting fear of government-led retributive violence against the political losers. After the BNP last seized power in 2001, in an alliance with Jamaat-e-Islami (now the country’s largest opposition party), hundreds of Hindu families were reportedly subject to violent attacks, including beatings and rape, by BNP supporters due to their perceived support for the Awami League, according to Amnesty International. Arrests were few and far between; hundreds of families fled to India. In the year after Hasina fell on 5 August 2024, and an interim government was appointed, over 300 people were killed in political violence. Many of those victims were affiliated with the Awami League, the ousted party.

The continuation of this cycle of retribution after Hasina’s fall is a dark reminder that political violence in Bangladesh was a legacy of an old system. Indeed, speaking to people in Dhaka in the days after the BNP victory was announced, many voters – previously outspoken about their political allegiance – seemed to have gone quiet. Previously vocal Jamaat voters ignored my calls; so did students from the NCP, the student-led party which formed a controversial alliance with Jamaat. A photographer friend of mine told me that, when she asked ordinary people in Dhaka who they voted for, they whispered ‘BNP’, shiftily, and unconvincingly. At least for the losers, the climate seems, if not one of fear, then at least one of quiet trepidation.

When I interviewed Tarique Rahman – bespectacled, mild-mannered and courteous – in his office in the posh, leafy district of Gulshan the day before the election, he was quick to emphasise that his first priority was restoring law and order. Notably, the Bangladeshi army grew more, not less, belligerent under the caretaker government. Yet, on the more practical questions, Rahman remained elusive. When I asked how he planned to hold those members of the security forces who are still in office accountable for crimes committed during the Hasina era, he deflected it as a ‘legal matter’, not a ‘political one’. When I asked what he planned to do about violence against minorities – in particular communal violence against Hindus – he said communal violence ‘didn’t exist’ in Bangladesh. ‘I don’t know about communal violence’, he said. ‘All violence here is political violence.’ ‘I want to create an inclusive future for Bangladesh’, he added. ‘I don’t see people in Bangladesh as minorities – I see everyone as Bangladeshis.’

Violence against minorities in Bangladesh is yet another legacy of 1971, and one that the country’s new leader appears to be tactfully choosing to ignore. During the Liberation War, the Pakistan military, assisted by local Islamist groups, killed and raped Bengali Hindus en masse, including over 10,000 Hindus in Chuknagar attempting to flee to India on 20 May 1971. In the violence of 2024, 69 Hindu temples were attacked. So, too, were 157 Hindu homes, which left five dead.

In the run up to the election, both the BNP and Jamaat attempted to distance their parties’ image from the uncomfortable legacies of the past. Jamaat’s rebranding was more obviously audacious: the party, which opposed the liberation of Bangladesh and actively collaborated with the Pakistan army, attempted to reclaim the Liberation War in the weeks running up to the vote. They made vocal claims that ‘true liberation’ was not achieved in 1971, and even went so far as to co-opt the 2024 student revolution by naming it ‘the second liberation war’. When I mentioned this to Rahman, he called it ‘funny’.

The BNP’s attempt at rebranding is hardly less ironic. In his conversation with me, Rahman touted a ‘zero-tolerance approach to corruption’, while evading the fact that his own party is plagued by it. After Hasina’s ousting in 2024, the low-level extortion – so-called ‘Chandabaji’ – networks previously controlled by the Awami League, feared by working-class voters, were quickly co-opted by local BNP party members. It was precisely this low-level corruption and thuggery that led many voters to whom I spoke to swing towards Jamaat, or to abstain, rather than voting for Rahman’s party. Senior BNP leader Amir Khashru Chowdhury told me that his party had expelled over ‘7,000 rank and file’ to tackle the issue – but the problem is deep-rooted and structural, and unlikely to vanish simply by removing a few bad apples.

Rahman will now need to prove that his party won’t slide back into old patterns. The fact Bangladesh was relatively calm in the wake of last week’s elections is, after all, to the credit of the interim government, not the newly-elected party. The new prime minister will also need to tackle new challenges: despite the BNP presenting itself as a bastion of liberal values, the party fielded just ten female candidates. The 13th national polls have recorded the lowest representation of women and ethnic minorities in over two decades. Only seven women have been directly elected to parliament, which is shocking in a country where power has long been held by matriarchs. On top of that, just four candidates elected were from religious and ethnic minority communities.

There’s also the pressing issue of recovering the billions of dollars worth of stolen assets funnelled out of the country during Awami League rule – a figure Yunus’ interim government estimated at US$ 234 billion, vanished from the country in illicit financial outflows between 2009-23. The white paper Yunus commissioned identified 10 banks as technically bankrupt, exposed inflated costs in public infrastructure projects, and estimated that 40 per cent of the government’s annual development budget had been embezzled by insiders.

In the election’s aftermath, it’s become clear that voters opted for a familiar political force, despite reservations about its past practices. Whether Rahman will leave his party’s corrupt past behind, however, is still unclear. The BNP’s large majority will make it easier to proceed unchallenged, but it may also diminish accountability. What remains to be seen is whether the BNP uses its strong mandate to pursue inclusive reforms, rather than sliding back into old pursuits of majoritarian consolidation.