Bangladesh: Elections, External Shocks and the Crisis of Legitimacy
Bangladesh is at a political crossroads as far as its electoral process is concerned. It has repeatedly affirmed its resolve to hold a national election as early as possible, sparking cautious hope for some and bitter skepticism for others. Election timetables are mooted. The Election Commission is holding roundtables. Promises are made. A positive script is played out. But beneath this veneer of routine change, a disturbing reality is also visible: a range of structural, political, and geopolitical factors is colliding in ways that are increasingly making it difficult for them to ensure a timely, peaceful, and widely accepted election in Bangladesh in the coming days.
The future of Bangladesh’s next election has now become a complex question with profound implications for the country’s leadership vacuum, institutional integrity, national sovereignty, and foreign policy independence. The weakening of mainstream parties, the division and fragmentation of the opposition, the uncertain future of veteran leaders, and the resurgent role of outside forces are all adding to a highly combustible mix. At this stage, the question is not when the next election will be held but whether it can be organized, credible, and have a stabilizing effect.
BNP’s Organizational Crisis and the Vacuum of Trusted Leadership
If the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) were to be seen as the only effective counterweight to the Awami League (AL), the reality is that it has lost its steam. In fact, there is growing evidence that BNP is losing ground rapidly, and a range of factors has begun to combine to ensure it is bleeding on several fronts. BNP appears weak. Disunited. Unclear in message and objectives. Dysfunctional as a party structure and generally distrusted as a whole leadership package that is trying to either partner or survive at the expense of Jamaat-e-Islami. In one word, BNP is in crisis.
Professor Dilara Chowdhury, a respected political philosopher, has identified this party’s primary vulnerability: BNP lacks a leadership core around which it can grow in size, popularity, and influence. Begum Khaleda Zia is a respected and widely known figure in Bangladesh. She is an icon for BNP loyalists and Bangladesh patriots. Her popularity is derived from her nationalist credentials and her resilience under decades of persecution and vilification at the hands of the Awami League establishment. But this leader is now ailing and may be dying. If so, then the party she led, represented, and struggled for will be badly exposed. At this point, no one knows what the future course of action will be for BNP, as the party’s power shifts away from its leader and founder.
Khaleda Zia’s illness or possible death is therefore also a political problem for BNP because she remains the sole unifying symbol for the party. It may have a working organizational structure without Khaleda Zia. Still, it will not have a leadership of equal caliber with which to win popular support or to take on the Awami League juggernaut credibly. The public also senses that several key BNP stalwarts are compromised either by ambition, a taste for power, or a perceived proximity to external forces such as India. This perception, whether or not grounded, has severely damaged trust between the public and BNP. To a significant degree, many Bangladeshis believe the BNP has lost its distinctiveness as a major political player, unlike the Awami League.

 

The belief that BNP is not so different from AL in its foreign policy orientation has added to the widespread feeling that Bangladesh’s two dominant parties have become no more than two sides of the same coin.

Jamaat-e-Islami: Discipline, Popularity and Structural Limitations
Jamaat-e-Islami (JI) is an entirely different party with a distinct political pedigree and organizational dynamics. It is a more disciplined and robust party. It has a very clear hierarchical structure. Leadership is centralized and consolidated, the message is coherent, and there is a strong sense of organizational identity that stretches from the top down to the grassroots. JI’s ideological position is also clear, which can be appealing to voters who are both confused and fed up with mainstream parties and looking for a viable alternative that is at once both anti-status quo and more visibly effective on the ground.
JI’s popularity, as suggested by recent surveys, is estimated at around 21 percent, which is by no means a negligible figure in the country’s current political climate. However, even with such popularity, the structural, ideological, and historical limits of JI as a political party do act as a check on its reach and ambition. While JI may play an essential role in shaping the country’s political future, the question is whether it has changed in all relevant respects enough to lead the country.
Tarek Zia, Exile, and the Politics of Fear
On the personal front, Tarek Rahman’s prolonged exile from Bangladesh raises as many questions as it answers. He is BNP’s de facto acting chief and its most visible political face. His prolonged absence from the country is now beginning to raise suspicion. If, as has been promised, a national election is truly just months away, then why is its most visible opposition leader not in the country?
Professor Chowdhury has drawn attention to this key question in an essay on this matter: are there forces in Bangladesh – including external ones, and invisible to the naked eye but potentially very visible in terms of their long-term impact – that once found the prospect of Tarek Zia being in Bangladesh as life-threatening as they may do so again today? He was forced into exile in the UK in 2008, but it was not entirely of his own volition. Instead, he was placed under constant surveillance, intimidation, and politically motivated harassment.

There is no reason to believe that the fear that forced Tarek Zia to uproot himself from Bangladesh years ago has been eliminated. It may have only been reduced for reasons that the average citizen, civil society actor, or political commentator may never fully understand. External sources may continue to act directly or through intermediaries to create a sense of fear, uncertainty, and confusion with a view to controlling, managing, and shaping the political process and public debate.
Narratives of Threat and the Chanakyan Calculus
The power of disinformation is one of the most formidable weapons of this kind. It has been increasingly used, with significant effect, in recent months to intimidate, mislead, and frighten the public. These strategies align with the Chanakyan model of psychological operations (psyops), in which repeated, even unbelievable, messaging is used to shape public perceptions, influence behavior, and ensure a degree of both domestic and international control disproportionate to the visible tools of political power.
Recent suggestions in certain Indian media outlets about Turkish intelligence agents assassinating Tarek Zia are one such psyop that would strain the credibility of any newsroom that published or broadcast such information, and I am certain it is entirely made up. But made up or not, such suggestions, the very existence of which has also been widely circulated on social media, have serious implications for those who choose to read, discuss, or act upon them. Even if Tarek Zia is not under threat, such a possibility is now in the public realm and it does matter for this reason. The more of this that happens, the greater the effect.
Foreign Involvement, Tilt, and the Architecture of Disinformation

It is impossible to speak about Bangladesh’s political and electoral future without recognizing the full extent of foreign involvement in its domestic processes, politics, and public affairs. In this sense, two countries are of particular relevance: India and the United States. While the U.S. continues to be an important bilateral and strategic partner with particular interests and narratives of its own in relation to Bangladesh’s political future, it is India that has been involved in such a pervasive and sustained manner with a well-oiled, highly calibrated, and extensive disinformation and influence architecture.
India’s elite establishment has a well-entrenched approach to dealing with Bangladesh. It views Bangladesh largely through the lens of its own patron-client relationship paradigm, believing that no political alternative to its chosen favorites can survive for long. Awami League was a known entity with a long record of complicity with New Delhi on a range of issues critical to India. When the Awami League fell out of favor, elements within the Indian establishment have continued to suggest that the AL should return, without recognizing or accepting the fact that the party’s brand has been so severely damaged that it has lost popular legitimacy beyond a certain fringe or urban segment.
But what is worse, and has profound implications for how Bangladesh’s next election is to be conducted, is the fact that India has an entire fifth column within Bangladesh’s bureaucracy, civil service, military, police, media, and civil society. These elements, individuals, and groups covertly push the Indian narrative, offer succor to its points of view, and pass off New Delhi’s strategic interests as if they were aligned with, and in fact were, synonymous with the national interest.

Organizations ranging from religious, cultural, ethnic, professional, to academic have openly promoted ideas, concepts, and ideological currents that are anti-Bangladeshi or, at the very least, highly partisan in support of Indian nationalism. The very existence of such ideas, organizations, and actors – even a “minority” one that is used as a smokescreen to support the Indian strategic narrative of civilizational destiny – is a way of inserting and sustaining an ideological foothold that is fundamentally foreign.
At its core, it is a direct assault on Bangladesh's national sovereignty and decision-making process. Ordinary Bangladeshis, when they get the chance to speak, are very resentful of this state of affairs. On the streets, in tea stalls, and on social media, there is a growing anger towards India’s heavy-handed hegemony and its very subtle capacity to shape what is possible, what is unthinkable, and what can and should be done in Bangladesh at this time of political crisis.
The Ruling Interim Government and Constitutional Legitimacy
The interim government has been very active in a short time, making bold moves and taking several corrective steps. In this sense, Professor Muhammad Yunus has set a positive tone for the administration and demonstrated a will to ensure that Bangladesh holds an early election between October 2024 and February 2025.
But at the end of the day, even if Bangladesh were to go for an election next month, the interim government’s constitutional legitimacy, both nationally and internationally, would remain in question in the absence of a direct popular mandate. Furthermore, if an election cannot be held promptly due to logistical issues, leadership concerns, security considerations, or political deadlock, the country would have to revert to a military-backed arrangement, risking further isolation and delegitimization of the government.
Bangladesh is in desperate need of an election, not for formality but for necessity and nation-building. Without this, suspicion will breed conspiracy theories, and outside forces will continue to have a free hand in Bangladesh.
Khaleda Zia: A Tragedy in Bangladesh’s History
As for Khaleda Zia, the rest of her life, if this indeed is her fate, will be marked by a tragedy she has neither earned nor deserved in the annals of Bangladesh’s political history. That her own party could not mobilize in her defense at a critical time, when she needed to be given a lifeline at a juncture when it was at its most vulnerable, in effect stabbed in the back, will also be a blot on the party’s legacy.
The truth is that India has seen Khaleda Zia as a figure of resistance and anti-hegemony. It has actively gone after her party in different ways on multiple fronts and engaged in electoral manipulation, support for enforced disappearances and acts of violence, and repression, surveillance, and control, in the two decades that she was politically active.
Bangladesh’s Uncertain Future
Bangladesh’s political future remains clouded by a range of serious uncertainties. Fragmentation, weakness, and uncertainty from within, coupled with ideological confusion, misrepresentation, and polarization from outside, make it an extremely challenging time for the country. By no means will these foreign forces announce themselves. By their very nature and purpose, they will operate largely outside the realm of visibility, allowing their handpicked proxies, clients, and running dogs to shape and manage the public narrative for their own purposes. There is no higher strategic aim than to retain as much leverage as possible over the country in the aftermath of the next election.

Bangladesh’s political future, therefore, hangs in the balance. It is now up to Bangladeshis to seize the moment and ensure that this country holds an election as soon as possible that meets the minimum requirements of credibility and fairness, while also being an exercise in rebuilding trust and confidence in political institutions. The window of opportunity may well be closing. As it does, it is necessary to acknowledge the role of fear, falsehoods, and foreign pressure as impediments to a free and fair election.