Sheikh Hasina’s World Exclusive to THE WEEK: ‘I have faced down unelected politicians before’
As the daughter of Bangladesh’s founding President Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, politics was an unconscious but inevitable part of my childhood.
Each morning, we gathered around my father to read that day’s newspaper and discuss what was happening around the world. Spending time in the countryside, my father would point out the suffering of so many of our fellow people who lacked access to many of life’s basic necessities. He made it clear that things had to change, and his vision guides me to this day.
My father led our country to a hard-fought independence from Pakistan in 1971, after years of oppression and a violent crackdown by West Pakistan’s brutal military forces. His administration had to build a sovereign country from scratch.
He was also a social democrat who saw Bangladesh as a social welfare state and passionately believed in the enormous potential of our people for self-improvement. In 1972, per capita income was below $100. In just three years, it rose to more than $250.
My father’s assassination in 1975 ushered in a dark period of military dictatorship and a reversal of our country’s economic and social progress. Assassination and dictatorship have both been recurring phantoms in our region’s politics and I fear they loom over Bangladesh once again. In Dhaka, there are jurists accusing me of crimes against humanity and calling for the death penalty. The charges are bogus, part of a rigged and illegitimate show-trial that has been conducted in my absence, presided over by an unelected government. But more about that later.
I have faced down unelected politicians before. I was forced into exile after my father’s death, but in the early 1980s I returned as leader of the Awami League. At the time, the biggest challenge facing our country was a lack of representation and I set out to establish basic constitutional rights. In simple terms, without proper representation of the people, a country cannot develop. I believe our greatest achievement was the restoration of democracy in the early 1990s following a dark period of military rule.
The state must serve the people. Our party (Awami League) has always been a grassroots party with deep connections across every corner of society. As a young politician in the early 1980s, I set out to understand the needs of our people and learn about the realities and hardships they faced first-hand.
Over the years, we transformed Bangladesh. When we came to office, our economy was fragile, our people had little hope and our infrastructure lagged far behind.
Sadly, following a golden period, Bangladesh is led by an administration with no constitutional basis, no experience of governance and no electoral mandate.
I am extremely proud of what we were able to achieve during our time leading Bangladesh. Through determination, discipline and hard work, Bangladesh became one of the fastest-growing economies on earth. For more than a decade, we maintained steady growth, reaching nearly 8 per cent before the global pandemic struck. Per capita income also rose significantly, meaning more people benefited from our economic success. Our GDP climbed from $47bn to nearly $600bn, making Bangladesh one of the 35 largest economies in the world.
Most of the credit for this goes to ordinary Bangladeshis, not to politicians. And nor am I claiming that Bangladesh was a complete utopia during this period. Not everybody shared equally in the country’s improved fortunes. Mistakes were sometimes made in government. The transition from a more traditional way of life was hard for many. Some public officials were dishonest. There were instances of injustice.
Yet I am confident that overall, our country was moving in the right direction. Millions were lifted out of absolute poverty, women entered the workforce in growing numbers and foreign reserves grew to levels once unimaginable. Our infrastructure was decisively renewed. We made it a priority to ensure every Bangladeshi accessed better public transport, health care, education, the availability of electricity to people’s homes and made our ports a gateway for the rest of the world to do trade with us.
But all of those achievements hang perilously in the balance today. Political turmoil has sent inflation rocketing, pressured our reserves and caused factories to close, hurting our working families.
The streets of Bangladesh’s towns and cities witness daily acts of deplorable violence targeting religious minorities, women, girls and supporters of the Awami League. Bangladeshis live in fear of fellow Bangladeshis. It is a powder keg waiting to explode.
Where once we were a bastion of religious tolerance and secularism in our region, now sectarian recrimination is rife. We gained a hard-fought secular and pluralistic culture, ensuring men, women and people of all faiths were treated equally under the law. This was enshrined in our own country and internationally when we joined the International Criminal Court. We were a compassionate country. We welcomed, supported and protected thousands of Rohingya refugees fleeing civil war in Myanmar, when no other countries would give them shelter.
These values are now under direct attack by the so-called interim government of Bangladesh, installed following the violent insurrection against the elected government last year. This administration is nominally headed by Dr Mohammad Yunus, a celebrated economist whose longstanding credentials on the international lecture circuit give it the veneer of respectability. Dr Yunus’s administration was not elected and has precisely no democratic mandate. The kindest thing I can bring myself to say about him is that he is a thinker, not a politician and certainly not a statesman.
His lack of governance experience is woefully apparent to ordinary Bangladeshis, forced to endure lawlessness and the removal of public services. But the truth is that Dr Yunus is not really in control at all. Islamist factions linked to known terrorist organisations such as Hizb ut-Tahrir have been allowed take root in civil life, spreading a hardline ideology that seeks to oppress some of the most vulnerable in our society. These are the same extremist forces responsible for atrocious and deadly attacks such as the 2016 assault on the Holey Artisan Café—groups we worked tirelessly to contain and root out. Murder, rape, muggings, arson, lootings and robberies have become the norm, and citizens are scared to leave their homes, while offenders go unpunished.
In the first weeks of the Yunus administration’s rule, thousands of attacks targeting Hindus, Buddhists, Christians and indigenous people were reported. Still today we hear weekly reports of shrines, homes and places of worship needlessly destroyed. Human rights groups, such as Ain o Salish Kendra, have reported a concerning rise of violence against women and girls under the Yunus regime, with some 441 instances of rape recorded in the first six months of 2025 alone, compared with a total of 401 in all of 2024. These figures are a horrible indictment of what life has become in Bangladesh and suggest our country is on a dark path back to the self-destruction it has previously faced.
Bangladesh is a developing country, though one that has made remarkable progress in recent decades. It does not enjoy the same deep institutional roots or centuries of democratic tradition that make governance easy to implement in the west. Ours is a young country, only 50 years old, and one that has endured repeated challenges to its democratic ambitions. Bangladesh is a complex country to govern, and the strain is very visible today in the decline of public services, the stalling of the economy and the erosion of law and order under the inexperienced Yunus administration. It is all too easy for some of our western allies to apply their own metrics of democracy without understanding the fragility, the volatility and the lived realities of our political soil.
Throughout my tenure, I was guided by the vision of my father and the founding values of our country. The government must be accountable to its people, and their voices must be heard.
In Bangladesh, we have a unique set of values, priorities, history, environment, resources and topography. These are things my government was very aware of, and that is why we never tried to follow the examples of other countries but rather forged our own path to success. Our progress as a country was not a miracle, but rather the product of carefully thought-out policies, local understanding and long-term planning.
We were proud to forge closer economic and strategic ties with western countries as our international trade expanded, and Bangladesh took its rightful place on the world stage. Our oldest and most important ally, of course, is India. Since the days of our independence struggle, India has been our steadfast friend. The ties that bind our two nations can never be dissolved.
Today, Bangladesh is being ruled by an unaccountable elite who are carving the country up between themselves. They are paying lip service to democracy while the country is crying out for free, fair, and participatory elections, without the exclusion of legitimate political forces, such as the Awami League.
Bangladesh must establish a genuine tradition of participatory elections. Only then can we break the cycle of manipulation, boycott and exclusion that has defined too much of our political history and help free the nation from repeating these recurring mistakes. The pattern is clear: in 2006–07, the caretaker system was manipulated by the Bangladesh Nationalist Party and the electoral roll inflated with false votes; in 2014, political violence consumed the polls and undermined public confidence; and in both 2014 and 2024, the absence of major opposition parties rendered the elections effectively non-participatory and left ordinary citizens without a real choice. Each of these moments weakened democratic institutions and deepened public disillusionment. If we are to restore legitimacy, accountability and hope to our democratic process, Bangladesh must ensure the people’s right to choose their representatives freely, without fear, coercion or exclusion.
True democracy cannot exist while our country is governed by a head of state with no electoral mandate, who has banned the most popular political party, disenfranchised tens of millions of its own citizens and threatened our constitution with an unconstitutional charter. This charter does not reflect the voices of the people of Bangladesh and is nothing more than a political instrument designed to legitimise increasingly authoritarian rule under the guise of reform. Only the people of Bangladesh can decide the country’s future. But by banning legitimate political forces and disenfranchising ordinary citizens, the interim administration will succeed only in sowing division across the country.
There can be no hope for democracy when innocent supporters and members of a political party are arbitrarily detained simply because of their political allegiance. Thousands of spurious cases against Awami League supporters have been filed, hundreds of whom have faced detention on fabricated charges, while over 200 have died in custody at the hands of the interim administration. Peaceful discussion groups have been targeted by mob violence simply because of their pride in our independence struggle, which has become a source of shame in our country.
If these elections are to go ahead without the Awami League, it will set a troubling precedent, leading Bangladesh away from the democratic principles on which it was founded. Indeed, the UN itself cautioned against any such ban on political parties for the simple reason that it would undermine genuine multiparty democracy and disenfranchise a large part of the Bangladeshi electorate, millions of whom share our core beliefs.
At the same time, our media has increasingly become a target for lawfare with independent journalists caught in the crosshairs. Free media and a fair judiciary are the hallmarks of a democratic government. Yet, under the Yunus administration, hundreds of journalists have had their press accreditation suspended and false charges brought against them because they are considered to be sympathetic to the former government. Worse still, several senior journalists have been detained on false murder charges, held in solitary confinement and had further charges brought against them with limited access to lawyers. The interim government argues that the media has more freedom than ever and yet questions human rights groups who seek to expose the abuses that occur under its watch for relying on the evidence documented in media.
Our judiciary has been reduced to little more than a puppet show of state-appointed lawyers and judges lacking the experience, credibility or inclination to uphold a fair or impartial trial. The International Crimes Tribunal Bangladesh has fallen victim to the atmosphere of intimidation that persists under Yunus’s rule. Lawyers expressing any allegiance to our government have been denied the right to practise law, while mobs have forced the most senior legal figures, including 18 High Court judges, to resign with threats of physical violence.
In its current form and under these circumstances, it is simply not possible for the ICT to deliver any credible verdict. This is a court that has been weaponised for the political ends of an unelected government, with the sole aim of silencing opposition.
Instead of allowing the ICT to independently carry out its trial, the Yunus administration has deliberately perverted the Anti-Terrorism Act, granting the ICT unprecedented powers to ban political parties if it ‘appears to’ have committed crimes.
The trial is an outright assault on Bangladesh’s democratic institutions. The interim government has neither the legal nor the moral authority to prosecute a government that was elected by the people’s mandate. The international community must recognise this tribunal for what it is: a tool to criminalise political opposition and rewrite lawful governance as criminality.
The charges were brought with no formal notice of proceedings by a compromised prosecution that has freely engaged in a trial by media, sharing confidential evidence that would prejudice proceedings in any other jurisdiction. Indeed, the first lawyer appointed by the state for my defence had called for my execution on social media only months prior.
The so-called “International” Crimes Tribunal is prosecuting Awami League members exclusively. It declines to even investigate current crimes, attacks on journalists, religious minorities and members of the Awami League, or the wave of reprisal attacks that targeted these same groups in the immediate aftermath of last summer’s protests. Instead, these groups continue to enjoy total immunity in the eyes of the law, while the victims of their crimes are powerless to seek justice.
I mourn the life of every Bangladeshi that has been needlessly lost since the protests in the summer of 2024. While the vast majority of law-enforcement officers acted within their guidelines, mistakes were very clearly made in the way some members of the security forces responded to the rapid upsurge of violence. It was a fast-moving and febrile situation, and clearly there were breakdowns of discipline within the chain of command.
However, the Awami League categorically rejects the allegations that we were directly responsible for, or commanded the use of, lethal force against our own citizens. To characterise what happened as a plot by a democratically elected government to commit violence against its own people is entirely wrong. Indeed, I personally took steps to ensure that no firearms were used.
In early August 2024, I directed my party to establish an independent inquiry commission into the allegations of misconduct, ahead of the government’s violent overthrow, to investigate these matters. This was later dissolved by Yunus without it ever being able to fully investigate the matter. Moreover, and at the same time, the UN itself was invited by the government to observe events on the ground and financial support was pledged to help the bereaved.
I believe all decisions made by senior government officials were proportionate in nature, made in good faith and intended to minimise the loss of life. But principal operational decisions on the ground had to be taken by the security forces, not the political leadership.
Even now we would welcome a truly impartial investigation into the full scope of violence and lawlessness in Bangladesh over the past year, including not only the July and August incidents, but also the ongoing, often overlooked acts of political violence targeting Awami League supporters, religious minorities and members of the law enforcement since August 5 last year. These include the lynching, burning and killing of dozens of police officers, crimes that remain undocumented and unpunished.
Bangladesh is a great country with a proud history. Yet the truth is, we are at a pivotal crossroads fighting for democratic integrity, constitutional freedoms and fundamental human rights. We are a country that has overcome genocide and military rule in the past, and at every setback, we have returned to democracy.
I pray that my country once again returns to true democracy. That we get back to the economic growth of recent decades, afford women, girls and religious minorities the same rights as anyone else in society, end the chaotic and vitriolic violence, and enable every Bangladeshi to once again have a voice in our public life.
The Week