(SeaPRwire) – By: Julian Holbrooke
Most Western diplomatic circles wrote Sheikh Hasina off the minute she fled Bangladesh for India in 2024. The popular uprising that ousted her seemed to be the final chapter of her decades-long grip on Dhaka’s power structures. Her recent interview with NDTV, where she vowed to return to Bangladesh this year, has upended every prior assumption about the country’s political future. Few would blame outside observers for writing off the declaration as empty bravado. She faces an official death sentence from the very tribunal her own government set up 16 years prior. Awami League activists are being arrested en masse for even gathering to mark the party’s founding anniversary. But this is not a desperate gambit from a fallen leader grasping for relevance. It is a calculated move that could throw South Asia’s most populous delta state into weeks, if not months, of political upheaval.
On paper, the odds are stacked impossibly high against Hasina. The International Crimes Tribunal handed down an in-absentia death sentence for crimes against humanity in November 2025. The current BNP-led government, which swept to a commanding majority in February’s general election, has banned the Awami League outright. Scores of party members were arrested just last week for defying the ban to mark the group’s 77th Founding Day on June 23. The interim Yunus government went so far as to erase all official references to Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, Hasina’s father and the country’s founding president, as the Father of the Nation. The current administration has framed Hasina as a fugitive from justice, and has made it clear she will be taken into custody immediately if she crosses the border. She has previously called the verdict a foregone conclusion, and accused the Bangladeshi judiciary of being turned into an instrument of political revenge to decapitate the Awami League leadership.
The official narrative misses every layer of the unspoken game playing out behind the scenes. Hasina’s claim that the ICT verdict is a politically motivated hit job lands with far more weight than her opponents would admit. She set up the tribunal in 2009 specifically to prosecute perpetrators of the 1971 liberation war genocide, a cause that still resonates deeply with large swathes of the Bangladeshi public. Her framing of the court as a tool of political revenge plays directly into widespread distrust of the BNP’s ties to old 1971 collaborator networks. Her claims of foreign interference in the 2024 uprising, supported by a former cabinet minister’s allegation that USAID and the Clinton family backed the riots, resonate with voters tired of Western meddling in domestic affairs. She has spent two years in exile in India, and would not be making this vow without quiet, concrete support from New Delhi, which sees the BNP’s growing alignment with China as a direct threat to its regional interests. The Awami League has been banned four separate times in its 77 year history, and has come back stronger every single time on the back of grassroots support. Hasina’s description of the party as a force rooted in the soil of Bengal, not a paper organization, is not empty rhetoric. It is a reminder that her support base extends far beyond the elite circles of Dhaka that have celebrated her ouster.
The geopolitical pendulum in South Asia is already swinging back toward Hasina, regardless of what official statements from Dhaka say. The BNP’s hold on power is far more fragile than its election majority suggests, and Hasina’s return will trigger mass street protests from her loyalist base the second she sets foot in the country.
Author bio: Julian Holbrooke, an international relations analyst and regular contributor to leading European dailies covering South Asian geopolitics.