Without order and growth, the country risks sliding into Islamist majoritarianism

Brahma Chellaney

Nikkei Asia

After 18 months of turmoil, lawlessness and Islamist violence, Bangladesh’s national election has produced a government with a commanding parliamentary supermajority. On paper, that should be a recipe for stability. In practice, it may instead entrench a new and potentially more dangerous form of instability.

The central question is no longer who holds power in Bangladesh, but whether the world’s most densely-populated large country can still function as an inclusive, rules-based state at all.

Bangladesh stands today at a perilous crossroads. Without political reconciliation and economic revival, it risks sliding toward the kind of Islamist dysfunction that has long plagued Pakistan, the country from which it seceded in a bloody war of liberation in 1971.

For half a century, Bangladesh’s politics has been dominated by two dynastic forces: the Awami League, established by Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the country’s charismatic founding leader who was killed in a 1975 army coup, and the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), launched in 1978 by military ruler Ziaur Rahman, whose son Tarique Rahman now heads the new government. These parties have alternated between power and persecution, each using the state against the other.

Sheikh Hasina, Mujibur Rahman’s daughter, once symbolized democratic resilience and kept both the military and Islamist militancy in check. But her increasingly undemocratic rule triggered a violent, student-led, Islamist-backed uprising in 2024 that forced her into exile after she lost the military’s support. What followed was not a democratic transition but a dangerous vacuum.

The interim regime led by Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus presided over widespread repression, institutional purges and a resurgence of Islamist vigilantism. Armed mobs attacked minorities with impunity, journalists were silenced and thousands were imprisoned. Even more alarmingly, the regime rehabilitated extremist groups previously linked to terrorism, including releasing convicted terrorists, and allowed radical Islamists to enter the political mainstream.

The result is that Bangladesh now risks shifting from a secular-authoritarian order to an Islamist-majoritarian one.

Against that backdrop, this month’s election was less a democratic reset than a managed transition. The secular Awami League, historically the country’s largest political force, was arbitrarily outlawed last year and thousands of its members remain in jail without trial. As much as 30% to 40% of the electorate was effectively excluded from the election.

In that vacuum, the BNP emerged as the dominant electoral force. But it faced a new challenger in its former ally Jamaat-e-Islami, a hardline Islamist party. The election thus pitted an Islamist-leaning bloc against a coalition led by a hardline Islamist group, rather than offering a pluralistic national choice. Unsurprisingly, many Awami League supporters boycotted the vote and turnout fell sharply in minority-heavy constituencies, where intimidation and violence created a climate of fear.

The result is a 300-member parliament that may be numerically stable but socially brittle. It includes just seven women and only four members from religious and ethnic minority communities, though these groups make up about 10% of the population.

Even before the new government settles in, its legitimacy is already under challenge.

For years, the BNP and Jamaat-e-Islami accused the Awami League of rigging elections. Now, with the banned Awami League gone, the accusers have turned on each other. Jamaat — once the BNP’s indispensable ally, providing street muscle — has charged the BNP with rigging the the latest election, alleging widespread ballot fraud and irregularities.

This rupture reflects a deeper contest over who represents the spirit of the 2024 uprising, which Islamist groups helped organize and sustain. If the Islamist-led opposition believes it has been cheated of its “revolution,” Bangladesh may soon see renewed unrest.

Compounding this fragility is the near collapse of judicial credibility. Bangladesh’s Supreme Court has repeatedly reinterpreted the constitution to suit those in power, legitimizing coups, overturning its own precedents and even invoking a “revolutionary mandate” to justify continuance of an unelected interim regime.

In such a system, law becomes an instrument of power rather than a constraint on it. This is hardly a foundation for stability or investor confidence.

The new government, in fact, inherits an economy in distress. Growth has slowed sharply, inflation has surged, investor confidence has collapsed and foreign debt has risen. The BNP has indicated it will continue with the IMF bailout package negotiated by the interim regime, but austerity, subsidy cuts and banking reforms will impose real social costs, especially on a restless youth population.

The government must restore macroeconomic stability while delivering visible improvements in jobs and governance. Failure on either front could quickly translate into renewed street anger.

Bangladesh’s trajectory will have consequences beyond its borders. For India, instability raises immediate security concerns, including the risk of militant infiltration across a porous border. Bangladesh’s direction will also shape the regional balance between China, a major infrastructure investor, and Western partners seeking greater market access.

A parliamentary supermajority gives the BNP-led government enormous formal power. But political dominance is not legitimacy. Bangladesh’s cycles of instability have historically been driven not by weak governments but by exclusive ones — regimes that rule for one party while suppressing rival political forces. This election risks reproducing that pattern in a new ideological form.

True stability will require something Bangladesh has rarely sustained: national reconciliation. Countries emerging from deep trauma, from Rwanda to South Africa, recognized that durable peace depends on bringing former adversaries into a shared political framework. Bangladesh will need to do the same, to create a pathway for the Awami League and its supporters to reenter politics, protect minorities and dissenting voices, restore judicial independence and revive civil society.

Otherwise, the country risks replacing one form of autocracy with another: trading secular illiberalism for majoritarian Islamism, and stability for a cycle of confrontation and lawlessness.

The election has produced a government, but not a political settlement. Unless the new leadership uses its supermajority to widen inclusion, rebuild institutions and rein in extremist forces, the promise of stability and economic revival will remain elusive. The real test of this election will not be whether it delivered power, but whether it can deliver peace.

Brahma Chellaney, a professor of strategic studies at the independent New Delhi-based Centre for Policy Research and fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin, is the author of nine books, including “Water: Asia’s New Battleground,” which won the Bernard Schwartz Book Award.