Imperial deceit now stands starkly exposed in Bangladesh: the calculated rehabilitation of the executioners of 1971, ushered back toward power with chilling audacity.
There is an irony so stark, so unembarrassed, that it borders on historical obscenity. The United States and a coterie of its compliant vassal states now present themselves as custodians of democracy in Bangladesh while energetically enabling the political rehabilitation of Jamaat-e-Islami to power—an organisation indelibly stained by mass murder in 1971 and still unwilling to recognise the sovereignty of Bangladesh itself. This cynical project, unfolding under the banner of a so-called “national election” scheduled for 12 February 2026, seeks to exclude the Awami League—the country’s largest political party and its founding force—from the democratic arena. If deceit has a modern vocabulary, it is spoken fluently in this enterprise.
Jamaat-e-Islami’s historical record is neither disputed nor obscure. In 1971, its armed auxiliaries collaborated with the Pakistani military in genocide, targeting intellectuals, freedom fighters, minorities, and civilians in the name of religion. The organisation’s ideological hostility to Bangladesh’s birth was not a passing aberration but a defining posture. Even today, Jamaat’s refusal to offer unambiguous recognition of Bangladesh as a sovereign nation is telling. Loyalty, in its worldview, remains tethered to Pakistan—a posture that places it outside the moral and constitutional consensus forged at a sea of blood.
Yet, in a remarkable inversion of values, Western capitals now labour to launder this legacy. Under the pretext of “inclusive politics” and “level playing fields,” diplomatic pressure has been applied to normalise Jamaat’s return and designedly pull it to power while marginalising the Awami League—the very party that led the Liberation War and built the constitutional order. This is not neutrality; it is engineering. It is not democracy promotion; it is selective empowerment, dressed in the rhetoric of rights while trampling historical justice.
Concrete manifestations of this duplicity are increasingly visible. International statements obsessively scrutinise Bangladesh’s governance while remaining conspicuously silent on Jamaat’s past atrocities and present extremism. Election frameworks are discussed that conspicuously omit the Awami League, as though a nation can be made democratic by excising its largest constituency. Meanwhile, Jamaat-aligned networks—rebranded, sanitised, and media-savvy—are quietly legitimised as acceptable political actors under cloak-and-dagger, their crimes reduced to “contested history.”
This indulgence is not accidental. Jamaat-e-Islami functions as a merchant of religion, trading faith for power, grievance for mobilisation. Such actors are often useful to external powers seeking leverage: they fragment societies, weaken nationalist consensus, and render states pliable. Bangladesh, strategically located and economically emergent, becomes a tempting target for this familiar playbook. The pattern is old; only the language has been updated.
The exclusion of the Awami League from the electoral process is particularly revealing. No democracy can be credible when its founding party—still commanding mass support—is administratively, judicially, or procedurally sidelined. This is not competition; it is coercion by bureaucratic means. A ballot emptied of genuine choice is merely an instrument of legitimation for outcomes decided elsewhere.
What makes this moment especially dangerous is the attempted moral equivalence. Jamaat-e-Islami, a party of communal politics and historical bloodshed, is treated as just another stakeholder by America and their pliant states, while the Awami League is framed as an obstacle. This reversal is not ignorance; it is strategy. It seeks to sever Bangladesh from the ethical compass of 1971 and to replace a liberation-rooted polity with a managed, malleable one.
Bangladeshis must therefore confront a hard truth: sovereignty is not only defended at borders but within narratives. When history is rewritten to suit imperial convenience, nations are disarmed from within. The answer is neither isolation nor denial, but clarity—about who paid the price for independence, who denied it, and who now seeks to profit from forgetting.
Deceit, indeed, has a name. It is found in the imperial habit of preaching democracy while partnering with its enemies. It is echoed in the resurrection of Jamaat-e-Islami as a respectable force. Bangladesh’s future cannot be built on such fraud. A nation born of Brobdingnagian sacrifice must refuse governance by amnesia.
