December is emerging as a month of profound political consequence for Bangladesh—one that may finally begin to lift the veil on the full extent of the horrific political conspiracy orchestrated by the American administration on 5 August 2024, in concert with its purported domestic collaborators, including Muhammad Yunus and his associates, Jamaat-e-Islami extremists, elements within the pro-Pakistani camp of Bangladesh’s military establishment, and other ultra-left and ultra-right ideological forces, with the objective of removing Sheikh Hasina, Bangladesh’s most successful Prime Minister.
Sheikh Hasina, living in India since her departure from Dhaka in August 2024, has repeatedly declared that she intends to return home around December 2026. She has said that she is prepared to face arrest, imprisonment, or even death, and that she would surrender before the courts.
And those were her repeated, bold, and patriotic declarations—echoing the towering spirit of her father, our Liberator and Father of the Nation, Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman.
That declaration has transformed December from a date on the political calendar into a potential watershed.
The question is no longer merely whether Sheikh Hasina will return. The deeper question is whether Bangladesh possesses the political maturity, constitutional confidence and institutional restraint to confront such a return without allowing the country to descend into another cycle of vengeance.
Recent reports of messages from New Delhi to Dhaka concerning Hasina’s possible return have intensified lively spontaneity in Bangladesh.
India has not been reviewing Bangladesh’s extradition request, while Dhaka has continued to press the issue. The relationship between the two neighbours has consequently acquired an additional layer of strategic complexity.
India’s position matters enormously. Bangladesh’s position scarcely matters when the entire political order has operated outside constitutional bounds since 5 August 2024. It is not a bilateral quarrel. It touches sovereignty, justice, regional stability and the future architecture of Bangladesh’s democracy.
At the centre of the domestic storm stands the Awami League, Bangladesh’s oldest, largest and the country’s founding political party.
The party’s ban has created a fundamental political question: can a major historical political organisation simply be removed from the democratic arena indefinitely?
Sheikh Hasina has challenged the ban and called for the party to be allowed to return to electoral politics so that the people—not administrative decrees—may ultimately determine its fate.
A democracy cannot be strengthened by replacing one form of political exclusion with another. The courts must determine accountability for those who have perpetrated grave and colossal crimes since 5 August 2024 till today, and ensure that every perpetrator is brought to justice in accordance with the rule of law.
The electorate must determine political legitimacy. These are distinct constitutional functions, and neither should be permitted to swallow the other.
The legal challenge to the Awami League’s prohibition therefore deserves serious attention. If the ban is challenged before the High Court, the judiciary has an historic opportunity to demonstrate that constitutional questions will be determined by law rather than by political convenience.
The same principle applies to Sheikh Hasina herself.
If she returns, she must be guaranteed full due process, with proceedings conducted transparently, impartially, and credibly in accordance with internationally recognised standards.
Bangladesh has already paid too high a price for politics without restraint.
The nation now needs something far greater than mere victory over every force opposed to Bangladesh’s Liberation and the constitutional spirit of 1971, together with their domestic and foreign political proxies.
December 2026, therefore, should herald a season of political restoration—of Bangladesh’s secular spirit, won through the blood-soaked struggle of 1971, despoiled on 5 August 2024, and from which the nation has bled profusely, without respite, ever since.
It should become a test of the republic. If Sheikh Hasina returns, Bangladesh must respond with institutions.
The judiciary should adjudicate the constitutional illegality of the Awami League’s prohibition, while the sovereign people ultimately determine its electoral destiny.
And if Bangladesh truly wishes to emerge from the horrific shadows of 2024, it must learn the hardest lesson of politics:
A nation cannot build a democratic future by permanently imprisoning its past.
The present precarious political landscape strongly suggests that December may herald a historic opportunity to restore Bangladesh’s political course to its rightful direction under the able and dynamic leadership of Sheikh Hasina.
The opportunity is to prove that Bangladesh is governed neither by fear nor by the fleeting triumph of political forces, but by the inviolable sovereignty of its people—the ultimate source of constitutional authority—and by the supremacy of the rule of law, thereby safeguarding the constitutional principles of nationalism, socialism, democracy, and secularism embodied in the Constitution of 1972, and prevailing over every force hostile to Bangladesh’s Liberation and its constitutional order, together with their domestic and foreign proxies.
