On a day that will be long remembered, Bangladesh’s interim leader, the 85-year-old Nobel Peace Prize laureate Muhammad Yunus, stepped down Monday after handing power to an elected government. In a broadcast to the nation and the world, he said: “Let the practice of democracy, freedom of speech and fundamental rights that has begun not be halted.”

Yunus had returned from self-imposed exile in August 2024, days after the authoritarian government of Sheikh Hasina was overthrown in a student-led “Gen-Z” uprising and she fled by helicopter to India.

Last week, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) and its leader Tarique Rahman won a commanding electoral victory. Perhaps more significantly — only time will tell — voters in the nation of around 170 million endorsed sweeping democratic reforms in a referendum held the same day.

Hasina’s Awami League, the country’s other major party, was barred from participating. The former prime minister fled after the deadly August 2024 uprising, when security forces killed nearly 800 demonstrators — and possibly as many as 1,400 — during protests that began over high unemployment and a controversial job quota system and swelled into a broader revolt against her rule.

With more than 2,000 candidates from 51 parties and the first genuinely contested parliamentary elections since 2008, Bangladesh can regard the outcome with cautious satisfaction. Although some leaders of Jamaat-e-Islami cited procedural irregularities, most conceded defeat. The BNP secured a two-thirds majority.

Yet Bangladeshi politics has once again come full circle. Since independence from Pakistan in 1971, power has largely alternated between two families. Rahman is the son of former President Ziaur Rahman, who ruled from 1977 until his assassination in 1981, and former Prime Minister Khaleda Zia, who served two terms between 1991 and 2006. She died in December, days after her son returned from 17 years in exile in the United Kingdom.

When in power, both the Awami League and the BNP have wielded state institutions against opponents, pursuing court cases and imprisoning rivals. The cycle culminated in Hasina’s ouster. An international crimes tribunal established by the interim government later prosecuted her in absentia and sentenced her to death for crimes against humanity. The Awami League remains banned.

Rahman has pledged not to pursue vengeance and to uphold the rule of law. Whether his government finds a way to reintegrate the Awami League into political life will be one of his earliest and most consequential tests. Though his victory was decisive — and the BNP likely would have prevailed even in a fully open contest — Jamaat-e-Islami’s strong parliamentary presence ensures that politics will remain fraught.

Several Jamaat leaders were prosecuted and executed under tribunals Hasina established for crimes related to the 1971 liberation war and the party itself was once banned. Khaleda Zia, too, spent time in prison as her health deteriorated; Tarique Rahman also faced imprisonment. With public anger toward the Awami League still raw, any move to restore it to legitimacy will require careful political judgment.

The arc of Hasina’s career resembles Greek tragedy with South Asian overtones. She was the daughter of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, Bangladesh’s founding leader, assassinated by rogue army officers in 1975. She returned from exile, restored democratic rule and won elections. Over time, however, her government hollowed out democratic institutions and concentrated power.

The record is complicated. Bangladesh experienced sustained economic growth that expanded the middle class. But prosperity was accompanied by stark inequality and entrenched corruption, drawing criticism even from the World Bank. State institutions — from police to civil service to judiciary — became increasingly politicized. Elections lost credibility.

Enforced disappearances, extrajudicial killings and arbitrary detentions scarred political life. The Rapid Action Battalion, once touted as a crime-fighting unit, became synonymous with fear for many families. Journalists and activists learned the limits of dissent. Even some supporters of Hasina’s secular credentials and her association with the 1971 liberation legacy grew uneasy as she blurred the line between party and state.

Since the 2024 uprising, a new danger has emerged: the assault on the symbols of 1971. Bangladesh’s liberation war is not merely history; it is the country’s moral foundation. For years, the Awami League monopolized that legacy, equating national sacrifice with one family’s suffering. That appropriation deserved challenge. But dismantling memorials and erasing iconography linked to independence risks something else entirely — the erosion of collective memory.

When political cleansing spills into historical vandalism, the result is not renewal but desecration. In that space, sympathy for Hasina can arise not from admiration for her governance but from discomfort with excess.

The deeper problem is a political culture that treats power as domination. Accountability becomes destruction; opposition becomes treason. Trials humiliate rather than illuminate. Sentences eliminate rather than educate.

Democracy does not mature simply by removing an authoritarian leader. It matures when successors resist becoming mirror images of those they replace. The promise of the post-Hasina moment was that Bangladesh might pursue justice without spectacle and accountability without vengeance.

Whether Tarique Rahman can meet that test will determine whether this turning of the wheel marks a genuine democratic renewal — or merely the start of another cycle.

© The Japan Times