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Back in Bangladesh they are deemed criminals and fugitives, facing charges of crimes against humanity, murder, sedition or embezzlement. But in the comfort of the crowded food courts of Kolkata shopping malls, over black coffee and Indian fast food, the exiled politicians of the Awami League sit plotting their political comeback.
More than 16 months ago, a revolution against Bangladesh’s autocratic prime minister Sheikh Hasina forced her to dramatically flee the country, jumping on a helicopter to India as an enraged onslaught of protesters marched towards her residence. The streets she left behind were bloody; her regime’s final crackdown on protesters in the July uprising had left as many as 1,400 dead, according to a UN report.
Thousands of her party members also escaped in the aftermath, facing mob violence and mounting criminal charges for their complicity in the crimes of her regime. More than 600 Awami League figures took shelter in Kolkata, an Indian city close to the Bangladeshi border, where they have been hiding out ever since.
India has been a crucial lifeline for keeping their party activities and organisation going. In May last year, the interim government bowed to public pressure and suspended the Awami League, banning all its activities while its senior leadership was investigated and put on trial for a roster of crimes including murder and corruption. The party has also been banned from contesting or campaigning in the upcoming election on 12 February, the first since Hasina’s downfall.
Late last year, a war crimes tribunal sentenced Hasina to death by hanging for crimes against humanity, committed during the final throes of her regime.
Yet far from seeing her political career as finished, Hasina dismissed the verdict as “false” and has unabashedly been scheming her return from India, including mobilising thousands of her supporters to disrupt the upcoming election.
From her well-guarded, secret hideout in the Indian capital, Delhi, Hasina spends her days in hours of party meetings and calls with her cadre back in Bangladesh. Her political activities take place under the watchful eye of the Indian government – a close ally of Hasina’s when she was in power – which has pointedly ignored Bangladesh’s requests for her extradition.
Over the past year, senior party leaders including former MPs and cabinet ministers, have been routinely summoned from Kolkata to meet Hasina to discuss party strategy. Saddam Hossain, president of the Awami league students wing, Bangladesh Chhatra League, was among them.
“Our leader Sheikh Hasina is in constant communication with our people in Bangladesh: our party activists, party leaders, grassroots leaders and other professional bodies. She’s trying to make our party ready for the upcoming struggle,” he said. Bangladesh Chhatra League was labelled a “terrorist organisation” by the interim government and Hossain faces multiple charges of sedition and crimes against humanity, which he denies.
“She will be in calls and meetings sometimes 15 or 16 hours in a day,” he added. “Our leader is very hopeful she will return to Bangladesh. We believe Sheikh Hasina will come back as a hero.”
The past two elections under Hasina were overshadowed by widespread allegations of heavy vote rigging and the interim government, led by Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus, promised February’s polls will be Bangladesh’s first free and fair election in more than a decade.
But the Awami League argue that to stop them from contesting undermines all claims of democratic legitimacy. They have accused Yunus – who was loathed and persecuted by Hasina, who saw him as a political rival – of being a “devil” carrying out his own revenge vendetta against their leader, claims he dismissed.
“We are telling our workers to avoid all involvement in the election, boycott all campaigning and voting and not participate in this sham process at all,” said Jahangir Kabir Nanak, one of Hasina’s former ministers who is facing crimes against humanity charges, which he denies.
To those in Bangladesh who accused Hasina’s Awami League of 15 years of despotism and kleptocratic rule, its sudden pivot to championing democracy, human rights, transparency and press freedom has been met with a heavy dose of scepticism.
As documented for years by human rights groups and the UN, Hasina’s regime routinely suppressed dissent of its critics and opponents, thousands who were disappeared, tortured and killed in secret jails; many emerged only after Hasina was toppled. Freedom of the press and judicial independence was crushed and elections were reduced to a staged farce.
But despite promises by Yunus’s interim government to set the country on a new democratic path, they too have been accused of abuses, including the misuse of anti-terror legislation against journalists, a failure to protect freedom of speech, minority rights and a severe disintegration of law and order. The tribunal that sentenced Hasina to death also drew criticism for not complying to international standards.
As a wave of mob violence, justified in the name of revenge and retribution against Hasina’s regime, swept the country, Awami League allege hundreds of their workers have been attacked, killed by political opponents or jailed without bail. Many of their cadre remain in hiding. “We don’t stay in Kolkata because we fear prison,” said Hossain. “We’re here because if we go back, we will be killed.”
Geopolitical friction
The proactive presence of Awami League in Kolkata and Delhi has raised increasingly uncomfortable questions for India, particularly its role in allowing the activities of a suspended party to continue from its soil and the safe haven given to some of Bangladesh’s most wanted political fugitives. Since Hasina’s fall, India and Bangladesh relations have soured and all the Awami league officials in Kolkata said they had no fears of being deported by India.
The geopolitical friction came to a head last week, when Hasina gave her first public address to a packed gathering in Delhi. In audio recorded from her bunker, she condemned the upcoming election and accused Yunus of “forcibly taking power” and turning Bangladesh into a “blood-soaked nation”.
Bangladesh’s foreign ministry could hardly contain its rage. “Allowing the event to take place in the Indian capital and letting mass murderer Hasina openly deliver her hate speech … constitutes a clear affront to the people and the government of Bangladesh,” they said. The Indian government did not reply.
From their comfortable residences in Kolkata, there was little repentance or remorse among the senior party figures for the liturgy of alleged human rights abuses levelled at their regime. Most refused to acknowledge the uprising that drove them from power was a popular revolt, instead claiming it was a political conspiracy from a small minority.
“That was not an organic revolution, it was a terrorist takeover to bring down our democratic government,” said A.F.M. Bahauddin Nasim, joint general secretary of Awami League and former MP, speaking from a luxury villa in a private high security estate on the outskirts of the city.
His response to the murder and crimes against humanity charges he now faces, was to chuckle with laugher. “Bogus, bogus, bogus,” he said.
So far, the comeback plan of the exiled leaders hinges on the failure of the upcoming election, which they insist will not bring stability or peace to the country, and ultimately turn people back to Awami League.
Tanvir Shakil Joy, a former Awami League MP who has been living in Kolkata since August 2024, was one of the few who would acknowledge past “mistakes”. “I can admit we were not saints,” said Joy. “We were authoritarian. We were not fully democratic. I would agree that the 2018 election was not fully functional. We would have hoped it could be more fair and transparent, that’s unfortunate.”
As for corruption and kleptocracy, he conceded there were “irregularities, definitely. There were financial things that should not have taken place and we have to take blame for that”, but denied it amounted to the estimated $200 allegedly siphoned off from Bangladesh’s state coffers during Hasina’s 15 years in power.
Like many of those in Kolkata, Joy insisted his exile in India would be short-lived, though acknowledged jail would probably be waiting for him when he finally did return. “Things are very dark for us now,” he said. “But I don’t think they will remain so for long.”
Additional reporting by Aakash Hassan
