An exile who still hears the applause by Avani Devi

Sheikh Hasina’s promise to return to Bangladesh in December is the sort of political declaration that sounds, at first, like confidence. Listen more closely and it sounds like something else: a challenge thrown across a border, a refusal to accept that history has already moved on.

Two years after the extraordinary collapse of her government, Hasina remains convinced that her political story is unfinished. Speaking from India, she has again presented herself not as a defeated former prime minister but as a leader temporarily separated from her country. That distinction matters. Exile, in her telling, is an interruption. To her opponents, it is justice finally catching up.

The tragedy is that both narratives contain uncomfortable truths. Hasina presided over Bangladesh for years with the confidence of someone who had stopped believing power could ever be taken away. Her government brought economic development and a measure of stability, but political stability gradually became inseparable from political control. Opposition parties were weakened, dissent was increasingly treated as disloyalty, and institutions that should have acted as restraints appeared too often to function as extensions of the executive.

Then came the students. The protests became the political earthquake that years of managed politics had failed to predict. What began as a movement around student grievances developed into something much larger: an expression of accumulated frustration from a generation that had grown up under Hasina and no longer accepted the argument that stability justified everything.

The government's response transformed a political crisis into a national rupture. Deaths during the protests shattered whatever remaining legitimacy the authorities possessed. When Hasina finally fled, the image was brutally simple: a government that had appeared immovable had suddenly become homeless.

Now she wants to return. That promise will thrill her supporters and alarm those who remember the violence. But there is a peculiar danger in imagining that political legitimacy can be restored simply by crossing a frontier. Hasina may believe that her return would represent vindication. For many Bangladeshis, it could instead reopen wounds that have barely begun to heal.

Her conviction in absentia adds another layer of political theatre. A death sentence is an extraordinarily grave punishment, and political justice becomes particularly suspect when the accused is tried while outside the country and the country itself remains deeply polarised. Accountability is necessary after deadly repression. But accountability loses its moral force when it begins to resemble revenge.

Bangladesh therefore faces a dilemma larger than Hasina herself. It must decide whether the fall of one powerful leader will produce a healthier political system or merely replace one form of intolerance with another.

Hasina’s December pledge may prove empty, impossible or transformative. But the real question is not whether she can return. It is what kind of Bangladesh would receive her.

A democracy confident in itself should be capable of confronting its former rulers without fearing them. It should investigate abuses without turning courts into instruments of political vengeance. And it should allow even deeply unpopular politicians to exist within the political argument, provided the law is respected.

Hasina once seemed to embody the permanence of Bangladeshi politics. Now she embodies its unresolved past. Her return, if it happens, will not simply be the return of an ex-prime minister. It will be Bangladesh deciding whether it has learned anything from the moment when a government that looked permanent discovered, almost overnight, that the people had stopped applauding.