Ashraful Alam Khokon is not your average Awami League loyalist. To know him–or even to observe him from a distance–is to sense a peculiar dissonance.

Scroll through his hyperactive Facebook feed, listen to the anecdotes that circulate about him, and you’ll realize he doesn’t quite fit the archetype of the “boorish,” slogan-shouting party man the ruling Awami League became known for under Sheikh Hasina.

In fact, “sophisticated” is a word that wouldn’t feel entirely out of place.

His timeline is a curated collage of soft-lit portraits and carefully composed photographs–each captioned with verses of poetry or cryptic lines drawn from philosophy. The aesthetic is almost meditative, a portrayal of a man who appears cultured and self-possessed.

That might even be true–on the surface. But beneath that varnish lies a moral compass long demagnetized by proximity to power. Khokon’s years orbiting one of the most authoritarian regimes in the world have clearly left their mark.

Since August 5 of last year–the day dictator Sheikh Hasina fled the country in disgrace, chased out by a student-led revolt that toppled her 15-year rule–many of her loyalists have scrambled to rewrite history.

Those with large online followings have tried to recast her downfall as a tragedy foretold by the rise of “fundamentalists” and “extremists” rather than the fall of a despot.

It was a predictable playbook. Former propagandists and digital apparatchiks quickly regrouped–the so-called A-team, fronted by Omi Rahman Pial, Nijhoom Majumder and Nahid “Rains.”

Mohammad A. Arafat, the regime’s spin-hardened [last] State Minister for Information jumped in too with his mind-bogglingly convoluted narrative.

Even Hasina’s son, Sajeeb Wazed Joy, made a brief, humiliating appearance–his swollen face and vacant stare a portrait of inherited arrogance. His attempts to peddle conspiracy theories were so absurd that even dyed-in-the-wool Awami supporters began to cringe.

But Khokon has stood apart.

Scroll through his posts over the past 14 months, and you’ll notice something disarming–his words don’t always read as propaganda.

There’s a measured cadence, even a glimmer of introspection. For all his complicity, he has managed to sound, at least occasionally, like a man wrestling with the ruins of his own political faith while doing criticism for just reasons.

Veneered narrative

In one of his October posts, Khokon targeted a “controversial” move to grant television licenses to a handful of young upstarts who, as he wryly noted, had been “earning barely 20,000 or 30,000 taka a few months ago” and were now suddenly running entire TV channels.

The jab was delivered with a polished wit–no vulgarities, just a sly turn of phrase and a knowing smile.

It struck a chord. Many ordinary Bangladeshis, already nursing suspicions that the young faces of the July uprising were cashing in on their newfound fame, found validation in his words.

In that moment, Khokon managed to sound less like a bitter partisan and more like a prudent observer of the times.

In another post, he went further–back into nostalgia. He reminisced about a Bangladesh where “stars” once meant intellect and refinement.

He invoked the rhetorical brilliance of Birupaksha Paul and Abdun Noor Tushar, the cultural discipline of Abdullah Abu Sayeed, the artistic gravitas of Humayun Faridi, and the literary imagination of Humayun Ahmed.

Then, with an artful sigh, he lamented how fame had been reduced to a carnival of “uneducated YouTubers and TikTokers.”

For an urban middle-class reader, that post may have read like a harmless cultural critique–a lament for a lost age of civility. And on the surface, it was exactly that. But behind the elegy lay something more insidious–obviously.

Khokon’s real talent lies not in propaganda’s crudeness but in its refinement. He knows exactly where to press, which nerves to touch, and how to lace his rhetoric with just enough truth to make the poison go down smoothly.

His target is clear: to sow distrust among the very coalition that brought Sheikh Hasina down–the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), Jamaat-e-Islami, and the National Citizens Party (NCP).

His personal animus, of course, is reserved for the interim government led by Nobel laureate Dr. Muhammad Yunus. But his attacks rarely sound personal. Instead, he paints himself as the realist, the patriot who simply “sees through” the new establishment.

To be fair, Khokon’s propaganda doesn’t need to be invented from scratch.

The mess is already there. BNP and Jamaat have been trading accusations with the discipline of old rivals reliving their feud. Both carry their own baggage–Jamaat still burdened by its wartime stance in 1971 and the lingering fear that it might drag Bangladesh toward theocratic regression.

BNP weighed down by its history of corruption and its loud takeover of the client-patronage networks abandoned by fleeing Awami loyalists.

In short, Khokon doesn’t need to distort reality, he only needs to narrate it selectively. And that’s what makes him, perhaps, the most dangerous kind of propagandist: the one who sounds reasonable.

Jabs of hidden propaganda

The National Citizens Party, or NCP, carries its own kind of baggage–a party that began as the moral compass of the uprising but is now seen by many as a “swaggering mob” with the emotional volatility of wounded adolescents.

Allegations of corruption–some exaggerated, others unverified but widely believed–have only deepened the disillusionment.

Meanwhile, the interim government led by Dr. Muhammad Yunus has found itself on increasingly shaky ground. Its early months were marked by a rare sense of stability after the revolutionary upheaval of Hasina’s fall.

But competence has not translated into popularity. The patience of a restless public is wearing thin; many now accuse the administration of “not doing enough,” a vague but potent charge that captures the mood of frustration in the streets and in drawing rooms alike.

This is the oxygen people like Khokon breathe. The lack of unity and the half-truths–all of it offers him a peculiar satisfaction, a chance to refine his art of division.

He knows precisely where to press: the festering fault lines between the BNP and Jamaat-e-Islami, once allies, now adversaries.

Khokon understands the anatomy of their estrangement better than most. He knows that BNP’s leaders now see Jamaat less as a former partner than as a potent opponent. And he knows, too, that a disdain between the two former allies has grown beyond politics into emotion on several issues.

For many within BNP, the old fury reserved for the Awami League has been displaced by an almost visceral contempt for Jamaat.

Jamaat and its student wing, Shibir, have done little to repair that damage. Their revisionist attempts about 1971 and their aggressive online attacks on BNP activists have pushed the two camps even further apart.

Khokon has seized on this rupture like a strategist spotting a crack in the enemy’s defense. His weapon of course is narrative manipulation.

By repeatedly painting the interim government as a “Jamaat-backed” regime–a claim not entirely untrue but deeply misleading–he fans the embers of BNP’s resentment and keeps the opposition fractured.

It’s a masterclass in modern disinformation. He doesn’t shout; he suggests. He doesn’t fabricate; he frames.

And in that subtlety lies his power.

Carefully crafted optic

For the NCP, Khokon’s playbook is simple: ridicule and delegitimize.

He paints them as naïve, inexperienced idealists–useful idiots, essentially–doing the bidding of a shadowy Jamaat conspiracy.

His posts drip with irony and condescension, the language of a man who enjoys mocking his targets more than defeating them.

But it’s the BNP, the Awami League’s true rival, that provokes his deepest contempt. No matter how artfully Khokon cloaks his commentary in pseudo-intellectual musings, his resentment occasionally slips through.

Between the lines of his posts, you can feel the bite toward a party that, for all its flaws, now occupies the political space once monopolized by its own.

More troubling, however, is his quiet attempt to turn the armed forces against the interim government. After several senior generals were brought to trial for crimes against humanity, Khokon began to sharpen his rhetoric.

In one widely shared post, he wrote that Dr. Muhammad Yunus “has no expectations from the country because he has never contributed to its benefit,” before pivoting to a warning: “On August 5th, Army Chief General Waker stated that he had taken charge of the country’s responsibility. Therefore, for better or worse, the people will hold the Army and General Waker accountable for the state of the nation.”

The implication was clear–Yunus is expendable; the military, culpable.

It was a masterstroke of insinuation, a way to seed discontent within the most disciplined and stable institution [right now] in the country without ever uttering a call to rebellion.

Scroll through Khokon’s Facebook page–followed by a quarter million people–and the pattern is unmistakable.

Each post, however polished or poetic, feeds the same underlying objective: to deepen the fractures among the very forces that brought down Hasina.

To pit party against party and civilian against soldier. And, above all, to whisper the seductive lie that Bangladesh, for all its suffering, was somehow “better off under Hasina.”

That’s the genius of his deceit–it doesn’t seek to convince, only to confuse.

And confusion, in a country still recovering from the trauma of dictatorship, is the most effective counterrevolution of all.

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