The Awami League is a party that once managed to lose a mayoral race even while holding national power in 2011 and then went on to drop four City Corporation elections in 2013, just as its street-level ideological machine was supposedly in full gear across Dhaka.

After that, “participation” became a formality. The 2014 auto-pass election, the 2018 midnight ballot, and the 2023 family-and-friends pageant were less democratic exercises than inventory checks.

What the party deployed in its final decade was way more than just some ordinary authoritarian muscle.

It was a kind of political tech sorcery, a Ninja Art of the Surveillance Capitalism age, engineered through a tight fusion of party and civil administration backed by a cowed down military, with India playing the role of the new regional company-state.

And yet, in 2024, ordinary citizens, with nothing but their bodies and their resolve, dismantled that sorcery.

After the “metaphorical Chowkidar” arrived, Awami League figures fled as if tunneling out of a safe house, cutting into the wall, grabbing whatever money they could, and disappearing.

The interim government that inherited the ruins showed little interest in stopping the exodus or investigating how such a coordinated escape could unfold with help from insiders.

Perhaps, as Humayun Ahmed once joked, nature…and interim governments…enjoy a good mystery. Observation, not intervention, became the governing philosophy. Their attention, and that of the class orbiting them, drifted toward metaphysical debates: Awami spelling reforms, Awami literary theory. Meanwhile, the real Awami operators simply walked away.

Yes, a segment of the military and bureaucracy still indulges in a soft-focus nostalgia for the Awami era, the kind of wistfulness that middle-aged uncles display in a “Matric Batch 1998” Facebook group while searching for their school crush.

But the sentiment has no economic or political grounding. To stake the country’s future on a bourgeois party that has already been abandoned by the public is the political equivalent of selling off your father’s land to buy a motorcycle from Evaly.

The disappointment is not a risk; it’s a certainty.

Driving home the point

And that is the point. Bangladesh cannot simply be handed back to the Awami League.

Power requires legitimacy. And legitimacy is the one thing the Awami League no longer possesses.

The seasoned machinery of the military and civil bureaucracy knows all of this. Still, when the old political order reappears–like a long-lost crush–it can momentarily unsettle parts of the Deep State.

But that flicker is mostly logistical. The new system hasn’t yet stabilized the channels of wealth extraction, and their relationship with the “new crush” hasn’t matured.

Even the Awami League, an ‘mafia like” organization that siphoned an estimated 2.8 trillion taka over sixteen years understands that politics cannot be run on 3 am nostalgia.

In a functioning political marketplace, capital flows into politics much like it flows into banking, because banks, at least theoretically, require predictable political conditions.

But the proceeds of outright plunder do not circulate through bourgeois politics. If the people who looted banks believed they could legally earn comparable sums through political investment, they wouldn’t have chosen bank robbery in the first place.

Which is why the Awami League, even flush with years of extraction, will not pour serious money into national politics anytime soon. The incentives no longer align.

Yet political organisms do not willingly embrace irrelevance. Deprived of resources, structure, and public support, the party is left with only the cheapest tools for signaling life: burning tires at the union level, late-night Skype calls trading insults about uncles and aunties, and a flood of AI-generated holograms of imaginary marches.

These low-cost disruptions can still be dangerous. The recent deaths in a bus fire show how quickly cheap politics can turn lethal.

Meanwhile, we hear endless tales about the Awami League’s “magical” wealth but the storytellers politely skip over the crucial question that how much of the laundering happened after August 5?

Why, in the most sensitive window of political transition, did no system exist to monitor capital flights abroad? And who, exactly, enabled this mass escape–both the people and the money?

None of this is explained. Perhaps because, as the joke goes, Nature…and interim governments…prefer their mysteries intact.

The fault in our stars

What remains, then, is the question of the present turbulence…and the turmoil that may lie ahead.

It is worth remembering that the Awami League governed for sixteen years with its heel firmly on the country’s neck, without meaningful public support, using an administrative apparatus not so different from the one in place today.

The party may have fled, but its machinery has not. And if the state genuinely wanted to neutralize the pre-announced theatrics of a now-banned, long-delegitimized party, it would not be a heavy lift.

Should it fail to accomplish something so elementary, the failure itself becomes the message. There is a method in the madness.

From their comfortable overseas perch, Awami League leaders now seem eager to place their remaining loyalists in harm’s way, hoping to reenter politics through the back door of martyrdom.

But no one, except the reckless or the delusional, is likely to risk their life for a party whose political capital has dwindled to pocket change. And the state has more than enough force to restrain those few who try.

This is the same leviathan that could be halted only when the entire country rose up in anguish and only after 1,500 to 2,000 deaths. Even today, workers and teachers cannot safely gather for rightful demands; the state’s surveillance net is that tight.

To imagine that an ethically bankrupt, politically abandoned, banned party could suddenly shake this vast apparatus is to believe in ghosts. It is not possible…unless the apparatus itself wishes to be shaken.

That is why the work of containing the Awami League’s remnants must fall first and foremost to the government. If the state can do it, it should be supported. If it cannot, the question must shift to why it cannot…and who benefits from the failure.

Condemn the Awami League for its actions, and extend that condemnation to any actor who repeats those abuses. But do not turn hatred into a fetish or a ritual, the way Awami-era politics encouraged a permanent hysteria around Jamaat, Shibir, and Razakars.

Use it instead as a tool of functional politics: mobilize, inform, resist sabotage…but refuse to participate in a staged spectacle of vigilante violence while the full machinery of monopoly force and surveillance remains untouched in the hands of the state.

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Mikail Hossain is a writer and analyst