How South Asia’s Uprisings Are Reshaping Party Politics — And What Bangladesh Gets Wrong
Three countries. Three uprisings. Three very different answers to the same constitutional question: what do you do with a political party that abused power?
In Nepal, the Maoists — whose decade-long armed insurgency killed several thousand people — were brought inside the constitutional order and eventually governed the country. In Sri Lanka, the Rajapaksa political dynasty, whose government presided over an economic collapse that drove citizens to storm the presidential palace in 2022, was electorally punished but left legally intact. In Bangladesh, the Awami League (AL), the party that led the country’s independence struggle in 1971 and drove rapid infrastructure and economic growth under the government of Sheikh Hasina, but faced criticism for alleged democratic backsliding and authoritarianism, was ousted from power in August 2024 in a mass uprising. The AL has been formally banned by parliament as a terrorist organization, its registration suspended, and its supporters facing up to 14 years in prison for any organized political activity.
The comparative record suggests Bangladesh has chosen the worst of the three available paths.
Bangladesh: Accountability as Legal Extinction
The Anti-Terrorism (Amendment) Act 2026, passed by the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP)-led parliament on 8 April 2026, converted what the interim government had begun via an emergency ordinance into permanent law — the total prohibition of all activities of the AL, its affiliates, and its student wings. Meetings, publications, social media posts, and public gatherings are all banned pending completion of trials of AL leaders, including Hasina, before Bangladesh’s International Crimes Tribunal. The Election Commission has suspended the party’s registration. Indeed, Bangladesh’s February 2026 elections — the first since the July 2024 uprising — proceeded without the participation of a party that won nearly half the national vote as recently as 2008.
The constitutional defects are serious. Article 38 of Bangladesh’s constitution protects freedom of association, permitting restrictions only for organizations that promote violence, destroy communal harmony, or are constitutionally inconsistent in their aims. The Awami League — founded in 1949, a consistent electoral participant, and the party of liberation — meets none of those criteria as a matter of constitutional law. Article 39, which protects expression, is equally violated by a law that criminalizes any public statement made on the party’s behalf. And the targeting logic inverts criminal law’s foundational principle: the International Crimes Tribunal exists to try specific individuals for specific acts. Using pending individual trials as the predicate for an organizational ban on the entire party converts individual liability into collective proscription — a constitutional move that no established legal system in the region has endorsed when applied to a major political party.
Constitutional lawyer Barrister Tania Amir captured the doctrinal stakes precisely. Banning the AL, she said, is “challenging the very edifice of democracy.” That is not a defense of the AL’s conduct in government. It is a recognition that formal constitutionalism — a parliamentary vote, a signed statute, elections duly held — can coexist with, and produce, the practical extinction of political pluralism.
LSE constitutional scholar Tarunabh Khaitan has described this as killing a constitution with a thousand cuts: the accumulation of individually defensible legal acts whose cumulative effect dismantles the competitive order that formal law claims to protect. Bangladesh’s party ban is a compressed, single-act version of that pathology. Anti-terrorism law has been deployed to accomplish what no openly unconstitutional measure could: the removal of the principal opposition from political life, under parliamentary cover.
The systemic result is a reconfigured party system in which the AL’s historic electoral constituency — roughly a third of the electorate — is represented by no legally functioning party. The BNP governs. Jamaat-e-Islami, itself previously banned under the Hasina government, has been rehabilitated as parliamentary opposition. As analysts have concluded, what Bangladesh has produced is not democratic renewal but “restoration more than renewal” — a rotation of the dominant party, leaving the mechanisms of dominance entirely intact.
Nepal and Sri Lanka: Redesign Instead of Removal
Nepal’s approach offers the starkest contrast. The Maoists did not emerge from the 2006 peace process as a banned organization. They entered elections, joined coalition governments, and helped draft the 2015 Constitution — a settlement deliberately structured to prevent any single party from replicating centralized dominance: a federal structure across seven provinces; mandatory quotas for women, Dalits, and ethnic minorities; and a statutory framework for party financing and internal democracy. Nepal’s implementation has been imperfect, coalition instability is endemic, and the gap between constitutional design and political practice remains wide. But Nepal’s constitutional response to party-driven violence was to change the rules under which parties competed — not to remove the offending party from the field. Erik Mobrand’s comparative work on party constitutionalization in Asia identifies the design principle: constitutions that bring parties inside a framework of enforceable rules produce more durable pluralism than constitutions that respond to party pathology through exclusion.
Sri Lanka’s 2022 Aragalaya uprising ended with the Rajapaksa family fleeing the country. The reckoning was severe. But the Rajapaksas’ party was not banned. Its members contested subsequent elections, its voters remained represented; the constitutional reform debates that followed focused on structural redesign — diluting executive presidential power, regulating party financing, reforming electoral rules — rather than on removing the offending party from the constitutional order. Sri Lanka’s reform project has been slow and contested. But it has maintained the architecture of party pluralism while pursuing accountability. That is the choice Bangladesh has declined to make.
The Disease, Not the Symptom
The deepest problem with Bangladesh’s party ban is not what it does to the Awami League. It is what it fails to do to the conditions that produced AL dominance. The electoral institutions susceptible to executive pressure, the judiciary historically vulnerable to governing-party influence, the regulatory apparatus that parties in power weaponized against rivals — all of these survive the AL’s legal extinction intact. As Adem Abebe’s comparative analysis of winner-takes-all politics across the Global South demonstrates, preventing the next iteration of authoritarian dominance requires constitutional design that disrupts the mechanisms of capture — through enforceable opposition rights, transparent party financing, and genuinely independent judicial institutions. Banning the current incumbent delivers none of these.
Heather Thuynsma’s analysis of South Africa’s party finance ecosystem makes the structural point. The African National Congress’ dominance was sustained by privileged access to state resources and private business money, not only electoral majorities. South Africa’s reforms requiring donation disclosure and establishing public funding for opposition parties are genuine tools for disrupting that advantage. Bangladesh’s post-uprising process has produced no equivalent. The architecture of dominance changes hands; it does not change character.
Many who participated in the July 2024 uprising in Bangladesh hoped for the introduction of a different kind of politics — one in which institutions constrained whoever held power rather than serving them. The young people who led it did not take to the streets to swap one dominant party for another. Nepal and Sri Lanka, each in their imperfect ways, have attempted to respond to comparable uprisings by redesigning the rules of the game. Bangladesh has responded by removing the opposing team from the field and calling it a victory.
That is not accountability. It is the next cycle of dominance, beginning.
