You can try to erase a 77-year-old political party by writing a decree, but the streets usually have a different timeline.
On June 23, 2026, Bangladesh turned into a militarized fortress. The government deployed army troops and Border Guard Bangladesh (BGB) forces across the capital city of Dhaka and five critical districts, ordering them to hold those lines until June 30. The objective was simple: stop the Awami League from celebrating its founding anniversary.
The state took a total refusal stance. Home Minister Salahuddin Ahmed flatly told reporters that the party doesn't exist anymore. Yet, hours later, dozens of activists were being dragged into police vans during midnight raids and flash street protests.
What we're seeing in Bangladesh isn't a routine law-and-order operation. It's a high-stakes, anxious effort by a new government trying to completely bury the ghost of Sheikh Hasina's regime. The problem is, ghosts don't care about security bans.
The Reality of a Nationwide Lockdown
If the Awami League is truly dead, the current administration is spending a massive amount of resources to police the corpse.
The Dhaka Metropolitan Police confirmed at least 26 arrests inside the capital city alone, with dozens more picked up nationwide. In Barishal, police donned full riot gear to break up unannounced flash marches. Troops are occupying Gopalganj, the ancestral home and fierce traditional stronghold of the ousted prime minister. Mainstream media networks and local online news platforms operate under a total blackout order, legally forbidden from printing or broadcasting statements from Hasina or reporting on anything her party does.
Dhaka Metropolitan Police deployed over 18,000 officers specifically for the June 23 anniversary, supplementing the military and paramilitary units patrolling the streets.
But the tension started spiking days before the actual anniversary, driven by severe state heavy-handedness.
- June 20: An Awami League activist died while in police custody in Faridpur.
- June 21: Another party worker died from injuries suffered during a frantic police chase in Barishal.
These two deaths changed the local dynamic completely. Anger boiled over into a brief but chaotic blockade of the vital highway connecting Dhaka to the southwestern city of Khulna.
Then came a genuinely surreal political twist. Senior leaders from the ruling Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) in Faridpur actually showed up at the funeral prayers for the activist who died in custody. They publicly condemned the police behavior. When the people currently in power start criticizing their own security apparatus for how they treat the banned opposition, it tells you the political terrain is getting incredibly unstable.
Why Banning an Identity Rarely Works
The current government's policy of total erasure ignores how deep the roots go here. The Awami League was founded on June 23, 1949, back when the territory was still East Pakistan. It's the political vehicle that literally led the 1971 Liberation War to birth Bangladesh.
No one denies that Sheikh Hasina's final years in power turned deeply authoritarian, culminating in her ouster during the student-led uprising on August 5, 2024. The International Crimes Tribunal later sentenced her to death in absentia, a ruling she rejects from her exile in India.
But when the interim administration under Muhammad Yunus disbanded the party, and Prime Minister Tarique Rahman’s government later codified that ban, they set a dangerous precedent. They assumed you can cleanly separate a major political tradition from the population by using legal force.
From her hideout in India, Hasina used social media to send a direct message on the eve of the anniversary: "We were not born to be defeated." Online, her supporters echoed the defiance, writing that they plan to return with ten times the strength.
The state’s counter-strategy has been raw physical prevention. Dhaka Metropolitan Police Commissioner Mosleh Uddin Ahmed boasted to reporters that his forces completely foiled the party's plans to gather. He expressed confidence that they wouldn't manage to bring out a single procession or rally.
He was technically right about the big squares, but wrong about the margins. Raw video footage slipped past the digital censors and onto social media platforms, showing small, fast-moving groups of people sprinting down side streets with red and green flags, screaming party slogans before vanishing before the police trucks arrived.
The Risk of Closing the Valve
Independent political observers inside the country are starting to voice major warnings about this approach. When you completely block a major political segment from doing something as symbolic as marking a founding date, you don't make them disappear. You just push them underground and make the system hyper-polarized.
The total security clampdown is scheduled to lift at the end of June, but the underlying friction isn't going anywhere. For ordinary people trying to run businesses or commute in Dhaka, the constant checkpoints and sudden highway blockades are a reminder that the post-uprising stability is an illusion maintained by gun barrels.
If you are trying to track where this goes next, stop looking at the official government press releases and start watching the regional towns like Faridpur and Barishal. The moment grassroots members of competing parties begin finding common ground over state violence, the official narrative of a unified country moving past the Awami League falls apart. The government might have successfully cleared the streets on June 23, but keeping a lid on this pressure cooker for the rest of 2026 is going to require a lot more than midnight raids.
