Two years after Sheikh Hasina fled Bangladesh in a helicopter, pursued by a revolution that promised to bury not merely her government but the political system she had come to embody, the country has reached one of those exquisitely South Asian moments in which history appears to have travelled an enormous distance only to discover that it has somehow returned to the same neighbourhood.

Hasina wants to come home.

Muhammad Yunus, the Nobel laureate summoned in 2024 to supervise the transition from autocracy to democracy and who repeatedly insisted that political power was neither his ambition nor his destination, is meanwhile being discussed as a possible future president.

And Tarique Rahman, son of Khaleda Zia and heir to the other great political dynasty supposedly rendered obsolete by the July Revolution, is already prime minister.

For a revolution explicitly presented as the destruction of Bangladesh’s old political order, the cast has become remarkably familiar.

Hasina’s announcement is by far the most dramatic. Speaking from India, where she has lived since escaping Dhaka on August 5, 2024, the former prime minister has said that she intends to return to Bangladesh around December, together with senior leaders of the Awami League, despite facing a death sentence imposed in absentia and despite the suspension of her party’s political activities. She says she is prepared to surrender and face the courts, while describing the proceedings against her as politically motivated and demanding that the restrictions imposed upon the Awami League be lifted.

The government’s answer has been almost admirably literal. Dhaka says it wants her back too, although presumably for rather different reasons, and has repeatedly asked India to extradite her.

Everybody, in other words, agrees that Sheikh Hasina should return to Bangladesh. The disagreement concerns principally whether she should return as a political leader or as a prisoner awaiting execution.

That distinction is not exactly minor.

Yet the very possibility of her return reveals something that the architects of the post-2024 order have been reluctant to acknowledge. Sheikh Hasina was removed from power. The Awami League was repressed, its leaders arrested or driven abroad, its political activities suspended and its role in the February 2026 elections eliminated. What has proved considerably more difficult is removing the political constituency, historical identity and social infrastructure that made the Awami League one of the two dominant forces in Bangladesh for half a century.

Parties do not disappear merely because governments forbid them to exist.

This is particularly true in Bangladesh, where politics has never been simply a competition between electoral programmes. The Awami League is entwined with the Liberation War, the founding mythology of the state, Bengali nationalism, secularism and the political legacy of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. Hasina progressively converted much of that heritage into an instrument of personal and authoritarian rule, particularly during her final years in office, but abusing a political tradition is not the same as erasing it.

The post-revolutionary government often behaved as though it were.

There was understandable fury after the bloodshed of July and August 2024. United Nations investigators estimated that as many as 1,400 people may have been killed during the repression of the uprising. Hasina’s government responded to a student movement with lethal force, arrests, communications blackouts and the familiar machinery of an increasingly paranoid state. By the time she fled, she had managed the extraordinary feat of converting one of South Asia’s strongest political organisations into something that millions of Bangladeshis associated primarily with coercion.

But revolutions have a dangerous habit of confusing political destruction with political disappearance.

The Awami League may have been excluded from the election, but its voters did not evaporate. Its organisational networks did not all disappear. Its historical constituency did not suddenly become BNP. Nor did the enormous section of Bangladeshi society that remains uncomfortable with Jamaat-e-Islami and with the growing political legitimacy of Islamist forces automatically conclude that the solution was to live indefinitely without the country’s principal secular political organisation.

That vacuum is becoming increasingly important.

The February election produced the result everybody expected once the Awami League had been removed from the field: Tarique Rahman’s Bangladesh Nationalist Party won overwhelmingly and returned the Zia dynasty to power. The revolution that had initially appeared to challenge the entire architecture of dynastic politics therefore ended, at least electorally, by removing one dynasty and restoring the other.

This is not necessarily an argument against the legitimacy of the election. It is an argument about the limits of political engineering.

Bangladesh cannot indefinitely solve its democratic problem by deciding which of its major political traditions is temporarily permitted to participate.

Hasina understands this perfectly well.

Her proposed return is therefore not simply an act of personal defiance, nor the sentimental desire of an elderly political leader to die in the country where her family is buried. It is a calculated attempt to convert physical vulnerability into political legitimacy. If she remains in India, she is the exiled autocrat protected by the neighbour with which her government was notoriously close. If she returns, is arrested and perhaps imprisoned under a government dominated by her lifelong political enemies, she can attempt something far more useful: becoming the victim.

It would be an extraordinary transformation, but Bangladesh has performed stranger ones.

The woman blamed for the deaths of the July protesters could return as a condemned prisoner claiming political persecution. The party accused of dismantling democracy could begin presenting itself as the largest political organisation excluded from democracy. The former prime minister who imprisoned opponents could demand due process from opponents who now control the institutions judging her.

Politics is rarely considerate enough to preserve morally convenient roles.

The current government insists that Hasina will receive due process and says it would welcome her return to face the courts. That may well be true. But whether the proceedings are legally defensible is only part of the question. The political effect of bringing Hasina back to Bangladesh in handcuffs may prove quite different from the effect imagined by those who believe that her conviction finally closes the Awami League chapter.

Martyrdom has always been a dangerous political resource in the subcontinent, and the Sheikh family knows something about the subject.

There is also India.

New Delhi has spent two uncomfortable years hosting Hasina while simultaneously trying to reconstruct relations with a Bangladesh no longer governed by its preferred partner. The relationship deteriorated sharply after 2024 as Dhaka demanded her extradition, anti-Indian sentiment increased and the new political establishment sought to demonstrate that Bangladesh would no longer operate within what critics regarded as Hasina’s excessively intimate relationship with Delhi.

The return of the BNP has created an opportunity for a reset, but Hasina remains sitting inconveniently in the middle of it.

Her latest public appearance from New Delhi was enough to provoke a furious reaction from Bangladesh, which complained that allowing her to address journalists from Indian soil amounted to an affront to Bangladeshi sovereignty. India responded with the diplomatic equivalent of putting several metres of furniture between itself and its guest: the event was private, the government had not organised it and New Delhi did not endorse what Hasina had said.

The problem is that geography cannot be denied quite as easily as responsibility.

Hasina is in India because India allowed her to remain there. Bangladesh wants her extradited. India has so far treated the matter as a legal question and avoided committing itself publicly to a decision. If she genuinely intends to return voluntarily in December, New Delhi may eventually be relieved of the choice it has been trying not to make.

Or presented with an even more difficult one.

A Hasina return could destabilise the political accommodation India is now attempting to construct with Tarique Rahman. Preventing her return, on the other hand, would transform India from reluctant host into effective jailer of the woman who for years was its closest political partner in Dhaka.

Neither is particularly attractive.

Then there is Muhammad Yunus.

The speculation surrounding his possible elevation to the presidency has taken on new life since President Mohammed Shahabuddin resigned on July 24, formally for medical reasons. BNP circles are reportedly considering several candidates, including senior party figures, and Yunus’s former press secretary has publicly denied that the former chief adviser intends to take the job.

For the moment, therefore, Yunus as president belongs to the category of political possibility rather than political fact.

The fact that the possibility appears plausible at all is nevertheless revealing.

Yunus entered government after Hasina’s fall precisely because he stood outside Bangladesh’s conventional political class. His international reputation, Nobel Prize and lack of an established party made him an ideal transitional figure: sufficiently prestigious to reassure foreign governments, sufficiently detached from the BNP-Awami League rivalry to claim neutrality and sufficiently temporary, at least in theory, not to become another contestant for power.

The trouble with temporary power is that it has a peculiar capacity for developing constitutional ambitions.

Yunus presided over the most ambitious attempt in years to reshape the Bangladeshi state, culminating in the July Charter and a referendum on constitutional reform. His interim administration presented itself not simply as a caretaker government organising an election, but as the custodian of a revolutionary mandate to reconstruct institutions and prevent the return of the authoritarian concentration of power associated with Hasina.

The question was always what would happen to the custodian once the transition was complete.

If Yunus were ever to become president, even under a reformed constitutional arrangement and with parliamentary consent, the symbolism would be difficult to ignore. The allegedly non-political figure of the revolution would have moved from temporary executive authority into a permanent constitutional office created by the very political transition he helped design.

There is no evidence that this is presently his plan, and people close to him insist that it is not.

But Bangladesh is discussing it because the revolution never quite resolved the problem of where revolutionary legitimacy ends and ordinary politics begins.

That unresolved question links Yunus and Hasina more closely than either side would probably enjoy.

Hasina claims historical legitimacy: the Liberation War, Mujib, the Awami League, development, secular nationalism and years of electoral dominance, however progressively distorted those elections became.

Yunus represented revolutionary legitimacy: July 2024, the students, the overthrow of authoritarianism, institutional reform and the promise of a new political beginning.

Tarique Rahman possesses electoral legitimacy: he won the election held after the transition and now governs through a parliamentary majority.

Bangladesh currently has all three forms of legitimacy competing inside the same political system.

None has completely displaced the others.

This is why Hasina’s possible return is far more significant than the fate of one former prime minister. It forces Bangladesh to confront the question postponed when the Awami League was simply excluded from the electoral process: can a democratic order be considered fully reconstructed while one of the country’s principal political constituencies remains legally and politically outside it?

The answer cannot simply be that Hasina committed crimes.

If she did, she should be tried for them.

The more difficult question concerns everybody who voted for her party, belonged to it without participating in repression or continues to identify with its secular and historical traditions. A democracy cannot prosecute a constituency.

Nor can the BNP indefinitely rely upon the absence of its principal rival without eventually suffering from the legitimacy problem created by that absence. Tarique Rahman may have won an enormous parliamentary majority, but governing Bangladesh successfully will require something harder than defeating an opponent prohibited from standing.

It will require demonstrating that the post-Hasina order works.

And this is precisely where Hasina’s political opportunity lies.

Economic difficulty, unemployment, law-and-order problems, attacks on minorities, Islamist mobilisation and disappointment with the revolutionary promises of 2024 all create the possibility of retrospective nostalgia, not necessarily for Hasina herself but for stability. Authoritarian governments frequently acquire an improbable golden glow once their successors discover that overthrowing a regime is much easier than replacing its capacity to govern.

Hasina does not need Bangladeshis to forget 2024.

She merely needs enough of them to begin remembering 2023 differently.

This is the danger for both the BNP and the political forces born from the July movement. The revolution was extraordinarily successful at defining what Bangladesh had rejected. It has been considerably less successful at creating a political structure capable of making the old alternatives irrelevant.

Two years later, Hasina is preparing to return, the BNP dynasty is back in government and Yunus’s name can plausibly circulate in conversations about the presidency even after he supposedly returned to private life.

The revolution has not failed simply because familiar people remain important. History rarely provides an entirely new political class on request.

But neither has Bangladesh escaped its old political grammar.

It still speaks in dynasties, personalities, historical legitimacy and saviours.

Sheikh Hasina intends to test whether exile, conviction and defeat have really removed her from that grammar or merely given her a new role within it.

If she returns in December, Bangladesh will not simply be receiving a fugitive former prime minister.

It will be confronting the unfinished business of the revolution that expelled her.

And perhaps discovering that removing Sheikh Hasina was considerably easier than constructing a Bangladesh in which Sheikh Hasina no longer mattered.