Return of the Prodigal Son

Tarique Rahman’s return is less a democratic revival than a portent of harder politics for Bangladesh and for India.

Bangladesh has a habit of mistaking movement for progress. When Tarique Rahman, the acting chairman of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), returned after 17 years abroad to much fanfare, his supporters hailed it as the homecoming of democracy. Perceptive observers in India and elsewhere, however, saw the re-entry of a man whose long absence had burnished his myth more than his record ever could.

Rahman is the son of the late Khaleda Zia, the country’s first female prime minister who passed away recently. Until her death, Zia was one half of the bitter duopoly (Zia and Sheikh Hasina) that defined Bangladeshi politics for three decades. Rahman’s return days before his mother’s death merely confirmed that there would be no inheritance dispute. If the BNP wins the next election, he is its presumptive prime minister.

The Awami League is barred from the electoral arena while the interim government under Muhammad Yunus presides over a brittle calm. Islamist forces in form of the Jamaat-e-Islami and newer fundamentalist outfits are jostling for space. Into this vacuum steps Rahman, who is being sold as a ‘democratic saviour,’ despite having spent nearly two decades in London with no record of governance at home.

Rahman’s biography resists such laundering. As the BNP’s strongman-in-waiting during his mother’s second term, he presided over sprawling patronage networks and a culture of impunity that hollowed out institutions. Courts later convicted him in absentia in the 2004 grenade attack on an Awami League rally.

The BNP itself was born in rupture. General Ziaur Rahman tore Bangladesh’s ideological compass away from the secular. The Bangali nationalism forged by Sheikh Mujibur Rahman in 1971 was pointed it toward political Islam. Mujib’s vision that was rooted pluralism and a strategic partnership with India was methodically dismantled. War-time collaborators were rehabilitated, their crimes bleached from public memory. Jamaat-e-Islami, disgraced by its alliance with Pakistan’s army during the Liberation War, was hauled back from infamy and folded into mainstream politics. The republic born of a secular rebellion was slowly recast as a faith-tinged state where piety became power and historical amnesia a governing doctrine.

Under Khaleda Zia, this ideological turn hardened into habit. Secularists were marginalised, minorities intimidated and Islamist street muscle indulged as a political asset rather than a threat. Where Mujib and later his daughter, Sheikh Hasina, anchored Bangladesh’s foreign policy in cooperation with India, the BNP cultivated a firm anti-India sentiment which became useful for mobilising anger, excusing economic drift and binding together an otherwise awkward alliance of nationalists, clerics and conspirators.

The son has been more explicit, and more reckless. From the safety of exile, Tarique Rahman has dressed this inheritance in the language of sovereignty, advertising a “Bangladesh First” doctrine that to Delhi reads less like prudence than repudiation. India is cast as a hegemon to be resisted while Pakistan is quietly rehabilitated. Islamist actors are treated not as extremists but as legitimate partners in the national project.

The consequences are already visible. Since 2023 Bangladesh has been scarred by waves of arson, mob violence and intimidation that scarcely bother with the pretence of protest. Islamist street power has grown louder and more violent. Cultural life has been throttled by mobs shouting religious slogans and demanding submission.

Rahman disowns the violence and speaks fluently of democracy. But the coalition arithmetic that props him up hands leverage to precisely the forces driving the disorder. His return does not dismantle the Islamist power matrix that metastasised during the Yunus interregnum; it jolts it, sharpening rivalries between BNP factions, Jamaat-backed zealots and newly emboldened radicals.

For India, the risks are acute. Sheikh Mujib’s Bangladesh, for all its flaws, saw India as a partner in survival. A Bangladesh shaped by Tarique Rahman’s instincts would be different: inwardly consumed by identity politics and outwardly defined by grievance, suspicion and strategic flirtation with forces hostile to India. Rahman promises to pull Bangladesh back from an abyss of hate and radicalism even as his ascent depends on those who thrive on both. He invokes his mother’s democratic legacy while inheriting a party that normalised street violence and sanctified religious majoritarianism.

Bangladesh’s tragedy is not simply bad leadership but vanishing choice. With the Awami League forced off the field, voters confront a stark binary: accept a dynastic strongman stained by corruption and Islamist compromise, or watch the state slide further toward a harder clerical axis.