Though the interim authorities, led by Muhammad Yunus, has downplayed Bangladesh’s former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s name to boycott the February 2026 elections, the assist base of the Awami League tells a special story, a report revealed on Saturday.
It added that even in its worst efficiency within the 2001 election – profitable 62 of 300 seats – the Awami League secured over 22 million votes, solely about one million fewer than the Bangladesh Nationalist Celebration (BNP), which received 193 seats, underscoring the Awami League’s enduring well-liked base.
Writing for main German media outlet Deutsche Welle (DW), senior journalist and political analyst Masood Kamal noticed that a lot of the Awami League supporters stay “ideologically and traditionally devoted” to the occasion regardless of the allegations levelled in opposition to its management.
He additional argued that “banning a political occasion with an government order” is just not “an indication of a civilized society.”
“The irony is that this authorities was meant to be certainly one of unity. As a substitute, it has turn into a software of division,” DW quoted Kamal as saying.
The report highlighted that six worldwide human rights teams, together with CIVICUS, the Committee to Defend Journalists, Fortify Rights, and Human Rights Watch, not too long ago wrote a joint letter to Yunus, calling for the lifting of the ban on the Awami League, warning that such restrictions may undermine democratic rights and political equity.
The rights our bodies appealed to the Interim Authorities to “chorus from political occasion bans that might undermine a return to a real multi-party democracy and successfully disenfranchise a big a part of the Bangladeshi voters.”
The report talked about that it’s not simply the Awami League dealing with the specter of exclusion. Because the fall of the Awami League authorities led by Hasina, calls to ban Bangladesh’s Jatiya Celebration have intensified, fueling considerations of a broader crackdown on political pluralism.
“Whereas not formally banned, the Jatiya Celebration was excluded from the interim authorities’s year-long reform talks. The Nationwide Citizen Celebration (NCP), shaped by some leaders of the 2024 rebellion, has made banning the Jatiya Celebration certainly one of its calls for,” the DW report added
Shamim Haider Patwary, the Secretary Normal of the Jatiya Celebration, warned that such a mindset poses a grave threat to the nation’s democratic progress.
“Excluding the Jatiya Celebration from all discussions sends a transparent message to the administration that this occasion’s rights don’t have to be protected. That is going to be a rigged vote. Jatiya Celebration is being handled as an ‘almost-banned’ occasion. This isn’t signal,” Patwary mentioned in an interview with DW.