Brief | Beyond the Gallows
- Joelle Mukheriee
- 6 hours ago
- 7 min read
How Sheikh Hasina’s verdict rewrites South Asian politics
Justice in Bangladesh is on trial alongside Sheikh Hasina. The exiled prime minister’s death sentence has transformed a domestic accountability process into a test of democratic legitimacy and political retribution in the wake of persistent tensions in South Asia. The verdict does more than assign individual culpability to Hasina, it reconstructs the balance of power between the interim government and the weakened but resilient support for the Awami League. Furthermore, the decision has become a litmus test for India, which provides shelter to Hasina, and its aspirations to be a dominant regional force in upholding Bangladesh's legal system. This background shapes the trajectory of Bangladeshi party politics and signals to the region whether people’s appeals to justice can still constrain executive power or be subordinated for regime change and geopolitical leverage.
The trial of Sheikh Hasina is a wake-up call to the broader picture of how the state's most powerful and longest-reigning leader transformed a pro-democracy agenda into a state that is heavily reliant on security and is closely monitored. Over two decades in office, there is no debate that Hasina’s government has led to significant GDP growth and infrastructure expansion; however, this has been at the cost of marginalising the opposition and empowering security agencies implicated in extrajudicial killings. In 2011, the abolition of the non-partisan caretaker system greatly diminished the credibility of elections. This eroded trust in a government mainly dominated by the Awami League and set the backdrop for Hasina’s political downfall. What ultimately triggered this fall was the 2024 quota reform movement. The youth believed that the government's public sector reservation system was tainted by partisan privilege and generational inequality, favoring Awami League constituencies. This led the student-led movement to challenge the system. What began as peaceful demonstrations over civil service quotas quickly expanded to a mass movement demanding fair jobs, credible elections, and the abolition of powers for security forces. Alarmed by the instability in the country, opposition parties and business communities started to support the protests as they expanded outside of Dhaka. With the strikes paralysing key economic sectors, Hasina’s political and military position became untenable, leading her to resign and flee to India.
The following case, Chief Prosecutor vs. Sheikh Hasina & Others, was brought before the International Crimes Tribunal, originally designed for 1971 war crimes under Hasina’s leadership. Prosecutors indicted her on five counts of crimes against humanity linked to the 2024 crackdown that led to the loss of 1400 civilian lives. These included orchestrating mass killings of protestors in Dhaka, ordering the use of drones, helicopters, and other lethal weaponry against unarmed civilians, targeted murders of student leaders, and the incineration and secret disposal of bodies to destroy evidence. However, critics contest the origins of the ICT rooted in vendetta politics and the court's biased procedural weaknesses, and sentencing of Hasina to death in absentia as a logical justification for an unfair trial.
On a domestic level, the verdict not only ended the era of the Awami League rule but also redistributed leverage across Bangladesh’s political system. The interim government has established the costs of authoritarianism by legally labelling Hasina a criminal, but it has also normalized the notion that the “winning side” of political tensions can use the courts to kill the “losing side” in order to gain power without formal negotiation. This is authoritarianism in the form of “lawful proceedings.” In addition to whether Hasina received a fair trial, the key question is whether her trial's outcome increases the likelihood that other governments will abuse the legal system in the future. This dynamic could narrow the space for moderate voices and allow for extremist rule, like in Bangladesh’s history, as the interim government’s power dissipates. This post-verdict social landscape produces asymmetric gains and losses that will shape the country through its 2026 elections and beyond. Most importantly, on the grounds of justice for victims’ families and survivors, the judgment operates simultaneously as vindication and as a bitter reminder of structural incompleteness. Human rights organisations, namely Amnesty International, have argued that the trial itself, despite its service to advocacy for the victims, has failed to meet international standards for judicial proceedings. “Justice for survivors and victims demands independent and impartial proceedings,” which this tribunal did not provide. Further, statements recorded from victims' families suggest that they find this verdict hollow, as its execution depends on India's cooperation in extraditing Hasina, which is not considered to be in India’s interests.
India’s response to the ICT’s verdict is less about one leader and more about how national interests align with power, law, and loyalty on its eastern flank. In the past two decades, the Awami League under Hasina gave India highly strategic security benefits against northeastern insurgents and constraints on Islamist outfits. Thus, acting as Hasina’s safe haven now does not reflect personal affinity to her or her party; rather, it preserves a dense network of pro-India actors inside Bangladesh and allows the possibility that an Awami-aligned rule could return and again anchor India’s preferred regional order.
Legally, India has constructed a political stance that also signals a message. While acknowledging the trial's contribution to justice for the August 2024 victims, India can argue that non-extradition is in line with its constitutional values rather than as a favour to a former ally. That is, by highlighting the trial's objections to the death penalty and due process. This gives India a defensible reason to withhold Hasina without openly confronting the Yunus government or disowning the bilateral treaty. The key idea here is that law functions as a tool of delay and leverage, not closure. Strategically, this stance indicates that India is trying to avoid three outcomes simultaneously: the disintegration of ties with the interim government, the spread of anti-India sentiment in Bangladesh and beyond, and a political vacuum that regionally competitive powers like China could exploit. Alternatively, extraditing Hasina might briefly please Dhaka and showcase respect for formal commitments; nevertheless, it would tie India to a death sentence by destroying its long-cultivated Awami networks and by emerging as the victor of this regional balance of power. However, a steadfast refusal of extradition would hand the Yunus government a populist script of India “sheltering criminals,” which would tilt further towards Beijing for its security partnerships. Therefore, India’s conditional accountability could be read as an attempt to keep all three risks manageable and not as indecision.
This leads to the question, how will this episode shape South Asia’s regional order? Bangladeshi youth have demonstrated that a popular uprising can topple a dominant leader and put state violence on trial, yet this case has also revealed how easily “transitional justice” can be employed as the logic for regime change. For policymakers and the South Asian public alike, the uncomfortable conclusion is that justice and stability are not alternative paths but competing social constraints. The question is no longer if South Asian governments will instrumentalise judicial machinery–they already do–but whether they are willing to accept meaningful change when the common public demands it with proper negotiation. If they are not, then the Hasina case will be remembered less as a turning point for accountability than as a warning about how the language of justice can be bent to the service of power.
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