“History…is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” James Joyce's Stephen Daedalus could very well pass off as the personification of a South Asian nation. The nightmarish history of the region has claimed another head of state. Sheikh Hasina, the erstwhile president of Bangladesh, has been sentenced to death. In exile since the student-led uprising in 2024, Hasina has been tried in absentia and found guilty of crimes against humanity.
In an almost inevitable turn of time, Hasina today faces what her father, Sheikh Mujibur Rehman, was subjected to in a newly liberated Bangladesh in 1975: death without dignity. While the Indian government has given her refuge for now and she intends to go back to her country, this verdict shuts the door on her.
A Cycle Of Power And Punishment
The sentencing of Sheikh Hasina marks a turning point in Bangladesh's already turbulent political trajectory, an unsettling repetition of its tragic cycles of power and punishment. Her ascent to leadership had once been framed as the culmination of her father's unfinished democratic project. Yet, in the final analysis offered by the state that now condemns her, Hasina's legacy is reconstructed as the antithesis of the liberation era's promise. Just like that of her father's. The charges brought against her have become the lens through which the new regime defines itself. The allegations of corruption, mass repression, enforced disappearances, and the suppression of dissent during her final years in office engendered the “revolution” in 2024. In this narrative, her downfall is both a means of legitimising the uprising that toppled her and a symbolic severance from the political dynasty that shaped Bangladesh for half a century.
The circumstances surrounding the trial deepen these tensions. Conducted in absentia, the proceedings are overshadowed by questions of fairness and political motivation. Yet, the new leadership's insistence on closure, on turning the page, has made the legal process as much a theatre of historical judgment as it is one of jurisprudence. For Hasina's supporters, the sentence is an act of vengeance masquerading as justice. For her detractors, it is the belated reckoning for years of democratic backsliding and authoritarian entrenchment. This bifurcated moral landscape echoes the broader divisions that have always haunted the nation: between secularism and religious nationalism, between dynastic politics and populist uprisings, between memories of liberation and disillusionment with its outcomes. South Asian history is besmirched by these binaries, with the element of spectacle heightening them. Symbols, carefully picked and shrewdly employed, become more important than simulacra of reality. As for reality, none exists beyond the immediate gains to be extracted.
India's 'Gesture'
Exile, therefore, has only amplified the symbolic weight of Hasina's predicament. In addition, India's decision to offer her refuge complicates the regional political calculus. It is not simply an act of humanitarian protection. Her stay in India reaffirms the historical interdependencies that bind Bangladesh and India have since 1971. These regional interdependencies are defined by critics as hegemonic and by supporters as fraternal. For India, hosting Hasina may serve as a reminder of shared histories and security cooperation. For Bangladesh's new rulers, however, it has become a provocation, a gesture that undermines their claim to a clean break from the past. India is no longer the friend that assisted the birth of Bangladesh. The spectre of cross-border political tension returns, echoing the tumult of earlier decades when exiled leaders sought sanctuary across shifting national boundaries.
Saviour Or Tyrant?
Yet, the most poignant drama unfolds within the figure of Hasina herself. She becomes an emblem of the circularity of South Asian history, where leaders are alternately elevated as saviours and condemned as tyrants, often within a single lifetime. One also remembers the cases of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, Gen Pervez Musharraf, and Nawaz Sharif in Pakistan. The symmetry is almost too deliberate. They are all leaders shaped by trauma, undone by the same forces of violent political rupture that they effected to seize and maintain power once.
Sheikh Hasina is, thus, more than the downfall of a political figure. It is the manifestation of a national struggle with memory, legitimacy, and the weight of unfinished histories. Bangladesh is confronting its ghosts not through reconciliation but through repetition, reenacting old conflicts under the guise of renewal. Nations that do not reconcile with their past are condemned to relive it, again and again, as if waking were impossible. Joyce's nightmare becomes the nation's own: persistent, cyclical, and resistant to awakening.
(Nishtha Gautam is a Delhi-based author and academic)
Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the author
