From liberation to prohibition: BengaliAwamism, ethnopopulism and the de-democratisation of Bangladesh

This article aims to propose an analytical framework, namely the concept of ‘BengaliAwamism’, to explain the authoritarian legitimation of the Hasina regime. ‘BengaliAwamism’ is the exclusive brand of secular Bengali nationalism, which constitutes a form of party-centric ethnopopulism that had systematically undermined democratic governance in Bangladesh. This article attempts to make three contributions to the authoritarian legitimation literature. First, it demonstrates that ‘BengaliAwamism’ operates not merely as a nationalist ideology but as a ‘dual-threat narrative’ that simultaneously constructs internal ‘demons’ (opposition parties as anti-national traitors) and external enemies (Pakistan, and latterly the United States), thereby fusing populist and ethnonationalist logics in a manner that the existing literature on Bangladeshi authoritarianism has not fully theorised. Second, this article situates this ethnopopulist project within the long arc of Bangladeshi political history, beginning with the Two Nation Theory and Partition, continuing through the Sheikh Mujib, Ziaur Rahman, Ershad, Khaleda Zia and Sheikh Hasina. It demonstrates that de-democratisation in Bangladesh has deep structural roots and that BengaliAwamism has been incrementally intensified over time, reaching its fulfilment under Hasina. Third, and most crucially, the article addresses what the collapse of an ethnopopulist authoritarian project reveals about the fragility and residual power of identity-based legitimation.