Targeting the AL as a collective entity required three executive orders issued between 10 and 12 May. The first two amended the International Crimes (Tribunals) Act and the Anti-Terrorism Act to enable sweeping action against organisations. The third applied these newly granted powers to impose a broad ban on the AL and all its affiliates, supposedly pending the international trial of its leaders.

The Anti-Terrorism Act was one of the first draconian laws the AL government introduced in 2009 to test the boundaries of state power. It granted extensive punitive powers under the banner of counterterrorism and set the template for later repressive laws designed to combat propaganda, drugs and other purported threats. Under section 18, the government could ban an entity if it argued it had reasonable grounds to believe it was involved in terrorist activities. With the ban in place, section 20 allowed the government to shut down its offices, freeze its assets, restrict its members’ travel and outlaw expressions of public support for the entity, including public rallies, published statements and social media posts and shares.

The recent amendment extends the government’s power in two ways. First, it enables the government to ‘temporarily suspend’ any entity and exercise the sweeping powers previously reserved for banned organisations. Second, the law now expands the prohibition under section 20 against publicly supporting a banned or suspended entity to include any statement made online or on any social media and organising any meetings or processions in support of the group.

Together with section 9 of the Anti-Terrorism Act, which imposes sentences of up to seven years’ imprisonment and a fine for supporting a banned or suspended entity, there is an increased risk the law might be used to target not just the members and affiliates of a prohibited group, but any citizen, activist or journalist whose dissent, even on social media, might be interpreted as support for the group.

The ban on the AL has exposed the structural contradictions of this democratic transition. Superficially, it’s justified by allegations of criminality, but its timing and selective legal interpretation reveal a deeper purpose: to dislodge a hegemonic party without allowing it the chance to reconstitute itself electorally.

The AL itself set a harmful precedent in 2013 by banning Jamaat-e-Islami on the grounds that its charter was incompatible with the constitution. Now the same logic is being applied with greater legal force and to a party with a much larger voter share.

The AL’s ban is not just about the removal of a political party. It also underscores the emergence of a new orthodoxy that treats any challenge to post-revolutionary demands as sacrilege. It threatens to shrink the space for dissent and transform revolution into a doctrine of obedience. Some factions of the NCP and the protest movement who are or were part of the interim government are now adopting a similar posture to their predecessors, treating any challenge to the crackdown on the AL as an affront to the revolution. Critics of the ban, including myself, are labelled as traitors or sympathisers of the old regime. The symbolism of the July uprising, as the revolution is called, is being invoked to foreclose debate and narrow the horizon of permissible discourse.

The ban has fundamentally altered the foundation upon which electoral competition in Bangladesh was historically structured. In the period that followed the early 1990s transition from military dictatorship, electoral politics was structured around two-party competition between the AL and BNP, which shaped voter expectations, alliances and political strategies. The collapse of two-party dynamics left a fragmented landscape, with rival forces competing without settled rules.

Having endured 15 years of exclusion, repression and organisational decay under AL rule, the BNP views the ban as a vindication and is pressuring the interim government to hold the election as soon as possible, hoping for an easy victory while the NCP is still organising.

In contrast, the NCP aims not simply to replace the AL, but to change the rules of legitimacy altogether. Yet despite its revolutionary rhetoric, it often mimics its predecessors, particularly in demanding the AL’s total erasure and the policing of dissent in the name of revolutionary purity.

Other groups marginalised under AL rule now see the electoral vacuum as an invitation to re-enter the fray. While the NCP views this process as a revolutionary succession, the Hefazat and Jamaat parties interpret it as overdue restoration. The risk is that this multiplicity of ambitions may create not a more pluralistic democracy but a more fragmented one where principles of legitimacy remain contested.

Democratic renewal cannot be achieved through blanket elimination. A credible electoral process requires pluralism, procedural fairness and space for dissent. The upcoming election will be a test of whether Bangladesh is entering a new democratic period or merely exchanging one exclusionary order for another cloaked in the language of change. Ultimately, democratic renewal requires more than the removal of an autocratic regime: it requires undoing the architecture of repression instead of rebranding it. Authoritarian laws outlast authoritarian rulers, so we must dismantle them.