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The writer is executive editor of Netra News, an investigative news platform Months after Sheikh Hasina’s 15-year autocratic rule in Bangladesh collapsed under an uprising in August 2024, Mubashar Hasan landed in Dhaka after more than six years of exile. Back home, Hasan — an academic who once spent 44 days in a secret military detention facility — found the pervasive fear was gone. The military’s Directorate General of Forces Intelligence, once the most dreaded arm of the state, was now openly criticised on primetime television. After a chat show tore into the DGFI, Hasan expected “a microbus full of agents storming the TV station, or panellists . . . kidnapped on their way home”. Nothing of the sort happened. Instead, a profound shift has begun. An interim administration hauled serving officers before civilian judges to answer for “crimes against humanity”, brushing aside army objections. Warrants were issued for five former DGFI chiefs. When the establishment-friendly Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) swept back to power in the February 2026 elections, the new government moved swiftly to detain generals behind a 2007 soft coup and on July 26 authorities brought charges against six military officers over the enforced disappearance and killing of a local politician. But cementing civilian rule will require more than a few high-profile arrests; it will mean extricating the military from its central role in the country’s economy and politics. Today the army finds itself uniquely unpopular, having managed to alienate virtually every faction of society. Human rights groups are unsparing in their criticism; populist rightwing YouTubers followed by millions condemn its perceived subservience to New Delhi; secularists recoil at its institutional identity steeped in Islamic iconography. There has been a slow degeneration of its institutional purpose since a popular uprising ended direct military rule in 1990. Western democratic pressure after the cold war and the financial allure of UN peacekeeping missions — which pay far more than regular army deployments — kept the generals away from politics. In subsequent years, they rebranded themselves as neutral power brokers between two warring political dynasties: Awami League and the BNP. That referee role eroded in phases. The 2007 coup, sold as a project to reform the political system, instead saw the military detain and torture leading politicians — including Tarique Rahman, the former BNP leader’s son, who is now prime minister. When that experiment collapsed, the generals handed power to Hasina after she won the 2008 election. The civil-military relationship was fundamentally altered in 2009 after a bloody mutiny that left 57 officers dead. Hasina blocked direct military retaliation. Officers who protested were systematically purged while the top brass deepened a quiet alliance with the regime. Through the rigged elections of 2014 and 2018, the supposed referee joined the game. Officers seconded to the Rapid Action Battalion — a notorious, military-dominated elite law enforcement unit — carried out extrajudicial killings at eight times the rate of regular police. Politicians, journalists, and academics were “disappeared”. The rewards for this complicity were staggering, chiefly in the form of land. In Dhaka, there are 14 major public housing schemes for a city now home to more than 30mn people. But the defence forces alone have five, built with public subsidies. Older government land grants have made their holders dollar millionaires in a city where income per head is about $5,200. During Hasina’s tenure, defence spending doubled in real terms and the armed forces captured a reported $6bn in construction contracts. Uniformed officers now run about 300 high schools and universities under welfare trusts that also pushed into real estate, banking, manufacturing and tourism. They also routinely jostle with civilian bureaucrats to run lucrative entities, from the telecom regulator to ports. Pakistan and Egypt show what such empires cost a country: businesses that escape audit, crowd out private firms and leave the officer corps with a permanent stake in who governs. The monetisation of the army’s ties to the regime broke discipline inside the ranks too. Officers marginalised during Hasina’s reign turned to the internet, savaging their own leadership on social media and shattering the sacred taboo against public dissent. So long as the generals hold the assets, they will have a reason to bend the government to their will. The crucial question for the next chapter of Bangladesh’s democracy is whether they now possess the institutional wisdom to withdraw from business as well as politics.
