When Sheikh Hasina picked up the phone from her exile home in Delhi and told Reuters that she and her senior Awami League colleagues plan to return to Bangladesh this December, her words were as direct as they have always been. “They may arrest me on my return, they may even kill me,” she said. “Still, I have to go. If death comes, I want it to come on my own soil, where my parents are buried and where their blood was shed.”
I have had the privilege of working alongside Sheikh Hasina for many years, and I can tell you that sentence did not surprise a single person who has followed her life closely. It is the same sentence, said in different words, that she has been living by for half a century.
To understand why, you have to go back to a single night in August 1975. Sheikh Hasina was twenty-seven years old when a group of army officers stormed her family’s home in Dhaka and killed her father, Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the founding leader of Bangladesh. Her mother was killed. Her brothers were killed. Nearly her entire family was gone before morning. She and her younger sister Sheikh Rehana survived only because they happened to be abroad. She was barred from returning home for six years.
Most people, after losing everything in a single night at the hands of the state, choose distance. Sheikh Hasina chose the opposite. In May 1981, while she was still in exile, the Awami League elected her its president, and she flew home anyway, into a country still ruled by the same military establishment that had orchestrated her family’s murder. Hundreds of thousands of people came to the airport to receive her that day. She has said many times since that it was their call, not her own ambition, that brought her back, and that their call is the only thing that has ever mattered to her.
That pattern has repeated itself throughout her political life. In 2007, with Bangladesh under a military-backed caretaker government and a state of emergency in force, and with officials making it clear she would be arrested the moment she landed, Sheikh Hasina returned anyway. She was jailed within weeks on corruption charges that were widely understood to be politically engineered, held for close to a year, and freed only when public pressure made her continued detention untenable. She went on to lead her party to a landslide election victory the following year.
Then there are the attempts on her life itself. By her own account and that of her long political record, she has survived nineteen of them. The most notorious came on August 21, 2004, when grenades were thrown into a rally she was addressing in Dhaka, killing twenty-four people and wounding hundreds more. Sheikh Hasina herself survived only because her own party workers formed a human wall around her as the explosions went off, an act of loyalty that cost her a portion of her hearing but not her life. Those of us who work with her, and millions of ordinary people across Bangladesh, have long believed that no security detail or strategist can fully explain that kind of survival. They call it what it is: the prayers and the blessings of a people who never stopped believing she would come back to them.
Between these dramatic moments sit two decades in which she governed. Under her leadership, Bangladesh went from one of the world’s poorest nations to a global garment export powerhouse, lifting tens of millions of people out of poverty and building the roads, bridges, and power stations that changed daily life for ordinary families. That record is her own answer to the question of what her resilience was for. It was never about staying in office. It was about building a country worth surviving for.
In August 2024, a violent uprising, fed in no small part by disinformation and orchestrated unrest, forced her from power and into exile once again. Bangladesh’s war crimes tribunal has since sentenced her in absentia to death. She has called those proceedings farcical, and she has denied the charges from exile, just as she has denied every accusation thrown at her across five decades of struggle. Her party, the Awami League, one of the oldest and largest political movements in South Asia, has been banned outright. Tens of thousands of its workers have been jailed, driven from their homes, or forced into hiding. Even now, from Delhi, Sheikh Hasina has held online organising meetings covering more than a hundred of Bangladesh’s parliamentary constituencies, because distance has never once stopped her from leading.
Now she says she is coming home again, this time with her senior colleagues beside her, to surrender voluntarily in court rather than wait for extradition proceedings to run their course. “All together, we will all surrender in court,” she has said. It is a decision that should tell every observer, inside Bangladesh and outside it, exactly who they are dealing with. This is a woman who has already outlasted a military junta, two caretaker governments, a grenade attack, nineteen attempts on her life, and two years of exile. She is not a leader who calculates her survival by counting her enemies. She counts the people who are waiting for her, and by that count, she has never once been alone.
I have watched her face down threats that would have ended most political careers many times over, and I have never once seen her flinch. Not from the generals who killed her family. Not from the courts that have tried to write her out of history. Not from the mobs, the propaganda, or the exile. She has always said that power is temporary but the people are permanent, and she has staked her entire life on that belief being true. As her spokesperson, and as someone who has stood beside her through the hardest years of this struggle, I can tell you plainly that Sheikh Hasina is not afraid, has never been afraid, and does not intend to start now. She is going home.
