In the hours after Bangladesh’s International Crimes Tribunal handed down a death sentence to ousted former prime minister Sheikh Hasina, parts of the Indian media rushed to declare that the country was “on the boil.”

Their reports painted a picture of Awami League loyalists flooding the streets in fury, a nation convulsing in protest. The Awami League’s own social-media ecosystem, long adept at distortion and wishful thinking, dutifully amplified that fiction. Influencers framed the verdict as a spark that had ignited a mass uprising, as if ordinary Bangladeshis were spilling into the streets in righteous outrage.

One of the party’s loudest online propagandists, Omi Rahman Pial, went so far as to proclaim that “six crore” Awami supporters were ready to storm the streets. The irony, of course, is lost on him.

In today’s Bangladesh, not six crore, not even six lakh Awami activists with genuine ideological conviction, or simple self-interest, were willing to take the physical risks required to defend their leader.

Had even a fraction of that “mythical army” materialised, Hasina would not have been forced to flee within hours. With a few days of determined resistance, a negotiated settlement or at least a dignified exit might have been possible. She might well have ended up in Washington with her son, not in the humiliating limbo that followed her flight.

Some blame the absence of Awami foot soldiers on the sheer force of the crowds marching toward Ganabhaban. But recent history hints at a more uncomfortable truth. Even in Bangladesh’s “bourgeois,” clientelist political parties – where incentives for patronage and rent-seeking are built into the system –loyalists think twice when the physical risk becomes too real.

Bravado evaporates quickly when the protective shield of the law enforcers or the Army begins to wobble. The parallels are imperfect, but instructive. When Begum Khaleda Zia was jailed back in 2018 on charges widely dismissed as politically motivated, many predicted violent clashes. In reality, little happened.

And yet, the Awami League was always assumed to be different, fiercer, more tribal, almost cult-like in its devotion to Hasina. If any supporters were expected to pour into the streets at a moment of existential crisis, it was them.

But the day Hasina was condemned to death, that mythology collapsed. The televised rage, and the factional frenzy – none of it materialised. What emerged instead was a sobering portrait of a ruling party whose supposed legions of loyalists existed mostly in social media posts, and the fantasies of its own propagandists.

Bangladesh was not at all “on the boil.” Rather It was quietly taking stock.

If one looks back for a moment when Bangladeshis last poured into the streets in truly consequential numbers, risking not just arrest but death itself, it was during the fallout from the popular Islamic scholar (who was also a leader of Jamaat-e-Islami) Delwar Hossain Sayedee verdict in 2013.

And even that episode, often invoked as a testament to Jamaat-e-Islami’s ideological discipline, tells a more complicated story. The ferocity of the reaction was never replicated for any of Jamaat’s core leaders who were later sentenced to death or executed.

The crowds surged only for Sayedee, an outsider to Jamaat’s inner hierarchy whose charisma blurred political divides.

In life, Sayedee was arguably one of the most popular public figures Bangladesh has ever produced, a celebrity preacher whose influence reached far beyond party loyalists. Many who braved bullets and batons did so for Sayedee the orator, not Sayedee the politician.

His funeral made that point unmistakably clear that mourners came not only from Jamaat, but also from the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) and, quietly, even parts of the Awami League.

But Sayedee was an anomaly, not a model. His case underscores how rare it has become for party activists of any stripe to take to the streets when the risks are real and the protective machinery of the state is not on their side.

During the Awami League’s long tenure, this reluctance only deepened. Some attribute it to complacency, others to a culture of indiscipline that thrives when politics becomes a marketplace for patronage rather than conviction.

I prefer a simpler explanation – self-preservation. Today’s party workers – Awami, BNP, Jamaat alike –are more rational than their leaders give them credit for. They weigh the costs.

They know that no political reward is worth a cracked skull, let alone a bullet wound, unless their own survival is already in question. The old mythology of blind devotion dissolves quickly when the state’s backing wavers and the risks become personal.

In that light, the silence on the streets after Hasina’s sentencing was not an aberration rather it was the new normal. There are many ways to interpret this retreat from the streets. The materialist in me suspects that even Bangladesh’s modest economic gains have seeped into the lower and lower-middle strata from which party muscle is traditionally recruited.

The pool of “nothing-to-lose” young men has shrunk; the “cold and calculative” have grown. When you have a little more to protect – some savings, a motorcycle on installments, a job you might actually keep – you think twice before charging into a political showdown with no police protection.

In some ways, this shift should be welcomed. Fewer armed enforcers roaming the streets is good for democracy, good for civic resistance, and good for a polity long held hostage by partisan violence.

The trend could go further if the country’s organised forces–police, BGB, RAB, even the student wings operating out of public university halls–were compelled to follow protocol and held accountable for violating it.

A politics without weaponised dormitories would be a healthier politics by any measure.

And yet, optimism feels premature. Bangladesh has not suddenly stumbled into a post-militant golden age. The bar for progress remains embarrassingly low.

I would call it a major achievement if, after the guns, pistols, and machetes are finally cleared from our political landscape, we manage to return to the comparatively innocent era of hockey sticks and cricket stumps.

Nayel Rahman is a political analyst.

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