The Compromised Strongman: Interrelationship of Strongman Politics, Radical Rights, and Nationalism in Contemporary Bangladesh

Abstract

The strongman is the single key approach to studying the democratic status, the rise of radical rights, and the questions on nationalism in present-day Bangladesh. Occupying the office since 2008, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina took a sharp turn in 2014 to become a strongman leader of the country, and a successful strongman regime has been created in the process. Since then, the strongman government has made quite a few populist compromises with the radical right groups, which then, in turn, gave birth to a distinct kind of strongmanship: the compromised strongman. This historical research through secondary data analyses finds that a nationalist identity split between a linguistic and a religious, national consciousness has played the role of the major catalyst in the political outcome of the country, and an apparent compromise between the two groups representing the secular and the religious blocks, contrary to common sense, paved the way for the strongman politics in Bangladesh.