When Mir Mahfuzur Rahman’s mother was finally allowed into the morgue, she collapsed.
For three hours she couldn’t bring herself to look at her son’s body.
When she did, she leaned in and kissed his head — the same place a bullet had entered just days earlier.
“My brother and I looked at each other,” Mr Mahfuzur Rahman’s older brother Dipto told the ABC, sitting in their family home in Dhaka.
Dipto’s younger brother was killed during the July-August 2024 uprising. (ABC News: Bhat Burhan)
“One mother was kissing his head. And the other mother — who we call our country — gave him a bullet in the same place.”
The 25-year-old MBA student, known fondly as Mugdho, was not a political organiser nor aligned with any party.
On the day he was killed during the July-August 2024 uprising, he was handing out water to protesters.
He was wearing his university ID card. Its plastic sleeve is still stained with his blood — now carefully kept as evidence in a case yet to be decided.
Bangladesh’s youth party faces its first election
According to the United Nations, as many as 1,400 people were killed during weeks of unrest that began as protests over government job quotas, before spiralling into a nationwide revolt against corruption, repression and 15 years of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s rule.
Hasina was forced to dramatically flee the country, jumping on a helicopter to neighbouring India as enraged protesters stormed her residence.
An interim government, led by Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus took over, and 16 months on, Bangladesh is heading back to the ballot box in what is being billed as its first free and fair election in more than a decade.
The high stakes of the election
For families like Mugdho’s, the stakes are not abstract.
“At first, we were proud because he did the right thing … for the betterment of the country,” Dipto said.
“Now our mindset is shifting. The problem is we still see very minimal things have been changed.
“All the things, especially the bureaucratic system, is still there … they are just working for themselves.”
Bangladesh is about to head to the polls in what is being billed as its first free and fair election in more than a decade. (ABC News: Bhat Burhan)
For tens of millions of Bangladeshis, February 12 will be the first credible vote of their lives.
“I am interested in this election because we went through three deeply flawed elections in 2014, 2018 and 2024,” said Shafqat Munir, a senior fellow at the Bangladesh Institute of Peace and Security Studies.
“This election in many ways is not only resurrecting democracy but also giving our vote back to us.”
Under Hasina, opposition parties were marginalised or banned. Two elections were boycotted.
The third was widely seen as rigged. Human rights groups documented enforced disappearances, mass arrests and extrajudicial killings.
That pressure cooker eventually exploded in an uprising led by students and paid for in blood. Now comes the reckoning.
Bangladesh voters are preparing ahead of elections due to be held on February 12. (ABC News: Bhat Burhan)
A power vacuum
The contest is being shaped by two dominant forces: the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) and Jamaat-e-Islami.
Hasina’s Awami League is banned from contesting.
For the BNP, this election marks the return of a familiar name: Tarique Rahman.
He is the son of former prime minister Khaleda Zia and former president Ziaur Rahman, who declared Bangladesh’s independence in 1971.
Tarique Rahman is the chair of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party. (ABC News: Bhat Burhan)
Rahman returned from nearly two decades in exile last December and the ABC joined him on the campaign trail, where his convoy was routinely mobbed for kilometres at a time by surging crowds that chanted and waved flags.
Police struggled to hold the line, while Rahman sat at the front of the bus, greeting as many supporters as he could.
Mr Rahman’s campaign convoy was routinely mobbed for kilometres at a time. (ABC News: Bhat Burhan)
“They were deprived from their political rights and economic rights,” he told the ABC.
“The hope they have is very high, and to fulfil that hope is really very serious.”
Polling suggests the BNP is the frontrunner.
For supporters, Rahman embodies survival — a leader whose party was suppressed, whose mother was jailed, whose supporters were arrested or disappeared.
The election is being shaped by two dominant forces: the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) and Jamaat-e-Islami. (ABC News: Bhat Burhan)
But he also carries baggage, with critics pointing to corruption allegations from the BNP’s last time in power.
They warn against a return to dynastic politics so soon after young people risked their lives demanding systemic change.
Nearly half of Bangladesh’s voters are aged under 37 and whether Rahman can connect with them may determine the outcome.
Jamaat’s calculated resurgence
Filling the same vacuum is Jamaat-e-Islami — Bangladesh’s largest Islamist party.
Once banned after courts ruled its charter conflicted with the country’s secular constitution, Jamaat is now campaigning openly on anti-corruption, welfare and what it calls moral governance.
Its student wing provided much of the street muscle during the 2024 uprising.
Under its leader, Shafiqur Rahman, the party has run a disciplined, highly visible campaign — backed by a sophisticated online operation aimed squarely at young voters.
Shafiqur Rahman has run a disciplined campaign. (Reuters: Kazi Salahuddin)
“This is a Muslim country, I think Islamic rule is better,” voter Sarwar Uddin Akand said.
“They will bring discipline, and people won’t be allowed to roam around in a nasty way. Our sisters, mothers and brothers won’t be able to move around just like that.”
Much of the concern around Jamaat has centred on fears of a broader Islamist shift. But for many supporters, its appeal is less ideological than practical.
Bangladesh is deeply religious, but faith here has long been shaped by Bengali identity and a moderate, syncretic Islam — something that sits uneasily with Jamaat’s far stricter world view.
Flyers promoting Jamaat-e-Islami’s candidates. (ABC News: Bhat Burhan)
The party’s ideology seeks to tip that balance.
Yet many voters drawn to Jamaat talk less about doctrine than discipline, seeing it as organised, responsive and less compromised than the political establishment.
That message appears to be landing with younger voters in particular.
Many are less focused on Jamaat’s controversial role during the 1971 independence war — when it opposed secession from Pakistan and some members took part in mass atrocities — than with their own frustration at a system they believe serves a narrow elite.
“Fresh blood is needed,” 24-year-old Shoaib Akhter Rumi said.
“I don’t want BNP to get a majority, I would like to have a challenge in the parliament.”
Shoaib Akhter Rumi would like to see some change at the polls. (ABC News: Bhat Burhan)
Still, Jamaat’s record raises hard questions.
The party has not fielded a single female candidate. In an interview with Al Jazeera, its leader said a woman could never head the party. It has floated policies that would reduce women’s working hours while reinforcing traditional gender roles.
Jamaat insists it would govern under the secular constitution but its critics remain unconvinced.
A country still counting its dead
Since Hasina’s fall, anxiety has spread among religious minorities.
There have been reports of attacks, arson and killings — particularly in Hindu neighbourhoods that traditionally backed her party.
Authorities say many incidents were criminal rather than sectarian.
Minority communities remain uneasy.
Across Dhaka, graffiti of the young men and women killed in 2024 still dots the walls.
Drawings of young men and women killed in 2024 have been sprayed on walls in Bangladesh. (ABC News: Bhat Burhan)
For families like Mugdho’s, justice has been slow.
Evidence has been submitted, but no-one has been held to account.
Dipto says it has done little to reassure him that the bureaucracy — which will largely continue under any new government — can deliver change.
Under the interim administration, he says, progress has been limited.
While Snigdho, the twin brother of Mugdho, officially joined the BNP last year, wanting to represent the “July generation”, Dipto hasn’t decided who he’ll vote for.
He just wants his brother’s death to mean something.
Next week’s election won’t answer that question on its own.
It won’t heal the wounds of the past year-and-a-half nor bring back the dead.
But for the first time in years, Bangladeshis will cast a vote knowing it might actually count.
For a country still mourning its youth, that is where any real change has to begin.
Bangladesh is preparing for its first elections since the overthrow of Sheikh Hasina in 2024. (ABC News: Bhat Burhan)