The Uprising Is Over - So Now the Allies Are Fighting Each Other

Coalitions of Convenience: Why Bangladesh's Allies Are Now Its Rivals In December 1971, the

forces that had fought together for nine months to liberate Bangladesh from Pakistan were, within four years, turning on each other. The Awami League government of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman faced growing armed opposition from former Mukti Bahini fighters and leftist student groups who had shared the same trenches but not the same politics - a fracture that culminated in Mujib's own assassination in 1975.

The lesson buried in that history is simple and uncomfortable: a coalition built to remove one enemy is not, by itself, a coalition that can govern. Bangladesh is now watching the same pattern play out on a shorter, faster timeline.

The August 4 clashes at Jagannath University were not a fight between the ousted Awami League and its opponents - Hasina has been gone for two years. They were a fight between the very groups that shared that victory: the BNP's Chhatra Dal, Jamaat-e-Islami's Chhatra Shibir and the National Citizen Party's Chhatra Shakti, all once united in the July 2024 uprising, now assaulting each other's injured inside a hospital emergency ward.

Where the 1971 Parallel Holds

• and Where It Breaks The parallel holds in its mechanism: both 1971 and 2024 produced what political scientists call a "negative coalition"
• unity defined entirely by what the group opposed, not by what it agreed to build afterward. Remove the shared adversary and the coalition has no remaining reason to stay whole. Territory, resources and the right to claim credit for the revolution become the new battleground - exactly what is happening over control of Bangladeshi university campuses today. But the parallel breaks down in its timeline and its stakes. The 1971-to-1975 fracture took four years and ended in a coup and assassination - a slow-burning institutional collapse. The 2024-to-2026 fracture is compressing into two years, playing out not through the army but through student wings fighting inside hospitals and disrupting a presidential anniversary address in real time. That compression matters: it suggests these coalitions now fracture faster because the stakes of "who controls the narrative of the revolution"
• visible instantly through the dispute over who gets credit for the one-point demand against Hasina - have become as contested as control of physical territory.

Why This Is a Recurring Lesson, Not a One-Off Crisis What Vikram

Singh's reading of Indian and South Asian history keeps returning to is that revolutionary unity is a starting condition, never a governing one. India's own freedom movement had to actively manage this same risk - the divergence between Congress and the Muslim League, between Gandhi's and Subhas Chandra Bose's methods, was visible well before 1947.

What separated relatively stable post-independence transitions from unstable ones was not the absence of internal disagreement, but whether new institutions were built fast enough to absorb it before it turned violent. Bangladesh's second anniversary - marked by a memorial museum opening in the same week as hospital-ward assaults - is a live test of exactly that question and its answer will matter directly to how India manages its own eastern border in the years ahead.