Last Updated on December 29, 2025
On November 17, 2025, Bangladesh’s International Crimes Tribunal (ICT) sentenced ousted Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina to death for crimes against humanity. The ICT holds her responsible for the extrajudicial killing of hundreds of student protestors during the 2024 Student-People’s Uprising. The two-month protests, centered in Dhaka, contested the rise of authoritarianism and demanded labor reforms. Hasina resigned amidst escalating protests in August 2024 before self-exiling in India.
But while the majority of the country sees her as a brutal autocrat, Indigenous communities in southeastern Bangladesh hold a different view.
The leader who ordered the killing of hundreds of civilians is also one of the only politicians ever with a proven record of expanding Tribal rights. Hasina’s political party, Awami League (AL), offered limited inclusion for Indigenous communities and other minority groups, including education quotas and access to affordable housing.
Hasina, daughter of Bangladesh’s founding president and leader of AL since 1981, served twice as Prime Minister. She was charged with orchestrating the killings and destroying evidence. None of the prosecutors were Indigenous, and their rhetoric reflected Bengali nationalism with little regard for broader politics regarding the country’s many Tribal peoples. None of the 25 judges newly appointed to the Supreme Court belong to any ethnic or minority groups either.
Sheikh Hasina at CHOGM 2011. Photo: Annaliese McDonough/Commonwealth Sectratariat on flickr (CC)
While many Bengali communities celebrated, as seen in a viral video of an effigy of Hasina being hung, this reaction was not universal. Members of the AL claimed her trial in absentia was undemocratic and denounced it as rigged. Her party, AL, has now been effectively banned, another factor that plays into the current polarization about Hasina’s sentencing.
Without the AL, will any political party in Bangladesh advocate for the Indigenous communities of the Chittagong Hill Tract?
The Chittagong Hill Tract (CHT), in southeastern Bangladesh near India and Myanmar, is home to 11 Indigenous populations collectively known as the Jumma Peoples. These include the Chakma, Marma, Tripura, Tanchangya, Murung, Lushai, Khumi, Chak, Khyang, Bawm, and Pankhua. The 2023 census counts 1,650,478 Indigenous persons, approximately 1% of the country’s population, though the Bangladesh Indigenous Peoples Forum estimates the actual population to be around 4 million.
This population consistently faces the encroachment of Bengali settlers into their communities. In 1941, Indigenous peoples made up 98.5% of the CHT; by 2011, it was down to just 52.90%.
Although the British annexed Bengal in 1757, the peoples of the CHT resisted colonial control for decades. From 1772 to 1798, the Chakma led what is now recognized as the first recorded resistance to British rule in South Asia, predating the Sepoy Rebellion of 1857. However, British authorities later restricted Bengali settlement in the CHT through measures such as the 1900 Chittagong Hill Tracts Regulation, thereby preserving the region’s Indigenous land systems.
These protections were tied to the CHT’s jum-based agro-forestry economy, a rotational farming practice involving controlled burning that sustains both soil fertility and forest ecosystems. That framework collapsed after 1947, when the CHT was incorporated into East Pakistan despite its predominantly non-Muslim population. In post-independence Bangladesh, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman further dismantled these safeguards and pursued national unification through the Bangladesh Krishak Sramik Awami League (BaKSAL), thereby threatening Indigenous cultural and political autonomy.
Location of the Chittagong Hill Tract in Bangladesh.
Displacement intensified with the 1962 construction of the Kaptai Dam, funded by USAID, which submerged 1,306 square kilometers of land and displaced roughly 100,000 Jumma Peoples, including 70% of the total Chakma population. Religious, cultural, and historical sites, including Buddhist temples and the Chakma Royal Palace, were lost, and tens of thousands fled to India and Burma. Today, half of the CHT population are Bengali settlers.
In response to systemic dispossession, the Parbatya Chattagram Jana Samhati Samiti, or United People’s Committee of the Chittagong Hill Tracts (PCJSS), pursued 3 main claims: land rights, protection of Indigenous offices, and constitutional recognition.
After all three demands were rejected in the early years of nation-making, the armed wing of the PCJSS, Shanti Bahini, was formed, engaging in guerrilla operations through the 1970s and 1980s. After decades of conflict, the PCJSS and the Bangladeshi government came to an agreement, resulting in the 1997 CHT Peace Accord. The CHT Accord promised autonomy, land restitution, and demilitarization.
Implementation, however, has been inconsistent to say the least.
Indigenous reactions to Hasina’s sentencing have been skeptical. In a video by ET Daily, Suhas Chakma, director of the Rights & Risks Analysis Group, who is ethnically Chakma, criticized the trial’s fairness, emphasizing that the actual perpetrators of past violence against the student protestors remain unprosecuted, and that authoritarian institutions remain unchanged.
Other Indigenous rights groups have used this moment not to debate the verdict itself, but to refocus attention on long-standing demands. They point to ongoing violence, land dispossession, and the state’s failure to implement the 1997 Peace Accord, concerns echoed in a recent post by the International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs.
In a separate interview, an anonymous former AL policy advisor, who fled after the party’s ban, offered a party insider’s perspective on how Bangladesh’s political structures affect Indigenous communities. The advisor argued that Bangladeshi politics are more organized around the nexus of religion than economics, especially after the AL ban. Today, Jamaat-e-Islami (JI) pursues an Islamic fundamentalist agenda based on Sharia law, while the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) is a centrist party aligned with Western powers.
The Indigenous peoples of Bangladesh are erased from the political debate.
According to the former advisor, JI poses the greatest threat to Indigenous peoples, particularly in the CHT. The advisor pointed to the early 2000s attacks by Islamist groups, including Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh and Harkat-ul-Jihad al-Islami, who bombed courts, secular institutions, and minority communities like the Chakma to impose Sharia Law.
While in opposition, the AL criticized the BNP-led government’s alleged complicity in the attacks. Upon returning to power in 2009, the AL pursued prosecutions, securing convictions against the militants and their supporters. Following the overthrow of the government in 2024, the current interim government released the detained Islamist militants, bringing back insecurity for Indigenous communities in the CHT.
Looking ahead to the June 2026 election, Indigenous communities face uncertain prospects.
While laws like the CHT Peace Accord exist, legislation alone has proven insufficient. It is urgent to make local authorities enforce legislation to ensure land rights.
The former policy advisor noted that Indigenous populations are such a small percentage of the electorate that they are rarely visible in national media, and their voices are often excluded from policy debates. Political participation among Indigenous groups is also shaped by local power structures rather than national campaigns.
Studies on Tribal voting patterns in Bangladesh suggest that electoral decisions are often guided by Tribal leaders and elders, with entire communities voting collectively rather than as individual political actors.
Another study of the 9th parliamentary election found that voter turnout among the Garo peoples, an Indigenous community in Bangladesh, was high, comparable to that of the Bengali majority. This occurred despite their limited participation in campaigns and political organizing, complicating assumptions of Indigenous political disengagement.
These dynamics place Indigenous voters in a precarious position for 2026. Historically aligned with the AL, Indigenous voters no longer have a unified political front. The BNP is actively attempting to court Indigenous peoples by positioning itself as a bulwark against the radical JI, but their efforts ring hollow, as they were the party that once enabled the comeback of the Islamist Jamaat.
While polling data remains inconclusive, Indigenous voter turnout could be lower without this party representation. Decades of unfulfilled promises in the CHT leave them adrift.
Now that Hasina fell, a new political order is forming. Indigenous peoples will continue to see leaders come and go without being part of the equation. The next government, whether interim or elected, has a duty to fulfill for Indigenous communities. Whether they deliver tangible change remains unclear.
This article is a part of Hotspots, a journalistic collaboration between IC, Professor Manuela Picq and her students at Amherst College.
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