The Return Of Hizb ut-Tahrir: How Bangladesh's Power Vacuum Revived A Banned Caliphate Movement

The scenes from Dhaka in March this year, with thousands chanting "Khilafat, Khilafat" outside the grand Baitul Mukarram Mosque complex, were not the spontaneous eruption of a marginal movement. They were the predictable flowering of an organisation that had quietly rebuilt the scaffolding to exploit political disorder, Hizb ut-Tahrir Bangladesh (HTB).

The group's reappearance in public life is less an intelligence surprise than the logical outcome of a strategic mistake that many in New Delhi had warned about. By removing the single most effective, if deeply imperfect, barrier to Islamist mobilisation in Dhaka, space was created for this revival.

HTB is not new to Bangladesh. Banned in 2009 and driven underground for more than a decade, the group used that period to consolidate a network of study circles, campus contacts, and sympathetic allies within state institutions.

This infrastructure, largely invisible to the public, became a ready platform for resurgence once the political environment in Dhaka became unsettled following Sheikh Hasina's ouster in August 2024. What had been a clandestine organisation operating in the shadows was suddenly able to move into public spaces with startling confidence.

Since Hasina's removal, HTB has become increasingly visible. Within days of the August 2024 uprising, activists staged demonstrations outside the Jatiya Sangsad, occupied the Raju Memorial at Dhaka University, a symbolic site for anti-terror activism, and plastered posters in high-end residential areas such as Gulshan.

The group openly petitioned the interim Home Ministry to lift its proscription, held seminars under front organisations, and began recruiting students, professionals, and even mid-ranking security personnel. These activities underscore the group's ability to operate in the "grey zone," exploiting administrative weaknesses and a fractured law enforcement system to gain legitimacy and influence.

Hizb ut-Tahrir is a pan-Islamist organisation founded in Jerusalem in 1953 that seeks to establish a global caliphate. While it presents itself as "non-violent," HT has been banned across much of the Muslim world, including Bangladesh in 2009, for promoting subversive ideology and acting as a pipeline to more violent jihadist groups.

HTB's Bangladesh chapter was established in the 2000s by academics at Dhaka and Rajshahi universities. It later expanded into elite institutions such as BUET and North South University. The group designates Bangladesh as a wilaya, a province of the envisioned caliphate, and has long worked to radicalise educated, conservative Muslims by presenting secularism and democratic values as corrupting influences.

Its early attempts to influence security forces and foment unrest, including plotting to incite Air Force officers after the Pilkhana massacre, contributed to its proscription.

HTB's operational methods are both sophisticated and patient. Recruitment targets high-achieving students and professionals through secret study groups and online seminars. In early 2024, the group mailed recruitment appeals directly to BUET students, demonstrating administrative infiltration.

HTB also cultivates retired officials and academics to host seminars, giving a veneer of respectability to its messaging. In the armed forces, it has a history of attempting to recruit mid-ranking officers, exemplified by a foiled coup plot revealed in 2012. Online campaigns ahead of the 2024 national elections were also directed at defence personnel, reflecting a long-term strategy of embedding influence within coercive institutions.

The challenge is amplified by personnel gaps created during last year's unrest. According to security sources and media reports, 712 trained HTB members and 174 convicted militants remain unaccounted for following prison breaks during the July uprising. These individuals, already ideologically primed and in some cases technically trained, represent a persistent threat.

While authorities have arrested key figures, such as the 2023 detention of online propagandist Touhidur Rahman Sifat and the October 2024 remand of coordinator Imtiaz Selim, these interventions are piecemeal compared with the dispersed and deeply embedded networks of the group.

A biased narrative has also aided HTB's revival. Under the Hasina regime, allegations of jongi natok, staged militant dramas to justify repression, created a climate where Islamists could claim that terrorism was fabricated. This narrative has been reinforced by some senior law enforcement officials who publicly denied the existence of terrorists in Bangladesh, lending legitimacy to HTB's claims and complicating counter-extremism efforts.

Before Hasina's ouster, HTB's activities were largely clandestine. It operated through secret study groups, covert online outreach, and occasional bursts of visibility when arrests or exposés occurred. Its strategy was to cultivate influence over institutions rather than carry out immediate violent acts, allowing the group to survive despite a decade of proscription and police surveillance.

Following the establishment of the Yunus-led interim government, HTB rapidly revamped its activities. Within weeks, it organised seminars under the banner of the Bangladesh Policy Discourse, using retired officials and academics as speakers to amplify anti-Indian and anti-Western rhetoric alongside calls for a caliphate.

Public outreach continued with leafleting campaigns, poster drives, and targeted social media messaging aimed at students, professionals, and even security personnel.

Clashes left dozens injured and scores arrested, highlighting both HTB's operational sophistication and the interim government's inability to pre-empt coordinated mobilisation.

Government responses have been reactive. Raids, arrests, and directives to madrasa and vocational boards have continued, but they primarily address symptoms. The deeper challenge is HTB's ideological infrastructure: study circles, inbox networks, and institutional footholds that allow it to influence successive cohorts of students and professionals.

Unless countermeasures address both the operational and ideological dimensions, HTB's resurgence is likely to endure, posing a sustained threat to Bangladesh's internal security and institutional stability.

What changed after August 2024 was not HTB's doctrine but its operating environment. The collapse of strong, even if authoritarian, governance in Dhaka created gaping seams in law and order, contested legitimacy, and a policing apparatus distracted by political convulsion. Into that vacuum HTB moved openly.

The result was a rapid expansion of recruitment and a public confidence its organisers had not shown since the pre-ban years.

The return of HTB highlights the risks India warned about.

New Delhi's concern about stability in Bangladesh was never a defence of an individual leader for her own sake. It was a hard-headed calculation about regional security and order. Sheikh Hasina's rule was repressive and earned deep antipathy in large parts of Bangladeshi society, but it also delivered two results every strategic planner cares about. It clamped down on organised Islamist violence and maintained a working state capable of policing its borders and institutions.

For India, which shares a 4,000 kilometre frontier and has persistent worries about radicalisation spilling across the border, the choice was not between loving Hasina and hating the idea of change. It was a choice between predictable, if unpleasant, stability and the real risk of chaos.

The latter scenario, once dismissed by some Washington strategists as alarmist, is now playing out. The evidence is plain, from HTB's march in March to its recruitment drives in elite universities and the reported escape or disappearance of hundreds of trained cadre after last year's prison breaks.

That does not mean India endorsed everything Hasina did. New Delhi has long balanced strategic necessity and democratic propriety, and it calibrated relationships to protect core interests while signalling discomfort at abuses. Policy is about options, and when the most viable option is an authoritarian government that keeps violent extremists contained, a prudent neighbour will prefer containment over chaos.

The international community's failure to weigh that trade-off or to remain indifferent to the immediate security consequences of regime change in Dhaka has produced a strategic gap now being filled by HTB's revival.

India's approach, prioritising stability while pressing for reforms where it could, was not paeans to autocracy. It was realism in action.

HTB's return to the streets of Dhaka is a warning that ideology, once given breathing room, is exceptionally hard to squeeze back into the bottle. If the West wishes to avoid a region in which every crisis produces a new vector for radicalisation, it must take seriously the trade-offs India articulated long before the protests.

Stability matters, and institutions, imperfect as they are, can be the difference between stability and chaos.

The question now is whether policymakers in the West will admit the costs of their earlier choices and act with the urgency the HTB resurgence demands.

The clock in Dhaka is ticking.