ABSTRACT
On June 29, 1974, security forces escorted a 94-year-old leftist dissident back to his hometown after he criticized the government at a rally in Dhaka (Maniruzzaman, 1975, p.121). The dissident, Abdul Hamid Khan Bhashani, was a veteran politician, popularly known as the ‘Red Maulana’ due to his socialist orientation and religious educational background. Decades later, on May 6, 2013, state security officers dispatched yet another nonagenarian dissident Maulana back to his hometown after his movement, Hefazat-e-Islam, challenged the government’s legitimacy at a rally in the capital. This dissident, Shah Ahmad Shafi, had recently ventured into politics to demand that the government align the country with his movement’s socially conservative interpretation of Islam. Between the two rallies, the world stage had witnessed massive changes: the systematic weakening of leftists and increased visibility of Islamists, the end of the Cold War and the onset of the War on Terror, and the complex consequences of neoliberalism. The two rallies not only reflect interconnections between domestic dynamics and the global context, but also underline the diverse challenges the Bangladeshi state has faced.
