Dhaka: One can say that Taslima Akhter has always had an eye for the plight of the workers. In 2013, amidst the rubble of Rana Plaza, a collapsed garment factory in which over 1,134 workers died, she had captured an image that haunted the world – a man and a woman, frozen in death, locked in an embrace. That photograph stripped away the statistics of industrial negligence to reveal the human experience of being buried in one’s workplace. Thirteen years later, Akhter is once again trying to frame a difficult truth, though this time her medium is not silver halide but the chaotic, uncertain theatre of Bangladeshi democracy.This February, Bangladeshis will go to polls for the first time since the student-led July Uprising of 2024 ousted a 15-year Awami League regime. In the scruffy, industrial heart of the capital, the Dhaka-12 constituency, which has been a traditional stronghold of dominant political parties, Akhter is contesting a seat in the parliament. She is a nominee of the Ganosanhati Andolan (mass solidarity movement), a leftist outfit.Akhter is an internationally recognised photographer and a former member of the Bangladesh Students’ Federation at Dhaka University. Together with her partner, Zonayed Saki – the Ganoshanhati Andolan’s chief coordinator – she has built a platform dedicated to social and environmental justice. A recipient of the Begum Rokeya Award in 2024, she is known for documenting the resilience of garment workers and the fires that plague their factories. She is also coordinator for the Garment Workers’ Solidarity movement. Activist candidates such as Akther are a noteworthy aspect of this election, although they are seen mostly in urban, well off, and educated constituencies. On the campaign trail, Akhter is primed to push the positives. On garment workers, she says, “It’s true that they’re living in very bad conditions, but I want to show their strength also. Because it is from their strength that we get hope. I don’t want to show them all the time as victims, I want to show them as fighters.”To watch Akhter campaign in the narrow alleys of Tejgaon is to witness a collision between high ideals and rough politics. Dhaka-12 is a microcosm of the Bangladeshi paradox: gleaming glass towers overlook slums where garment workers – the very people Akhter has spent decades documenting – stitch the clothes that generate the bulk of the nation’s foreign revenue. In recent elections, under the previous regime’s heavy hand, this seat was a fortress of muscle and money, effectively closed to insurgents. Today, the walls are down, but the playing field remains precipitously tilted. The race has narrowed to big candidates backed by the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) and Jamaat-e-Islami. Akhter is the only woman in the fray. Considered an outlier, she has been keen to take a leaf out of the campaign books of new New York city mayor Zohran Mamdani. Akhter has followed three of Mamdani’s tenets. Taslima Akhter on the campaign trail. Photo: By arrangement.First is the prioritisation of mass canvassing over muscle. Akhter relies on a volunteer team. Her teams treat every slum and factory floor as a space for individual persuasion rather than bloc-voting.Second, with digital literacy outpacing political reform, Akhter’s team uses scrappy social-media clips—urgent and personal—to talk to the voters about “food and clothes” issues. Finally, there is the economic pivot. While the big parties debate national identity, and contested histories, Akhter focuses on the factory floor and the food market. Like Mamdani, she treats housing, grocery prices and a living wage not as policy footnotes, but as the central nervous system of her campaign. She travels not in a motorcade but on foot or by rickshaw, funding her campaign with small donations rather than syndicate cash.It is noteworthy that her party’s election symbol is the “mathal” – the farmer’s traditional head covering. It is no surprise that she has chosen a symbol to represent the worker. Taslima Akhter’s pamphlet. Photo: By arrangement.The stakes in Dhaka-12 are high. As Charca, an online news outlet, observes, “The constituency is a hub of educational institutions, factories and transport terminals, but also home to squatters, extortionists and drug dealers… whoever is elected to this constituency will have to resolve these problems…voter turnout, security situation and last-minute voting trends will play a major role in determining the outcome of this constituency.” What makes Akhter’s run intriguing is the response she is getting. The candidate has energised young voters. In the tea stalls of Nakhalpara, voters listen. The electorate is younger, and more connected than ever. In a country where politics is often settled by force, a woman telling garment workers that they, not the factory owners (some of whom have been MPs, or had the ears of MPs), own the republic could also invite new pressures. But Akhter is no stranger to staring down police batons and the water cannon.Akhter’s partner Zonayed Saki is running from Bancharampur in Brahmanbaria, a deeply rural constituency. This is a shift from 2018, when he contested from Dhaka-12, the same site Akhter is running from.Taslima Akhter’s pamphlet. Photo: By arrangement.Critics might argue that the Ganosanhati Andolan is too cerebral for the rough-and-tumble of South Asian polls. They say the left in Bangladesh is a debating club, not an electoral machine. There is truth to this. Without the patronage networks that deliver “vote banks,” Akhter’s path to the parliament building, the Jatiya Sangsad, is steep. Of course, If the ghosts of Rana Plaza could vote, Akhter would already have won. If she manages even a moderately respectable showing, it will signal that the tectonic plates have shifted. It would suggest that the 2024 uprising left a residue of political consciousness that the big parties cannot simply pave over. Irfan Chowdhury has written for newspapers and online platforms, like The Daily Star, Dhaka Tribune, Alalodulal and Sapan News.