When Sajeeb Wazed Joy addressed an audience at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club in New Delhi alongside an audio appearance by the ousted former prime minister Sheikh Hasina on August 5, he was reviving a familiar doctrine that has shaped Awami League’s politics for nearly two decades.That is without Sheikh Hasina and her party Awami League, Bangladesh inevitably descends into terrorism, Islamist militancy and state collapse. It is a ‘powerful’ narrative. It is also one that increasingly struggles to survive contact with reality.Throughout his remarks, Joy painted Bangladesh as a “failed state,” warned that it had become “another Pakistan” on India’s eastern frontier, claimed that Hezbollah marches openly, that Al-Qaeda operatives address public rallies, that foreign intelligence agencies enjoy a free hand, and that Bangladesh could become the world’s next exporter of terrorism.He urged India and the international media to rally behind this interpretation before it was too late. These are extraordinary allegations. They demand extraordinary evidence. And none was provided.‘Accept the conclusion without presenting the evidence’The most striking feature of Joy’s speech is its repeated substitution of insinuation for verifiable fact. His central proposition is that Islamist militancy has returned because Sheikh Hasina is no longer in power.Yet nearly two years after her removal, Bangladesh has witnessed no major terrorist attack, no cross-border terrorist operation against India, and no evidence that the country has become the regional epicentre of ‘jihadist violence,’ like the way Joy and Awami League wanted to portray Bangladesh.If Bangladesh had truly become “another Pakistan,” as Joy claimed, the first people to sound the alarm would almost certainly have been India’s own security establishment. That has not happened yet.Nor has New Delhi issued any public warning suggesting Bangladesh now constitutes a terrorism threat. Intelligence cooperation between the two countries has continued. Cross-border security mechanisms remain functional. International travel advisories have not been rewritten to describe Bangladesh as an emerging terrorist sanctuary.Instead, Joy asks his audience to accept the conclusion without presenting the evidence.His argument also depends on a familiar visual shorthand that the Awami League has cultivated for years: the increased public visibility of Islamic identity is presented as proof of militant resurgence.This conflates religiosity with extremism.Bangladesh is a country where nearly nine out of 10 citizens are Muslim. Public expressions of Islamic identity – whether beards, hijabs, niqabs, panjabis or prayer gatherings – are neither new nor inherently political.Under Sheikh Hasina’s increasingly authoritarian rule, however, visible religiosity was frequently portrayed as suspect. Her government repeatedly blurred the distinction between conservative religious expression and violent extremism, allowing counterterrorism rhetoric to become a convenient instrument for suppressing political opponents.That legacy should not be confused with present-day reality.After the uprising of August 2024, many Bangladeshis became visibly more comfortable expressing religious identity in public. That social change does not, by itself, establish the existence of organised terrorism any more than increased church attendance would prove Christian militancy.Joy offers no evidence that these visible cultural shifts have translated into operational terrorist capability. Instead, he asks audiences to infer causation from appearance.From left, Director for Bangladesh Human Rights Watch USA Shah Md Bakhtiar, veteran International Journalist and Political Analyst Waiel Awwad and General Secretary of Bangladesh Human Rights Watch Muhammad Ali Siddiqui with former Bangladesh prime minister Sheikh Hasina’s son Sajeeb Wazed Joy, seen on the screen, during Hasina’s virtual press conference, in New Delhi, Wednesday, Aug. 5, 2026. It was her first public media interaction since fleeing to India on August 5, 2024. Photo: PTI.Politically useful positioning of opponentsHis warnings become even more sweeping when he invokes Hezbollah, Al-Qaeda and unnamed foreign intelligence services. Such assertions carry obvious geopolitical implications. Yet they remain unsupported by publicly available evidence.If convicted terrorists have indeed returned to organized operations on the scale Joy suggests, where are the documented attacks? Where are the disrupted plots? Where are the cross-border infiltration attempts? Where are the official assessments by regional or international counterterrorism agencies corroborating his claims?The speech provides none.This matters because the terrorism narrative has long occupied a unique place in the Awami League’s political vocabulary. It served not only as a legitimate framework for confronting violent extremists but also as a political shield against criticism.Opponents could be portrayed as extremists, civil society questioned as enablers, journalists accused of undermining national security, and international concern dismissed as ignorance of Bangladesh’s security challenges.That framing proved politically useful. It does not become more credible simply because it is repeated after losing power.Joy’s treatment of the July 2024 killings reveals a similar pattern. He questions the United Nations’ finding that more than 1,400 people were killed during the crackdown, suggesting that the organisation has failed to substantiate the figure.Yet the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights did not arrive at its conclusions casually. Its investigation relied on extensive interviews, documentary evidence, digital verification, forensic analysis and corroboration across multiple independent sources. Its report concluded that there were reasonable grounds to believe crimes against humanity may have been committed.Questioning any international report is entirely legitimate. Implying that its conclusions therefore collapse without presenting contrary evidence is not. Equally revealing is what Joy leaves unmentioned.He says nothing about the extensive documentation of the state’s use of lethal force during the uprising. Nothing about the widespread allegations of enforced disappearances, arbitrary arrests and torture that had accumulated over years before August 2024.Nothing about why such a broad-based popular uprising erupted against a government that had already governed for fifteen consecutive years.Rhetorical inflationJoy also portrays Bangladesh’s current political order as one in which killings have effectively been legalised through indemnity provisions. Legal scholars may certainly debate the wisdom or scope of post-uprising legislation.Courts remain open to reviewing those laws. But describing Bangladesh as a country where murder has become legally permissible is rhetorical inflation rather than legal analysis.His description of Bangladesh as entirely devoid of constitutional order similarly ignores inconvenient developments. The country has held parliamentary elections. An elected government now exercises executive authority. Courts continue to function.Perhaps the most consequential aspect of Joy’s address is its intended audience. This was not primarily a speech to Bangladeshis. It was a speech to India.By presenting Bangladesh as a looming security catastrophe, Joy effectively asks New Delhi – and, by extension, the wider international community – to view Bangladesh primarily through the prism of fear. The message is: tolerate the return of Sheikh Hasina, or prepare for extremism on India’s eastern frontier.In reaction, Bangladesh’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs described the platform provided to Sheikh Hasina as an affront to Bangladesh’s sovereignty and “a grievous insult to the martyrs of the July Revolution.”It also condemned the “denial of facts established by the United Nations,” particularly regarding the killings of civilians, including children, during the protests.Whether one agrees with every word of Dhaka’s statement is secondary. Its central point is difficult to ignore. Political rehabilitation cannot begin with the denial of established facts, nor can credibility be rebuilt by resurrecting narratives that have steadily lost empirical support.Faisal Mahmud is a Dhaka-based journalist. He was the former Minister (Press) in Bangladesh High Commission in New Delhi.