For eight years, Mir Ahmad bin Quasem was imprisoned in complete darkness and isolation, bitten endlessly by mosquitoes and with cockroaches and rats scouring his body. “There was nothing I could do,” he recalls of his ordeal, except “preparing myself every night for the executioners to come and take me out”.

Quasem was locked up in 2016 while serving on the legal team of his father, a leader of the Islamist Jamaat-e-Islami party targeted by the regime of Sheikh Hasina, then prime minister of Bangladesh.

He was among the hundreds held in the dreaded “House of Mirrors” prison, where blindfolded detainees were kept in solitary confinement.

Then, at dawn on August 6th last year, he was dragged out into the light. “I thought I was going to be executed, so I recited my last prayers,” he says. Instead, he was dumped in an empty field, a free man.

Hasina’s Awami League government had been ousted from power after a student-led uprising now known as the “Monsoon Revolution”. Hasina herself had fled the country.

Opposition activist Mir Ahmad bin Quasem is pictured after his release in August 2024 holding a phone with a photo of himself from eight years earlier. Photograph: Indranil Mukherjee/Getty

“I cried when I found out. I couldn’t believe we had been liberated from fascism,” Quasem said.

With the regime in ruins, the student revolutionaries plotted for a new future. They invited Muhammad Yunus, the octogenarian Nobel Peace Prize-winning economist, to serve as a caretaker leader.

The Herculean task of his interim government was not only to overhaul the political, social, judicial and economic institutions captured by Hasina’s party, but also account for extrajudicial killings and disappearances during her 15-year rule, while trying to recover billions of dollars lost to corruption.

Now with elections fast approaching to set Bangladesh on a new path, Yunus is struggling to keep the country of 170 million peo