Layli Uddin, a British scholar of Bengali descent, recalls how an 84-year-old peasant, Burhan Uddin, told her with conviction that Bhashani used to fly ‘over trees on his boat protected by an ambush of tigers and … the thwack of his lathi [walking stick] reverberating across the entire subcontinent’. This attribution of supernatural powers to a political leader, who captured the imagination of subaltern classes, was not unprecedented in the annals of Indian social movements. Shahid Amin notes similar rumours circulating among peasants in the United Provinces, in India, during the Khilafat–non-cooperation movement of the twenties; here, too, the peasants imagined M. K. Gandhi as possessing supernatural powers. Like Gandhi, who was a masterful politician of twentieth-century South Asia, Bhashani neither held a formal position of authority in the power structures of state nor evinced any desire for such formal trappings. Born in a peasant family, he was more interested in translating his moral capital, earned as a social activist and religious interlocutor, into political capital for the construction of collective resistance of subaltern communities. Though he appeared inchoate and inconsistent to many among his opponents, Bhashani sought to pit a morally grounded communitarian ideology of labour against the colonial process of surplus accumulation across both colonial and seemingly post-colonial temporalities in East Bengal. In this process, he engaged with various ideological apparatuses of the international socialist movements and, ultimately, as a peasant populist, was drawn to the emotional appeal of Chinese agrarian socialism.

In the fifties, Bhashani’s opposition to the West Pakistani regime was grounded in the demand for proportional elected representation according to the population distribution in different provinces. He combined this demand with constitutional autonomy. Admittedly, regional autonomy was also the goal of the constitutionalists in the Awami League. The crucial difference between Bhashani and his fierce critics drawn from the moderate constitutionalists in the Awami League was this: Bhashani attempted to fuse these demands while also opposing Pakistan’s closeness to the Western military bloc. He deciphered, in the formation of military bloc, a crucial hindrance towards the global movement for decolonization. As the president of the Awami League, Bhashani did not want the organization to be a party to such an ‘imperial alliance’.