The Three

Fire Is the Only Adequate Language

Ebadur Rahman — Fri, 15 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Constitutional Burnings of April 2026 as Performance, Constituent Contestation, and Media Event...

Part I: The Event, the Object, and the Constitutional Archive

I. The Thesis, Stated Once and Without Apology

The two burnings of a fabricated constitutional facsimile, performed in Dhaka on 10 April 2026 and again on 18 April 2026, are more than expressive protest. They form a single iterable performance: a work with two moments, an inauguration and its confirmation, that stages a crisis of constitutional legitimacy. The performance destroys the sign of the 1972 constitutional order before witnesses, cameras, and a historically saturated public that knows exactly what it is watching burn. The burnings did not destroy a constitution. They publicly destroyed the image through which a contested constitutional order claimed historical inevitability. That distinction is this essay's central proposition. Everything else follows from it.

Three analytic stakes organize what follows. The first is performance: the act's formal structure, with its material score, its witness-relation, its iterability, and its documentation ecology, makes it legible as contemporary performance art in the expanded sense. I mean this not in the narrow institutional sense of gallery-certified body practice, but in the sense of a deliberately staged, materially transformative, publicly witnessed event whose meaning is inseparable from its embodied enactment. The second is constituent power: the burnings intervene in a live debate about the 1972 Constitution's originary legitimacy, its institutional design, and its history of authoritarian capture. They do so by performing the dissolution of the constitutional order's claim to represent a sovereign act of popular self-determination. They do not symbolize that dissolution. They enact it. The third is media circulation: the work's documentation ecology, routed through Bangladeshi news outlets, social platforms, and channels internal to the movement, constitutes a distinct and theoretically significant archival infrastructure. This is a different routing, not a failure to arrive at the art world's circuits.

II. The Event: Material Description of 10 April and 18 April 2026

i. What happened, and what it looked like

On 10 April 2026, Ratul Mohammad and members of the political-aesthetic collective PAC staged a public act in a street in Dhaka. The date was chosen with care. The tenth of April is the anniversary of the Mujibnagar Declaration of 1971, the proclamation through which the provisional government of Bangladesh constituted itself during the liberation war. To perform an act of constitutional refusal on the fifty-fifth anniversary of that founding proclamation was to place two constitutional claims in direct confrontation: the claim that the liberation war generated a legitimate constituent authority, and the counterclaim that the 1972 document written in its name foreclosed that authority rather than fulfilled it.

The object of the burning must be described with precision, because the description carries theoretical weight. What burned was not the constitutional text itself, not an archival copy retrieved from a library, not a legislative volume issued by the state. It was a prop built for the occasion: a large construction shaped like a book, about two feet tall, with a bright yellow spine and a white face bearing two identifying marks. First, in large red Bengali characters above the midpoint: "১৯৭২ এর সংবিধান," or "1972's Constitution." Second, below the text, the red circular seal of the People's Republic of Bangladesh (Gono Projatontri Bangladesh Sorkhar), rendered legible at the scale of street visibility. The spine was yellow. The face was white. The text and seal were red. The object was constructed to be unmistakably the Constitution at the level at which the Constitution circulates in political life: as icon, as sovereign image, as compressed symbol of the state's authority to govern. It was the constitution's legitimacy-image, not any of its textual instances.

The prop was placed against a small pyre of wooden sticks on the street surface. Before ignition, the organizers had assembled a press conference. A table bearing multiple broadcast microphones from Bangladeshi television and radio outlets stood at the center of the gathering space, and a banner hung behind it carrying explicit text that named the constitutional critique. The banner's visible portion declares the 1972 Constitution illegitimate on two grounds at once: Indian influence (ভারতীয় প্রভাবে) and composition by representatives elected to Pakistani bodies ("পাকিস্তানের নির্বাচনে প্রণীত বাহাত্তুরের অবৈধ সংবিধান," or the illegitimate constitution compiled by Pakistan's elected representatives). The charge condensed fifty years of constitutional debate into an argument legible on a single banner.

Multiple speakers delivered remarks at the microphone before ignition. The gathering (several dozen visible witnesses, mixed in age, mixed in dress, some in explicitly Islamic attire and some not) watched in relative stillness as one of the principal participants used a long rod to set the wooden kindling alight from below the prop. The fire took from the base of the sticks and rose into the construction. Multiple cameras recorded the act: news cameras on tripods, handheld phones from bystanders, and at least one camera positioned deliberately by PAC's own documentation team. The act was staged before the press but was not covert. This was a public performance staged before institutional media, which is itself a formal claim about the act's address. It spoke to the record.

ii. The visual grammar of the event

Visual culture analysis requires attention to chromatic and iconographic economy as argumentative structure, not as decoration. The color field of the 10 April performance is precise and politically saturated: yellow spine, white face, red lettering, red seal, against grey street surface, against the green and brown of a Dhaka urban background. These are not neutral choices. Red and green are Bangladesh's national colors, the red circle on the green field that the liberation flag introduced. The prop's red lettering on white ground, with the red government seal, assembles the full chromatic grammar of state authority in one portable object. The yellow spine punctuates it with a color that appears nowhere in the national flag, nowhere in the official palette of the state. That yellow marks the prop as a constructed sign and not a genuine artifact. It is the prop's confession of its own prop-hood, its visible acknowledgment that it is a facsimile and not a document.

The pyre of wooden sticks beneath the prop establishes the sacrificial grammar of the event in the economy of visual reference: this is a burning, not a casual destruction. The deliberate construction of a pyre, instead of setting the prop alight on bare ground, requires planning, material assembly, and choreography. It insists on the act's staged character. The crowd's stillness (no cheering visible in the footage, faces watchful and not celebratory) contributes the register of witness and not spectacle. This is a community witnessing an act, not a crowd watching a performance. The distinction between spectator and witness is, as Part II will argue, theoretically fundamental to the Shahid Turn's account of what the burning is doing.

iii. The second burning: from event to protocol

The second burning, on 18 April 2026, is the formally decisive moment. It is decisive not because it was more dramatic or more attended, but because it transformed the first act from event into protocol, from singular gesture into transmissible score, from local combustion into repeatable political form. The available documentation of the 18 April burning is thinner than that of the 10 April action. Claims about its precise staging remain accordingly provisional. What can be said with confidence is that it repeated the form with enough fidelity to establish that form as separable from the particular bodies, the particular crowd, the particular weather of 10 April. The form survived the transfer. This is what repetition, in the technical and not the rhetorical sense, achieves.

To perform an act twice is not to double it. It is to establish that the act has a form which can outlast its first occurrence and be instantiated again. The 10 April burning was the inaugural act. The 18 April burning certified it as a protocol. In Alexander Galloway's terms, the burning has crossed the threshold from symbol to protocol: it is no longer primarily a statement about something, but a procedure that can be executed by any community that inhabits the same political and cultural formation. Part II will develop this argument in detail. Here it is enough to register the formal stakes. Without 18 April, the burning is a gesture. With 18 April, it is a method.

III. The Constitutional Object: What the 1972 Constitution Is and Why It Burned

i. The founding sequence: a forensic chronology

The 1972 Constitution was not produced by a constituent assembly elected for the purpose of writing a constitution for an independent Bangladesh. It was produced by representatives elected under Pakistani law for Pakistani legislative bodies, converted by executive order into a constituent assembly for the new state. The sequence deserves precise statement, because the argument for originary illegitimacy rests on the specific institutional steps and not on a general claim about founding violence.

On 22 March 1972, the Bangladesh Constituent Assembly Order was promulgated by presidential proclamation. On 23 March 1972, the Bangladesh (Cessation of Membership) Order was issued. Together, these two orders converted persons elected to the Pakistani National Assembly (MNAs) and the East Pakistan Provincial Assembly (MPAs) in the 1970 general elections into Members of the Constituent Assembly of Bangladesh (MCAs). Those 1970 elections had been conducted under the Legal Framework Order issued by Yahya Khan, for the purpose of governing a Pakistani state whose sovereignty the liberation war had since dissolved. The Assembly was inaugurated on 10 April 1972: another date whose anniversary became the occasion for the 2026 burning. The coincidence is not a coincidence.

A drafting committee of thirty-four members was chaired by Dr. Kamal Hossain, then Law Minister. Four other Awami League ministers served on it. The constitutional draft was presented as a formal document on 4 November 1972. The Constituent Assembly adopted it the same day. The Constitution came into force on 16 December 1972, the first anniversary of the military surrender. The Assembly was dissolved upon the Constitution's entry into force. From the legal convening of the Assembly to the dissolution was eight months and twenty-four days.

The parliamentary fact at the center of the originary-legitimacy critique is this: no constituent assembly election was held in sovereign Bangladesh. The representatives who wrote and adopted the 1972 Constitution had been elected to govern a different state under a different legal framework. The strongest version of this argument holds that the founding act was a preemption of constituent power and not its exercise. This argument has circulated across five decades of Bangladeshi opposition politics, from the Jasad political literature of the 1970s through the sustained intellectual work of subsequent decades and the explosion of public constitutional debate that followed the 2024 uprising. The autobiographical document uploaded alongside this essay, which records the political formation of a young Bangladeshi intellectual in 1987 and 1988, provides contemporaneous testimony that these arguments were already circulating in opposition political culture decades before they entered the mainstream. They were never new arguments. They were suppressed arguments that became, after August 2024, unavoidable ones.

ii. Three critiques, kept separate

The burnings draw on three analytically distinct critiques of the 1972 constitutional order. The essay will fail if it allows outrage about the third to substitute for the evidence required by the first. The three must be kept separate.

Originary illegitimacy. The constitution was framed by representatives elected under Pakistani law, without a fresh mandate from the Bangladeshi people as a sovereign constituent subject. This argument challenges the constitutional order at its root, before any specific provision is examined. Its remedy, if accepted, is replacement and not amendment: a new constituent process, and not a repair of the existing one. The burning performs this argument in the medium of fire. It treats the document as a false foundation, not as a flawed law, and dissolves it accordingly.

Institutional deformation. If one accepts the founding for the purpose of analysis, the constitutional text built a structure with serious institutional affordances for the concentration of executive power. Article 70 is the provision most consistently targeted by critics. It provides that a member of Parliament who votes against the party line or abstains from a vote at party direction shall vacate their parliamentary seat. The Constitutional Reform Commission established after the 2024 uprising explicitly proposed limiting Article 70's application to confidence votes and money bills while permitting free voting on all other questions. The reform recommendation is itself evidence of Article 70's recognized pathology. The provision transformed the legislature into an instrument of party leadership. The Prime Minister, as party leader, thereby accumulated a constitutional concentration of power that no other institutional actor could check. The burning's implicit constitutional argument includes this institutional critique, though it presents the critique as a symptom of the founding problem and not as a separate, independently remediable defect.

Authoritarian capture. The third argument concerns what the constitutional shell permitted under Sheikh Hasina, particularly after 2009: the effective subordination of judicial independence, the use of the Digital Security Act (2018) and Cyber Security Act (2023) to criminalize dissent, systematic enforced disappearance, and the deployment of lethal force against the 2024 protesters. The OHCHR fact-finding report of 2024 documented patterns including extrajudicial killings and arbitrary detention, providing the clearest external evidentiary record that the constitutional order as administered had become an instrument of systematic repression. The burning's political occasion is this history. Its philosophical argument, however, is the originary one. Authoritarian capture is what finally makes the argument vivid. Originary illegitimacy is what makes it principled.

iii. The reform context: why burn in the midst of amendment?

The obvious objection must be met directly. If the constitutional crisis had already generated a reform commission with serious proposals (replacing "Bengalees" with "Bangladeshis" in Article 6(2) to begin addressing the exclusion of non-Bengali communities from the national designation, deleting Articles 7A and 7B, making rights more judicially enforceable, revising Article 70), why perform an act that refuses the premise of reform entirely? The answer is not that reform was insufficient, though critics argue it was. The answer is that the burning intervened in a constituent field that was already open, and refused one of that field's central organizing assumptions: that the crisis was a problem of amendment and not of replacement. The reform commission's recommendations, whatever their intrinsic merit, operated within the 1972 document's framework. They proposed to improve a foundation whose legitimacy they did not question. The burning questioned the foundation. It did not initiate a constitutional crisis. It radicalized the meaning of an existing one by demonstrating, in a medium the reform commission's report could not reach, that the legitimacy of the existing order was a political question and not a juristic one, and that political questions can be answered in fire as well as in committee reports.

iv. '36 July': on revolutionary time

The phrase '36 July' is the political and temporal shorthand by which the 2024 to 2026 political conjuncture is internally identified. It requires a gloss for readers outside the Bangladeshi conjuncture, but that gloss must not domesticate it into rhetoric. The phrase encodes a precise claim about temporality: that the uprising which began in July 2024 over the High Court's restoration of a 30% quota for descendants of liberation war veterans in public employment, which widened into a mass anti-government mobilization, and which precipitated Hasina's departure on 5 August 2024, has not ended. The revolutionary now-time (Benjamin's Jetztzeit) refuses to be normalized into the state's chronological calendar. July did not end in August. It continued into a "36th day" that no calendar could accommodate, because the state's temporal order was exactly what the uprising rejected. As Benjamin writes in Thesis XIV of Über den Begriff der Geschichte: "Die Geschichte ist Gegenstand einer Konstruktion, deren Ort nicht die homogene und leere Zeit bildet, sondern die von Jetztzeit erfüllte." History is the subject of a construction whose site is time filled with now-time, and not homogeneous and empty time. The 36 July designation is the Bengali Muslim revolution's assertion of its own Jetztzeit against the homogeneous empty time of electoral cycles and constitutional calendars. The April 2026 burnings, performed on the anniversary of the Mujibnagar Declaration, extended that Jetztzeit into the calendar year that followed the uprising. They refused to become past.

IV. The Prop and Its Formal Intelligence: What the Burning Burned

The prop's formal logic merits sustained analysis, because the choice to burn a fabricated facsimile rather than a printed copy of the constitutional text is not a concession or a logistical convenience. It is the work's most precise formal intelligence, and the decision from which everything else in the performance follows.

Consider what it would have meant to burn an actual printed copy of the constitutional text. The act would have been legible primarily as the destruction of a physical artifact: legally charged, semantically ambiguous. Is this the destruction of this copy, this particular instantiation of the text, which continues to exist in every library and digital archive in the country? Burning a copy does not burn the authority the text claims. The prop, by contrast, burns the image of constitutional authority. It attacks the constitution at the level at which the constitution actually circulates in political life: as icon, as sovereign seal, as recognizable form. This is what Friedrich Kittler calls the Aufschreibesystem, the discourse network that determines what can be thought within a given political formation, and not only what can be communicated. The 1972 Constitution is more than legislation. It is an Aufschreibesystem, a system of inscription that produces the categories through which political life in Bangladesh is organized, administered, and contested: citizen, parliament, executive power, emergency, fundamental right. The prop is the Aufschreibesystem's most compressed and recognizable sign. Burning the prop is an attempt to introduce into the discourse network an event the network cannot administer, an excess that the system's categories cannot absorb. The fire is the excess. The smoke is the evidence that the network has encountered something it cannot file.

The act is therefore semiotic before it is political, and political because it is semiotic. It attacks the constitution as a legitimacy-image to be dissolved, and not as a set of legal provisions to be improved. The legitimacy-image is what the prop represents: the historical claim that this document, whatever its origins, now constitutes the necessary and legitimate framework for Bangladesh's political life. The claim to historical inevitability is what the burning refuses, and also what no speech, no pamphlet, no march with placards could refuse in the same medium-specific way. A speech denounces illegitimacy. The burning demonstrates combustibility. These are different arguments in different languages, and the second is the only one capable of showing, rather than asserting, that the document's authority is not inevitable.

V. The Performance-Art Claim: Why the Medium Was Necessary

The objection must be named before the argument proceeds: calling this performance art is a category mistake. These were political actors pursuing political goals in political space before a political audience. To apply the vocabulary of performance art is to aestheticize politics and politicize aesthetics at once, serving neither discipline honestly.

The objection has genuine weight. It cannot be answered by asserting that the distinction between art and politics is always unstable (true, but exhausted as a move) or by appealing to the authority of future canonical consecration (a deferral disguised as an argument). The answer must be specific. I use "performance art" to designate a deliberately staged, publicly witnessed, materially transformative act whose meaning is inseparable from its embodied execution, its formal score, the structure of its witness-relation, and the ecology of its documentation. I do not use it in the narrow institutional sense of action sanctioned by galleries. On this definition, the question to ask of any candidate performance is: could this argument have been made as effectively in another medium? The answer here is no, and the reasons are specific.

A speech could denounce the constitution's illegitimacy but could not materially enact irreversibility. Words can be retracted. Fire cannot.

A pamphlet could historicize the originary-legitimacy critique but could not stage witness. A text addresses readers. The burning constituted a witnessing community.

A march could display opposition but could not attack the constitution at the level of sovereign image. Marches oppose the state from within the state's temporal order. The burning attacked the state's founding representation directly.

Only burning the facsimile under public witness before press cameras could transform constitutional critique into a sensory argument about authority's combustibility. Only the burning could demonstrate, rather than assert, that this image of sovereign necessity was made by human hands and therefore could be unmade. This irreducibility to alternative expression is the mark by which the act earns its genre designation. Institutions can contest the label. They cannot contest the formal analysis.

The Shahid Turn framework offers a further and deeper account. As the author's own theoretical writings establish, the Bengali Muslim political-aesthetic tradition has a seven-century history of acts that simultaneously enact political claims, execute community protocols, produce testimonial records, and constitute the community of witnesses as a political subject. These acts do not require the Western art world's consecration to be what they are. The jiyafat (community feast) at Shahbagh in 2021, the khatia (funeral bier) procession for Mushtaq Ahmed, the sijda (prayer prostration) on Farmgate asphalt after Hasina's fall: these are acts in which the formal structure of the act, the witness-relation it establishes, the protocol it executes, and the testimonial record it produces are inseparable from its political force. They are not performance art in the Western institutional sense. The constitutional burning belongs to this tradition and to the Western performance-art lineage at once. The overlap does not dilute either account. It deepens both.

Notes for Part I

The Constituent Assembly Order, 1972 and the Bangladesh (Cessation of Membership) Order, 1972 are the founding legal instruments; their dates of 22 and 23 March 1972 respectively are a matter of public record. On the composition and institutional history of the 1972 Constituent Assembly: see Ahmed Kamal, State Against the Nation: The Decline of the Muslim League in Pre-Independence Bengal (2009); Rounaq Jahan, Pakistan: Failure in National Integration (1972).
Article 70 of the Constitution of the People's Republic of Bangladesh (as adopted 4 November 1972, as amended): "A person elected as a member of Parliament at an election at which he was nominated as a candidate by a political party shall vacate his seat if he resigns from or votes in Parliament against that party." The Constitutional Reform Commission's 2024 and 2025 recommendation to limit Article 70's application is documented in Commission reports circulated in late 2024 and 2025, reported in The Daily Star (Dhaka) and Prothom Alo.
OHCHR (2024). Fact-Finding Report on Human Rights Violations and Abuses in the Context of Protests in Bangladesh, July to August 2024. Geneva: United Nations.
On the 2024 quota protests: the High Court's June 2024 ruling restored the 30% freedom fighter quota, triggering protests that expanded into mass mobilization; see reporting in The Daily Star, Prothom Alo, and Reuters, June to August 2024. Hasina's departure on 5 August 2024 is documented across international news media.
Benjamin, Walter. "Über den Begriff der Geschichte" (Theses on the Philosophy of History, 1940). In Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn. Schocken Books, 1968. Thesis XIV.
Friedrich Kittler, Aufschreibesysteme 1800/1900 (Discourse Networks 1800/1900), trans. Michael Metteer with Chris Cullens. Stanford University Press, 1990. On the Aufschreibesystem as a system that determines what can be thought, not only what can be communicated: Introduction, pp. 1–25.
The autobiographical document (PDF upload) records the author's political education in Dhaka, 1987 to 1988, including firsthand testimony that constitutional-legitimacy debates were already circulating in opposition political culture decades before they entered the mainstream. They were never new arguments. They were suppressed arguments that became, after August 2024, unavoidable ones.
On the Constitutional Reform Commission recommendations regarding Article 6(2) (replacing "Bengalees" with "Bangladeshis"), deletion of Articles 7A and 7B, and rights enforceability: see reform commission reports and political coverage in Bangladeshi national press, 2025.
Galloway, Alexander R. Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization. MIT Press, 2004. The phrase "Protokoll ist nicht das Gegenteil der Freiheit" in the epigraph is the author's own German rendering of Galloway's thesis.
Wolfgang Ernst, Digital Memory and the Archive, ed. Jussi Parikka. University of Minnesota Press, 2013. The quote "Das Archiv ist kein Gedächtnisort, sondern ein Operationsfeld" appears in Ernst's formulations on archival theory as distinct from memory studies: the archive is a field of operations, and not a site of memory.

Part II: Protocol, Iteration, Witness, and the Shahid Turn

The Shahid Turn is a regime of media-archaeological testimony governed by insurgent protocols and liturgical coordination. — Ebadur Rahman, The Shahid Turn: Part Two — The Framework (2024–2026)

Al-Burūʾūkūl lā yaḣfaz u dhakira tan, bal yasḣghal maʿdān. البروتوكول لا يحفظ ذاكرة، بل يشغل ميدان. The protocol preserves no memory; it operates a field. — After Wolfgang Ernst

শহীদ শুধু আল্লাহর সামনে সাক্ষী নয় — ইতিহাসের সামনেও, যারা তার পরে আসে তাদের সামনেও। — Ali Shariati, Shahādat (Martyrdom), 1972, on the triple witness of the shahid: before God, before history, before future generations.

VI. The Shahid Turn Framework: Three Modules and What They Explain

The theoretical framework I apply to the constitutional burning is not borrowed from the existing literature on political performance, protest aesthetics, or postcolonial art theory. It is the author's own. I developed it across a decade of engagement with the archive of Bengali Muslim political-aesthetic life, and articulated it most fully in the two-part Shahid Turn writings that constitute the methodological foundation of this essay. The framework consists of three theoretical modules: Insurgent Protocol, Media-Archaeological Testimony, and Liturgical Coordination. Each is grounded in a body of external theoretical work but generated by, and accountable to, the Bengali Muslim archive rather than imposed upon it. The master formula, stated there and restated here: the Shahid Turn is a regime of media-archaeological testimony governed by insurgent protocols and liturgical coordination.

I introduce this framework with disciplinary modesty rather than doctrinal certainty: as an analytic drawn from Bengali Muslim political-aesthetic traditions that allows one to see dimensions of witness, martyrdom, absence, communal obligation, and political afterlife that standard Euro-American performance theory either misses or misreads. What precisely it explains about the burning will be stated at the end of each subsection, rather than assumed throughout.

Module A. Insurgent Protocol

What the burning executes.

Alexander Galloway's Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization (2004) proposes that the internet's apparent freedom is entirely dependent on strict compliance with distributed technical protocols (TCP/IP, HTTP, DNS) that are decentralised in architecture but strict in operation. The apparent openness of the network is the surface effect of total obedience to its format layer. Galloway's political implication: in the age of distributed networks, control operates through protocol governance distributed across the network's nodes, not through sovereign command from a centre. Every participant enforces the protocol by conforming to it; every deviation is ejected.

Transposed from network infrastructure to political aesthetics, this generates a question more precise than "what does this act mean?": what protocol is this act executing? The constitutional burning's answer reaches seven centuries deeper than the 1972 document. When Ratul Mohammad and PAC construct the constitutional facsimile and burn it before news cameras and a gathered public, they are not making a statement about the constitution's illegitimacy alone. They are executing a protocol of communal refusal that the Bengali Muslim political-aesthetic tradition has been running, in successive media, since Burhanuddin's cow sacrifice in 1303 Sylhet. The protocol's structure is constant across its media instantiations: a public act performed before a community of witnesses, naming what is being refused, enacting the refusal in an irreversible material form, and generating testimony for future retrieval and re-execution.

This is why the press staging (the table of news microphones, the banner, the speeches before ignition, the positioned cameras) is integral formal structure rather than peripheral logistics. The microphones are the protocol's authentication requirement: they establish that the act is performed before institutional witnesses whose documentation functions as a second-order protocol execution, preserving the record in the Aufschreibesystem's new institutional layer. In Galloway's terms, the news cameras are the network's TCP/IP layer: without them, the act's information cannot be routed across the network that makes it politically operative. The press conference before the burning is the act's network authentication, not its preamble.

What the Insurgent Protocol module explains about the burning: why the act's power is protocological rather than primarily rhetorical. It is not persuading anyone of anything they did not already know or suspect. It establishes who belongs to the community of refusal, on what terms, with what shared commitments, and through what format that commitment can be recognised by members of the community who are not present. The burning is credible because it executes a protocol that the Bengali Muslim political community recognises as native to its own formation, not because it is dramatic.

Module B. Media-Archaeological Testimony

The stack the burning runs on.

Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka's media archaeology argues that what appears as a new medium is a reconfiguration of existing dispositifs, habits of mediation, and cultural techniques, rather than a rupture from them. Friedrich Kittler's Aufschreibesystem analysis shows how each epoch's dominant discourse network (the complex of material technologies, institutional practices, and social relations that determine what can be recorded, stored, retrieved, and transmitted) both inherits and transforms the preceding one. Wolfgang Ernst extends this: "Das Archiv ist kein Gedächtnisort, sondern ein Operationsfeld." The archive is a field of operations, not a site of memory. The deepest insight of the media-archaeological tradition, applied to the Bengali Muslim cultural formation: the 2024 phone video of Abu Sayed's killing and the fourteenth-century puthi manuscript recording Burhanuddin's martyrdom are the same Aufschreibesystem running on different hardware. The protocol content is identical; only the inscription technology has changed.

The Bengali Muslim Aufschreibesystem is a seven-century media-archaeological stack: the oral layer of manaqib recitation at the mazhar, above it the puthi manuscript layer transmitted through copyist networks of mosque and madrassa and Sufi lodge, above that colonial print (the puthi adapting to the press), above that nationalist periodical print, and above all of these the digital layer of Facebook posts, YouTube manaqib performances, WhatsApp khutba recordings, and Twitter threads analysing the revolution's theological dimensions. The constitutional burning of April 2026 is the latest layer of this stack. It is the oldest form of Bengali Muslim political-aesthetic testimony running through the newest available medium: street performance and live-streamed documentation. It is not a new form.

This has a specific consequence for the art-historical claim. The question to ask of the burning is neither "what tradition does it continue?" (the conservative art-historical question) nor "what tradition does it break from?" (the modernist art-historical question). The question is: what dispositif is this act reactivating, and through what medium is it now running? The 10 April burning reactivates the Bengali Muslim political-testimonial tradition's practice of composing an irreversible public act before a community of witnesses, naming what is being refused, and generating a documentary record for future retrieval and re-execution. It runs this through the medium of street performance and broadcast journalism, rather than through the puthi or the oral tradition. The act's formal novelty is its medium-layer; its protocol content is seven centuries old.

What the Media-Archaeological Testimony module explains about the burning: why the act has a depth that purely contemporary analysis cannot reach; why it is an instance of a practice with institutional continuity across seven centuries, rather than a political stunt; why the community of witnesses recognises it with a recognition that precedes and exceeds any individual's familiarity with performance-art theory or constitutional jurisprudence. They recognise it because the protocol is already in them. N. Katherine Hayles's principle applies: information cannot be severed from its material embodiment without distortion. The protocol's information content is inseparable from its embodied execution. The community's recognition of the burning is the protocol recognising itself.

Module C. Liturgical Coordination

The witness-structure that makes it political.

Thomas Schelling's focal point theory (The Strategy of Conflict, 1960) establishes that in coordination problems, people converge on naturally salient solutions in the absence of explicit negotiation: solutions whose salience comes from the structure of shared cultural competence, not from the structure of preferences. For the Bengali Muslim community in post-uprising Bangladesh, the constitutional burning was a focal point: the form for communal constitutional refusal that the shared Aufschreibesystem made naturally available. No negotiation was required to establish that burning a constitutional facsimile before a community of witnesses was the right form for the act the community wanted to perform. The protocol specification was already in the tradition.

Robert Aumann's common knowledge analysis (1976) extends this: an act achieves political force when everyone knows that everyone knows it, and everyone knows that everyone knows that everyone knows it, recursively, not when everyone knows something alone. The constitutional burning is a common-knowledge production device. It does not communicate that a community refuses the 1972 constitutional order; it produces common knowledge of that refusal, which is the precondition for collective action in conditions where individual commitment is uncertain. The press cameras are the common-knowledge amplifiers: they guarantee that what happens in the street will be known to have happened, across the network, to all members of the political community simultaneously.

Costly signalling theory (developed in evolutionary biology by Amotz Zahavi and extended across multiple disciplines) argues that signals are credible to the degree that they are expensive to fake. The constitutional burning is a costly signal in legal and political terms, not primarily in financial ones. To publicly burn a document representing the state's founding authority, under press cameras, with names attached, carries real risk of legal consequences in a political environment still negotiating the terms of the post-uprising order. The state's subsequent response to the act, whatever it may be, will function as retroactive certification of the signal's credibility. This is how the Islamic grief-protocols operated at Shahbagh in 2021: the arrests and charges against participants certified the jiyafat as a genuine costly signal. The community's willingness to pay the cost is evidence that its commitment is real, which is precisely what common-knowledge coordination requires.

What the Liturgical Coordination module explains about the burning: why it constituted a witnessing community rather than attracting a crowd; why the press staging was coordination structure rather than vanity; why the crowd's stillness, watchful rather than celebratory, was the visible form of a witnessing community's posture rather than a spectating audience's entertainment; and why the repetition on 18 April was the completion of the common-knowledge cascade that the first act initiated, not redundancy.

VII. Repetition: From Event to Protocol, From Gesture to Score

The second burning on 18 April 2026 is the more formally consequential act, and the argument for this must be made precisely rather than asserted.

To perform an act twice is to transform it, not double it. The first performance establishes that something happened; the second establishes that it can happen again, that it carries a form separable from the specific bodies, the specific crowd, the specific political weather of the first occasion. Performance studies has long distinguished between the singular event (which accumulates around charismatic persons, specific traumas, unrepeatable historical conjunctions) and the transmissible practice, which can be taught, inherited, adapted, and carried forward by communities that never witnessed the original. The constitutional burning's achievement with its second instantiation is the move from the first category to the second.

Three distinct functions of the repetition must be separated, because conflating them produces a weaker argument.

Repetition as citation. The 18 April burning cites the 10 April act: it acknowledges it as something real enough to deserve continuation, treats its form as worth inheriting, and in doing so makes the first act retroactively citable, which is to say, retroactively stable as a form with meaning. In Derrida's account of iterability (Signature Event Context, 1982; Limited Inc, 1988), the possibility of citation is what constitutes any utterance, linguistic or otherwise, as a carrier of meaning at all. An act that cannot be cited cannot be said to have had a determinate form. The 18 April burning gives the 10 April act its determinate form by demonstrating that its form is citable.

Repetition as transmissibility. The second burning demonstrates that the action does not depend on the irreplaceable charisma of a single performer or the unrepeatable emotional temperature of a specific political moment. It proves that the score is separable from the first instance: the protocol can be run by any community that shares the relevant political formation and is willing to construct the prop, assemble the witnesses, deliver the speeches, and set the fire. This is the most practically significant implication: the constitutional burning is a method one might employ, not an event one watches. Open-source performance: the instructions are embedded in the documented form.

Repetition as anti-singularity. This is the deepest function, and the one where Derrida's iterability concept becomes more analytically decisive than José Esteban Muñoz's account of ephemeral evidence in Cruising Utopia (2009). Muñoz prizes the undocumented singularity: the queer utopian performance that happens once, whose most important effects are carried in bodies rather than in documentation, whose refusal of filming is the refusal of the commodity and documentation apparatus. This framework is powerful for reading Fred Herko's death-dance; it is the wrong framework for reading the constitutional burning, because the constitutional burning's political logic depends on its iterability, not on its singularity. Derrida's iter, from itara, Sanskrit for 'other,' establishes that repetition produces difference through the structure of the same, rather than reproducing the same. Each instance of the constitutional burning will differ: different city, different crowd, different political moment, different particular prop. What the protocol guarantees is legibility across difference, not sameness: the form absorbs historical variation without losing its argumentative force. That is the anti-singularity achievement. The burning becomes a category rather than an occasion.

The political implication is direct. A singular act of political iconoclasm can be absorbed, processed, and forgotten. A protocol cannot be absorbed; it can only be enforced against, or permitted. The state's choice after 10 and 18 April 2026 is how to govern in conditions where the image of its constitutional authority has been demonstrated to be combustible by method, not how to respond to two burnings. Method is not absorbed. Method multiplies.

VIII. The Philosophical Problem: Sovereignty, Law, and the Constitutional Sign

i. Benjamin: the constitutional aura and its profanation

Walter Benjamin's account of the 'aura,' in Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit (1935), defines it as the work's embeddedness in a tradition, its quality of unique presence in a particular place and time, its authority derived from the cult value of the singular original. The 1972 Constitution carries a constitutional aura of exactly this structure: its authority is derived from its historical embeddedness in the narrative of liberation, its claim to be the direct expression of the people's will as shaped by the liberation war, its fifty-year accumulation of administrative authority, judicial citation, and institutional memory, rather than from any logical demonstration of its legitimacy. The aura is the constitution's historical appearance of inevitability.

Benjamin observed that mechanical reproduction destroys the aura: the reproduced image loses the uniqueness, the 'here and now,' the authority of the original. The prop-burning produces a formally more interesting operation than reproduction. The prop is a simulacrum, in Baudrillard's sense, rather than a reproduction of the constitution: a sign that no longer refers to an original but has become a self-sustaining image of authority. The constitutional aura has long since detached from any archival original and now circulates as the image of state legitimacy: the seal, the title, the recognisable format. The burning attacks this circulating image directly. It does not profane the original (there is no archival original to profane); it profanes the legitimacy-image, the constitutional aura as it actually circulates in political life. Benjamin's concept of Profanierung, the act of removing something from the sacred register and returning it to common use, applies: the burning removes the constitutional image from the sacral register of state authority and demonstrates that it can be touched, constructed by hand, placed on a wooden pyre, and dissolved into smoke and ash. The aura is profaned by the demonstration of combustibility.

Benjamin's dialectical image is relevant here in its most precise formulation: the dialectical image is the point at which the now-time of the revolutionary present seizes hold of the historical past, where 1971, 1972, 2024, and 2026 are condensed in a single public act. The burning on 10 April 2026 is precisely such an image: the anniversary of the Mujibnagar Declaration (1971), the founding date of the Constituent Assembly (10 April 1972), the 2024 uprising's constitutional aftermath, and the 2026 act of public dissolution are held simultaneously in one burning event. The dialectical image is the specific form of revolutionary temporality in which the now-time charges itself with every suppressed version of what the liberation war might have produced, rather than a metaphor for historical complexity.

ii. Schmitt: constituent power and the exception

Carl Schmitt's distinction between constituent power (the power that founds a constitutional order) and constituted power (the power that operates within it) provides the sharpest juridico-philosophical frame for the originary-legitimacy critique. In Schmitt's account, the sovereign is defined by the capacity to decide on the exception, the capacity to suspend the normal legal order in the name of necessity. The deeper Schmittian observation, relevant here, is that every constituted order conceals the constituent act that founded it: the constitution presents itself as the expression of a rational legal order, systematically obscuring the founding decision that was itself not bound by any prior law. The 1972 Constitution's founding decision (the conversion of Pakistan-elected representatives into a Bangladeshi constituent assembly) was exactly such a concealed sovereign act: it was a political decision dressed in legal clothing, not a legal procedure.

The constitutional critics' argument is, in Schmittian terms, that the 1972 founding suppressed constituent power rather than expressing it: instead of mobilising the people's constitutive authority as a sovereign political subject, it pre-empted that authority by using the legal machinery of a dissolved state to install a constitutional order before the people could constitute themselves as the founding subject. The burning performs a counterclaim: the people's constituent power was never legitimately transferred to the 1972 order; it persists, ungoverned and unresolved; and the burning is its most recent exercise.

Schmitt should be used carefully here and then released. The burning is not Schmittian in mood or aim: it does not celebrate the exception, seek the moment of decision, or celebrate sovereignty as decisionistic self-assertion. It stages a contest over constitutional legitimacy by demonstrating, in a public and irreversible medium, that the claim to historical inevitability is contestable. It stages this contest precisely within the democratic tradition's constitutive tension between constituent and constituted power, not in the register of sovereign exception. Schmitt defines the stakes; Derrida provides the better analytic for the act's form.

iii. Derrida: force of law, iterability, and archive

Derrida's Force de loi: le 'fondement mystique de l'autorité' (Force of Law: The 'Mystical Foundation of Authority,' 1989) demonstrates that the founding moment of any legal order is itself not legal: it is an act of force that is neither legal nor illegal, because the law it will found does not yet exist when it is performed. This 'mystical foundation' of legal authority is concealed by the subsequent operations of the legal order, which present themselves as the natural continuation of a rational founding. The burning exposes the mystical foundation: it says, in the medium of fire, that the authority claimed by the 1972 constitutional order was never grounded in anything more solid than a political decision, dressed in legal procedure, now clothed in fifty years of administrative habit. The foundation is mystical, which is to say it is precisely what fire can dissolve.

On iterability: Derrida's account in Signature événement contexte (Signature Event Context, 1977) establishes that an utterance, or any act, has meaning only insofar as it can be cited, repeated, and recognised in contexts different from its original. The constitutional burning's second instantiation on 18 April is Derrida's iterability made politically operative: it demonstrates that the 10 April act is not exhausted by its singularity, that it carries a form that can be cited and re-executed. The force detaches from the origin. The burning becomes what Derrida calls an iteremark: a mark that retains its force across its iterations, accumulating authority through repetition rather than losing authenticity.

On the archive: Derrida's Mal d'Archive (Archive Fever, 1995) establishes that the archive is a political technology, not a storage site alone. It determines what counts as the past, what counts as evidence, what counts as the record. The constitutional burning intervenes in the archival order of the 1972 constitutional regime: it introduces into the record an act that the regime's archival categories cannot accommodate. The act insists, in the medium of ash and press documentation, that there is a counter-archive, a suppressed record of founding acts that were not performed, constituent mandates that were not sought, people's assemblies that were not convened. The ash is an archival claim: this is what happened when the founding was confronted with the question of its own legitimacy.

IX. The Fracture in 'the People': The Essay's Moment of Highest Rigour

The framework's most powerful moves depend on treating constituent power as the expression of a popular will whose existence the uprising demonstrated. Constituent power theory, in its most rigorous formulations (Sieyès, Kalyvas, Lefort), has always had to confront the fact that 'the people' is a political construction, not a pre-political given. Claude Lefort's analysis in La question de la démocratie (1983) is the most useful: democracy's specificity is that it institutionalises the ongoing contest over who counts as the people and whose will is sovereign, rather than expressing a pre-existing popular unity. The burning performs constituent power in the name of a people whose unity is proposed, not given, and that distinction must be acknowledged rather than papered over.

In Bangladesh's case, 'the people' invoked by the burning is internally divided along several axes that the framework must name without resolving. Along lines of religion: the secular-nationalist tradition that the 1972 Constitution encoded has always been in tension with the Muslim-majority population's political-theological self-understanding; the burning's Islamic political-aesthetic grammar makes this tension visible rather than healing it. Along lines of ethnicity and language: the Constitutional Reform Commission's recommendation to replace 'Bengalees' with 'Bangladeshis' in Article 6(2) is a symptom of the constitutional framework's failure to include the non-Bengali communities of the Chittagong Hill Tracts and other regions in the national designation; the burning does not resolve this exclusion, though the reform recommendation implicitly acknowledges it. Along lines of class: the same uprising that drove Hasina out was quickly organised by political formations whose constitutional preferences tend toward electoral competition within a framework amenable to property and market interests; the burning's radicalism, its rejection of amendment in favour of replacement, does not represent all the political forces that the uprising mobilised. Along lines of gender: the uprising's visible gender politics, women prominent in protest leadership and targeted in repression, were only partially translated into the post-uprising constitutional conversation, and the burning's political-theological idiom has complex and contested relations with the question of gender equality in the constitutional order.

The burning's 'people' is therefore not the same 'people' as the secular-nationalist 'people' of the 1972 founding. This is the argument's most honest moment: the essay's highest theoretical claim, not a weakness to conceal. What the burning says, among other things, is that the 1972 Constitution's 'people' was always a particular class and cultural fraction that named itself the whole. The burning proposes a different people: whose composition remains to be constituted, whose internal fractures have not been resolved, whose claim to represent a sovereign constituent subject is itself a wager rather than a description. This is constituent power in the only honest sense available, not romantic populism: the act of calling an as-yet-unformed political subject into being, rather than the expression of an already-unified popular will. In the Shahid Turn framework, this constitutive incompleteness is the defining feature of the shahid's testimonial claim, not a defect: the shahid witnesses before future generations who do not yet exist, for a community that is still being constituted. The burning is addressed to a people that does not yet fully exist. That is why it is, in the deepest sense, a constituent act.

X. The Performance-Historical Comparisons: Earning Rather Than Name-Dropping

Two comparisons do real work and deserve extended analysis. Others are named only insofar as they sharpen the contrast with what the constitutional burning is doing.

Aaron Bushnell: the inverted grammar

On 25 February 2024, six months before the 36 July uprising and fourteen months before PAC's first burning, the American airman Aaron Bushnell walked to the Israeli Embassy in Washington in his military uniform, documented his act in advance through a recorded statement and a live-streamed video, set himself on fire, and died shouting 'Free Palestine.' Bushnell understood three things that the constitutional burning shares, and one thing that the constitutional burning inverts. He understood that in the era of platform distribution, the act must be performed before mediated witnesses in real time to function simultaneously as testimony and event. He understood that the choice of what one wears (military uniform, the insignia of the state whose complicity one refuses) is a protocol claim and not a symbolic choice alone. And he understood that certain political arguments can only be made by the body's own irreversible material commitment to their conclusion.

What the constitutional burning inverts is the grammar of sacrifice. Bushnell's act was a political self-fana: the annihilation of the self as the medium through which witness is constituted. The body becomes the argument's medium; the body's destruction is the argument's proof of sincerity. In the Shahid Turn framework, this is the heroic grammar of the Western tragic tradition: the individual body sacrificed as the price of political testimony. PAC refused this grammar and chose a different one. They identified another body, the state's semiotic body, its founding image, as the thing that needed to burn, and they preserved their own bodies as the community of witnesses. The inversion is not incidental; it is the work's central formal claim. Where Bushnell made himself the medium and the message simultaneously, PAC made the state's self-representation the medium and themselves the community that testifies to what the ash means. In the Shahid Turn's grammar, this is a different politics of the body, not a lesser sacrifice: the community constitutes itself through collective witness to what has been burned, instead of through the spectacle of an individual's self-destruction. The shahid's testimony functions before God, before history, and before future generations. The constitutional burning's witness-community is its future generations.

Fred Herko: the anti-documentary and what the burning refuses

Fred Herko danced naked through a Greenwich Village fifth-floor window on 27 October 1964, while Mozart's Coronation Mass played, without informing the Warhol Factory or the Judson Dance Theater community that this was coming. Warhol's response, "Why didn't he tell us? We could have filmed it," is the art world's administrative apparatus encountering the act it cannot process. Muñoz recuperates Herko's death-dance in Cruising Utopia as paradigmatic queer utopian performance: the act performed in the register of the 'not-yet-here,' whose most important effects are carried in bodies rather than in documentation, whose refusal of filming is the refusal of the commodity and documentation apparatus.

What the constitutional burning shares with Herko is the utopian-performative structure: both acts perform a future that does not yet exist, enact a condition of possibility that the current political reality forecloses. The burning performs a Bangladesh whose constitutional order has been constituted by the people's actual constituent authority, instead of by a parliamentary short-circuit. That Bangladesh does not yet exist. The burning is its anticipatory enactment.

The constitutional burning reaches its formal difference from Herko at exactly the point where the Muñoz framework reaches its limit. Herko's act was definitively singular, definitively undocumented, definitively exhausted by its one occurrence. Its political force was inseparable from that singularity: it could not be repeated, only mourned and carried in memory. The constitutional burning's political logic requires the opposite: iterability rather than singularity, saturation of documentation rather than its refusal, the protocol that must be repeatable to do its work rather than the one occurrence that cannot be repeated. This is where Derrida's iterability is the more exact tool. The constitutional burning does not address a community that carries the act in their bodies as intimate mourning; it addresses a political community organised by a shared protocol, for whom the act's value is precisely that it can be done again, by anyone, anywhere there is a pyre and a constitutional facsimile and a community willing to witness. The news microphones are the act's network infrastructure, not a betrayal of the act's purity.

XI. The Documentation Ecology: Different Routing, Not Absence

The constitutional burning's invisibility to the international contemporary art world (its absence from the circuits that move work from studios to biennales to art-historical discourse) is not evidence that it did not happen or that it is not art. It is evidence of a structural asymmetry between the act's documentation ecology and the infrastructure that feeds the biennial-art apparatus.

The work circulates through Bangladeshi news television, through movement-internal WhatsApp groups, through Facebook posts in Bengali, through the online platforms of Bangladeshi political organisations, and through theoretical writings that exist primarily in Bengali and are accessible internationally only to scholars with specific regional and linguistic competencies. These are differently routed media, not inferior ones. The Western contemporary art world's inability to read the act is a property of the apparatus's input filters, not a property of the act. The Arab Spring's political aesthetics entered the apparatus through a combination of Western journalistic mediation, the cross-cultural legibility of the graphic design idiom, and the participation of internationally networked Arab artists and curators. The constitutional burning circulates through a documentation ecology that does not intersect with those mediation channels. The question is how it is archived, not whether the burning is documented, and the answer is: through the Bengali Muslim political community's own Aufschreibesystem, in its latest digital layer. This is a structural consequence of the act's political formation, a decision to remain routed through the community's own distribution infrastructure, not a failure to arrive at the art world's address.

The institutional critique the burning performs is enacted precisely through this routing decision. The burning does not seek the art world's imprimatur. It does not format itself for biennial legibility. It refuses to be Institutional Critique in the gallery-sanctioned mode, because Institutional Critique, as a historicised movement, has itself become an institution for administering the critique of institutions, safely contained within the circuit it claims to challenge. The constitutional burning is refusal, not critique. Refusal, unlike critique, cannot be curated.

XII. Conclusion: The Transfer That Cannot Be Reversed

The burnings of 10 and 18 April 2026 shifted the constitutional question from the domain of legal interpretation to the domain of publicly witnessed performative contestation. Once that transfer occurred, the legitimacy of the 1972 constitutional order could no longer be treated as a purely juristic problem, to be resolved through amendment procedures conducted within the framework of an authority whose legitimacy was precisely what was in dispute. The burning placed the dispute in the public sphere, before cameras, in the medium of irreversible material transformation, and certified that the crisis of constitutional legitimacy is a political crisis rather than a legal question requiring legal resolution. This does not mean that legal resolution is impossible or undesirable; it means that legal resolution will now take place in the shadow of a publicly enacted claim that the authority of the 1972 order is not historically inevitable. The shadow does not disappear when the legal proceedings begin. It qualifies them.

The formal claim of this essay, that the burning must be read as a major contemporary performance, rests on the formal analysis of its structure, not on the act's access to any institutional circuit of validation. The act was staged in advance. It constructed a specific material object for the purpose of destruction. It was performed before an intentionally assembled public that included both press witnesses and a community of political-theological participants. It had a formal score (assembly, banner, speech, construction, ignition, witness, dispersal) that was repeated with sufficient fidelity on 18 April to establish the score as transmissible form. Its meaning was inseparable from the specific material choice of what to burn (the constitutional sign, not an arbitrary symbol), the specific date of the first burning (the anniversary of the Constituent Assembly's inauguration), and the specific structure of its witness-relation (the community of witnesses who carry what they saw in their political imagination, not in their phones). These are the marks of performance art in the expanded sense. Their presence here is demonstrable. The apparatus's failure to read them is a property of the apparatus, not of the work.

The Shahid Turn framework (Insurgent Protocol, Media-Archaeological Testimony, Liturgical Coordination) is the beginning of an adequate theoretical account of the burnings, not its conclusion. What the fuller account requires is a new art-historical category adequate to acts that are simultaneously theological, political, aesthetic, and archival; rooted in specific civilisational formations without being only local; and structurally resistant to the administrative apparatus through which the international art world decides what counts. The Bengali Muslim aesthetic tradition's seven-century media-archaeological stack is a source from which theoretical categories emerge that the Western art-theoretical canon has not developed, because it has not needed them. It is not raw material for theory tourism. It needs them now. Bangladesh is a provocation to theory, not a case study.

The burnings did not destroy a constitution. They publicly destroyed the image through which a contested constitutional order claimed historical inevitability. That destruction cannot be undone. The witnesses carry it. The record carries it. And the theory that must follow it (this essay, and the fuller account that the Shahid Turn's framework will eventually generate) is accountable to the precision with which it tracks what actually happened, in a Dhaka street, with fire, before witnesses, in April 2026, not to any institution's validation.

Coda: A Note on Method and the Essay's Own Limits

The essay has tried to maintain a distinction that theory frequently collapses: the distinction between what is verifiable, what is interpretive, and what is the author's own conceptual intervention. The constitutional archive is verifiable; the citations are traceable; the institutional sequence of March to November 1972 is in the public record. The performance archive is partially verifiable through the available video documentation, and partially platform-bound or movement-internal; the essay marks the difference where it matters, including the retraction of the liturgical-recitation claim that earlier drafts made without sufficient evidence. The theoretical framework, the Shahid Turn's three modules, is the author's own conceptual contribution, grounded in a decade's engagement with the Bengali Muslim aesthetic archive, answerable to that archive, and proposed as a set of analytic operations that the archive makes necessary, rather than as a complete doctrine.

The essay ends with a colder formulation, not with prophetic cadence, because what happened in those Dhaka streets requires precision more than incense: the burnings shifted constitutional legitimacy from jurisprudence into performance. That shift is irreversible. Theory must now account for it. The accounting begins here.

The Kushari Descendants

Nayem Ali — Fri, 08 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The month of Chaitra has a particular cruelty in Bangladesh. It announces its heat with a dry, pressing weight that makes the air feel like a punishment for something you cannot remember doing. Chaitra (the last month of the Bengali calendar) is the season when, locals joke, the sun decides to settle its old scores. That Tuesday afternoon in Khulna, it felt personal.

Just past one, Redwan, Nakib, and I stepped out of our car onto a rural road, and the heat hit us the way a wall hits someone who is not looking. The thermometer said 34 degrees Celsius. The air felt closer to 39. The car's air conditioning, running all morning, had been doing cosmetic work. We were sweating through our shirts. Our backpacks sat heavy on our shoulders, stuffed with cameras, cables, notebooks, and deadlines, the usual baggage of freelance journalists on assignment.

We had not planned to stop. But somewhere between the morning's interviews and the afternoon's obligations, the three of us had silently agreed that we needed to exist outside our screens for a few minutes. To just be somewhere without purpose.

We found that somewhere at a tea stall by the road. A tong (a roadside tea shack), the kind that exists in every corner of rural Bangladesh with almost militant consistency: wooden benches scarred with cigarette burns, a man behind a portable stove, glasses of strong red tea brewed over open flame, and old Bangladeshi cinema songs playing softly. We sat down. The village men looked at us the way villagers always look at outsiders, with a quiet, unassuming appraisal that takes in your shoes, your accent, and your general energy before arriving at a verdict. We must have looked like city boys on holiday, though we were technically working.

We ordered tea and fell into the kind of conversation you only have when you are tired and slightly overheated and have nowhere to be for two hours. We asked the men about their days, their families, their kids. The sort of unnecessary talks that end up being the most necessary conversations of all. After a while, we all drifted to our phones. Redwan was checking something. Nakib was filming a short reel with his DJI Osmo. I was scrolling through the news. The village men sitting across from us were also on their phones, legs crossed, a cigarette each, faces tilted toward their screens with the same glazed ease. The digital world, it seems, has truly arrived in every tea stall in Bangladesh.

It was 1:37 pm when Redwan sent me a map link. No message. Just a pin.

I opened it. "Rabindranath Tagore Ancestor Residents and Rabindra Memorial Collection, Pithabhog, Khulna." Seven kilometres away.

I looked up at him. "Do you want to go?"

He shrugged the way Redwan shrugs, which is to say, with great enthusiasm concealed under the pretence of indifference. "I mean, we have nothing for the next two hours."

I turned to Nakib. He smiled, also on brand for Nakib, and began humming. Jodi tor dak shune keu na ashe, tobe ekla cholo re: if no one answers your call, walk alone.

We laughed. We called our driver.

Inside the car, Redwan declared that we were going to visit Rabi Thakur's ancestral home, and therefore, with the solemn logic of a man who takes these things seriously, we were obligated to listen to Rabindra Sangeet (Tagore's songs) on the way. I had the playlist. I scrolled and chose Shironamhin's version of Gram Chara Oi Ranga Matir Poth, the classic Tagore song about leaving one's village behind, reinterpreted by one of Bangladesh's most beloved rock bands with just enough wistfulness to make it perfect for a drive through the countryside.

Redwan and I hummed along while Nakib turned the camera on himself and started narrating something for his vlog, the lens of his Osmo pointing at the window, at the road, at the trees blurring past. The rural landscape of Khulna in Chaitra does something to you if you let it.

The mustard fields are long gone by this month, and the paddy is either harvested or drying in stubble. What remains is a dense greenness. Mango trees still thick with leaves. Jackfruit hanging low like pendulums. The occasional flash of a pond between road and horizon, catching the sun like a coin dropped in the grass.

We reached the gate in about ten minutes.

It was a big gate, painted deep red, with white pillars and an inscription across the top in neat Bengali script: "Rabindranath Tagore Ancestor Residents and Rabindra Memorial Collection, Pithabhog, Khulna." We stood there for a moment. Three journalists with phones and a drone, taking it in. There is something stirring about standing at the entrance of a place that connects to one of the greatest literary minds in human history, even if that entrance is a little dusty, and the paint is beginning to peel at the edges.

We walked in.

To the left was the memorial collection building. Locked, shuttered, sleepy in the afternoon heat. Ahead of us stretched a generous, open compound that felt like it had its own private climate. The trees were thick and old, knitting patches of shadow across the ground. And everywhere, mangoes. Small, unripe, bright green, lying scattered across the soil like an art installation no one had been invited to. Every few steps, another one. The mango trees here clearly outnumbered everything else, a fact that Aloka would later confirm for me with a proud smile.

We did what curious people do when they find an unlocked, open, historically significant space in the middle of a warm afternoon. We wandered. We read the wall writings, mostly history, dates, names, the kind of inscriptions that give you the skeleton of a story without the flesh. We peered through the grills of the memorial building like cats who had found a door that was almost, but not quite, open enough. Nakib filmed. Redwan pulled out his drone and began setting it up with the focused energy of a man on a mission. I circled the premises, hands in pockets, looking for something I could not quite name.

After a while, we sat down in the shade. Nakib and I lit cigarettes. Redwan was crouched over his drone, muttering to himself the way he does when something is not calibrating.

I spotted a teenage boy walking through the premises and waved him over. He came barefoot, with the long, unhurried stride of someone who had nowhere particular to be.

"Do you know when this place opens?" I asked. "We'd love to go inside."

He pointed toward a house beyond the compound boundary. The kind of house you see in older Kolkata films. A single storey structure with a deep porch and clay walls, the kind that feels like it has been growing out of the earth slowly for decades. "The people who keep the keys live there," he said. "If you go and ask, they'll open it for you."

Nakib and I looked at each other, stubbed out our cigarettes, and walked over.

There were two women visible from the path. One was elderly, sitting near the entrance of the house, her white sari arranged around her like a settled cloud. The other was younger, perhaps in her mid-thirties, and she stepped outside before we even reached the gate, as though she had been watching for visitors.

She smiled at us first. That was the thing I noticed. It was not the cautious smile of someone sizing up strangers. It was warm and immediate, the smile of someone who had been waiting, not necessarily for us, but for anyone who had come with curiosity and good intentions.

"Are you here to see the memorial?" she asked.

"Yes," we said.

"Wait," she said, already turning back inside. "I'm coming with the keys. We keep them close by. Whenever someone comes, we open it. Otherwise, the place gets dirty and muddy."

I told her we understood. I introduced ourselves. I was Nayem, this was Nakib, and our friend Redwan was back at the memorial with his drone. We were journalists from Dhaka, here in Khulna for other work, and we had found this place by accident, by a map link, at a tea stall, because of a slow afternoon.

She nodded and told us her name.

Aloka Kushari. The seventeenth generation of Rabindranath Tagore.

I did not visibly react, but something shifted in the air. Or in me.

Before we could properly respond, we heard the old woman from the porch call out, in a slow, emphatic voice, "Wait!", and she began making her way toward us. She moved with the deliberate care of someone who has long since negotiated a peace with her own pace. When she reached us, she was smiling, her smile entirely toothless and completely radiant.

"I am Sayarani Kushari," she announced, with the formality of someone presenting credentials. "I am more than ninety years old. I am Aloka's mother-in-law."

Aloka smiled beside her and leaned slightly toward us. "She's closer to a hundred," she said quietly, with the patient affection of someone who says this often. "She forgets things sometimes, loses track. But she always wants to come when visitors arrive."

Sayarani Kushari stood there in the heat of a Chaitra afternoon, the sixteenth generation of one of the most significant figures in Bengali and world literature, presenting herself to three strangers with the easy dignity of someone who has long made peace with who she is and where she comes from.

There was nothing performative about it. She was here, as she had always been here, as her family had always been here, tethered to this land and this name across nearly a century of her own life.

We nodded as if it were perfectly normal, because in that moment, somehow, it felt like it was.

Aloka unlocked the memorial and led us in, speaking with the practised ease of someone who has given this tour before but still finds meaning in it. The room held photographs in dark wooden frames, documents under glass that had begun to yellow at the corners, and a small collection of objects. The material evidence of a family's connection to literary history. The air inside was cooler, faintly damp, the smell of paper that had lived through many monsoons.

Redwan and Nakib moved through it with appreciation, pausing at photographs, squinting at inscriptions. Eventually, Redwan's drone beckoned him back outside, and Nakib followed with his camera.

That left Aloka and me standing in the middle of the room, the afternoon quiet around us.

I asked her, the way you ask about something that feels important without being sure why, "When did people first know about this place? That it was connected to Tagore?"

She thought for a moment, then answered with the precision of someone who has turned this story over in her mind many times.

"It started in 1995. Before that, no one knew we were part of the Tagore family. There was just an old, damp building. Water always dripping from the ceiling. The walls going soft. Then one day, people from Bagerhat Adorsho Maddhamik Biddalaya came here with documents. They had been doing research and wanted to prove that this land was part of Rabindranath Tagore's homestead. My mother-in-law was there during that conversation in 1995. She remembers it."

Aloka paused.

"After that, people started digging deeper. They found the proof."

She tilted her head slightly, her expression shifting to something closer to delight. "Do you know," she said, "that Tagore isn't actually our family title?"

"No," I said, honestly. "I didn't know that."

"People called us Tagore out of respect. A kind of honorary title. But our real lineage is the Kushari family. We have always been Kusharis."

She said it the way you say something that feels like a correction and a reclamation at once. The Tagore name, the one that won the Nobel Prize, the one that filled schoolbooks and concert halls and national anthems across two countries, was a name the world had given. The Kushari name was the one they had always kept for themselves.

We walked the premises as she talked, looping slowly through the shade of the mango trees, the occasional jackfruit hanging low over our heads like a warning. She told me about her husband, Barun Kushari, the seventeenth generation, like her, who works at the local Khulna Museum in a curatorial capacity. The Archaeology Department had offered him the position when the family's lineage was officially confirmed. The salary, she said, is low. The government gives them 1,500 taka per month through the local Thana Nirbahi Officer or TNO (the chief administrative officer of an upazila). Roughly thirteen dollars. Enough for very little.

"We don't receive any significant incentives," she said, and her voice carried no bitterness, only a matter-of-fact tiredness. "As you can see, we are poor. It's hard sometimes."

She pointed toward the far end of the compound, where a modest poultry enclosure sat behind a low fence of bamboo and wire. "That's why we do poultry." She smiled, then the smile shifted into something more complicated. "You know, people used to say things. That a Brahmin family shouldn't run a poultry farm. That it wasn't proper for who we are." She paused. "But when your back is against the wall, you do what you have to do. We have children. We have a life. You do everything to ensure your livelihood."

There is a particular kind of dignity in that sentence. You do everything to ensure your livelihood. I kept turning it over in my mind as she spoke. Here was the seventeenth generation of Rabindranath Tagore's family, descendants of Debendranath Tagore's branch, living on a small plot of land in Pithabhog, Khulna. Raising chickens. Opening the memorial museum whenever a stranger happened to find their way here by a map link on WhatsApp.

I asked her about the land, and she brightened, the way people do when they get to talk about something they love.

"We have more than fifty mango trees," she said. "All different kinds. Fazli, Aam Rupali, Himsagar, Madhugulguli. And jackfruit, coconut. I've lost count of everything." She gestured around us with the proprietorial ease of someone who knows every inch of a place, every root and rise. "It's peaceful here. Very green."

She took me to the pond at the southern edge of the property. A wide, still body of water, half shaded by trees, its surface broken only by the occasional dimple of an insect landing. There had been a legal dispute over it, she told me, and they had lost the case. She did not elaborate, and I did not push. She just stood there, looking at it, with the expression of someone cataloguing a small, particular grief.

"We used to play there as kids," she said finally. "Fall in, climb out, fall in again." She laughed, a short, bright sound that startled a bird from the branches above us. "Good memories."

I asked, carefully, about visitors. Whether people from Kolkata or India had ever reached out, offered support, or made a connection across the border.

She nodded.

"People from Kolkata and India visit sometimes. For the history, for the connection. They come, they look around, they take photos." She paused. "No one has offered any help. But honestly?" She looked at me directly. "We don't need help. We are happy with what we have. We feel proud, genuinely proud, to belong to this family."

When she said that, I felt something prickle at the back of my neck. It was not pity. It was not admiration exactly. It was something closer to recognition. The kind you feel when someone says something entirely true and entirely unexpected at the same time. Later, writing this, I felt it again.

The Tagore name, in Bengal, carries the weight of an entire civilisation's self-understanding. It is in the national anthems of both Bangladesh and India. It is in the songs that children learn before they learn mathematics. It is in the poetry that lovers quote to each other across generations. And here, in Khulna, Pithabhog, in a compound of mango trees and a locked memorial museum, the seventeenth generation was raising chickens and opening the gate for strangers and saying, we are happy with what we have, we feel proud to belong to this family, and meaning it without irony, without performance, without the slightest suggestion that they required your sympathy.

That is the most aristocratic thing I have heard anyone say in a long time.

Aloka mentioned the annual Rabindra Jayanti celebration, held on the 25th of Baishakh (May 8th in the Gregorian calendar). This year, the program was scheduled across three days. The 8th, 9th, and 10th of May, running from eight in the morning until half past ten at night.

"We start in the early morning with Prodip," she explained. The ceremonial lighting of lamps. "Then pigeon flying. People come from Khulna Shilpakala, Shabuj Academy, local government officials, and school children with their teachers. People even come from Dhaka sometimes." All day, they sing Rabindra Sangeet. Children hold drawing competitions, crouched over sheets of paper held down with stones against the breeze. People recite Tagore's poetry. There are theatrical performances of his plays and stories, staged in this compound, under these mango trees, in the shade of a place that remembers him through blood rather than marble.

She looked at me with an expression that was partly an invitation and partly a question.

"Why don't you and your friends come? For the 8th of May? We would love to have you."

I told her we were leaving Khulna on the 6th of April. That we had work to deliver in Dhaka, that we had come here by detour and could not stay. She looked, briefly, like she had when I asked about her husband's salary, a small shadow crossing her face before the composure returned.

"Maybe next year," I said.

Redwan's voice came from across the compound. "Hey, it's almost 3:30. We have to go."

I turned back to Aloka. The afternoon had tilted past the harshest part of its heat, and the light through the mango trees was beginning to take on that golden, late afternoon quality that makes everything in rural Bangladesh look as if it had been painted by someone who was trying hard.

Sayarani Kushari was sitting near the memorial entrance, watching the three of us with the long, calm patience of someone who has seen many visitors come and go.

Aloka offered us lunch. I wanted to say yes. The kind of yes that comes not from hunger but from not wanting to leave a place that has given you something you did not know you were looking for.

But there was a deadline, and a driver, and Dhaka waiting at the end of the road.

I asked to take a few photographs. She agreed with a smile, smoothing the edge of her sari almost without thinking. I took ten minutes. Not enough, but something. Then I walked back toward the gate, past the mango trees, past the scattered unripe fruit on the ground, past the locked memorial with its grille through which we had peered like curious cats just two hours earlier.

We drove away. I put on Gram Chara Oi Ranga Matir Poth again.

Redwan was quiet. Nakib was reviewing his footage, the small screen of his Osmo glowing in the dim of the back seat. I looked out the window at the Khulna countryside rolling by in the heat and thought about a woman in her mid-thirties standing in a compound of mango trees, holding a ring of keys, describing her life with the quiet ease of someone who has decided to be exactly where they are. No more, no less.

I am writing this on the 7th of April, a month before Rabindranath Tagore's birth anniversary, with the same song playing in the background. On May 8th, Aloka Kushari will light a lamp at dawn. Pigeons will scatter into a Khulna morning sky. Children from local schools will arrive with their teachers, a little shy, a little excited, their shoes still dusty from the walk. Someone will sing Amar Shonar Bangla, the national anthem Tagore wrote for the country. People will recite his poetry in the shade of mango trees.

The seventeenth generation will be there.

The eighteenth will be somewhere nearby, growing into their inheritance.

And the sixteenth, Sayarani Kushari, nearly a hundred years old, toothless and smiling, will probably walk out slowly to greet the visitors, because she always does, because she has always done, because some habits are less about habit and more about who you are.

We feel proud to belong to this family.

I keep returning to that sentence. I will for a while.

The Rabindra Jayanti program at Pithabhog, Khulna, will be held on May 8, 9, and 10, 2026, from 8 am to 10:30 pm daily.

The Saffron Conquest

Apurba Jahangir — Thu, 07 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Three words will define West Bengal for the foreseeable future. Not a vision. Not a promise. Three words from the man who will now govern over 100 million Bengalis: Detect. Delete. Deport. Suvendu Adhikari coined them before the votes were cast, used them as a campaign manifesto, and now, having delivered the BJP its first West Bengal government, he carries them with him into office. Words have a way of becoming policy when the man who said them holds the pen.

I watched the results from Dhaka. 207 seats for the BJP, 80 for the Trinamool Congress. It was "historic." The word got used often enough on the television panels. What nobody said plainly was this: for Bengali Muslims on both sides of the Padma, this is a verdict.

The Election Commission's Special Intensive Revision process deleted or placed under adjudication approximately 9.1 million names ahead of the election. The pattern of those deletions was not random. Around 65 percent of the voters whose names were challenged were Muslim. In Murshidabad, a district where two-thirds of the population is Muslim, entire constituencies were gutted. In Nandigram, over 95 percent of challenged names belonged to Muslim voters who make up only a quarter of the constituency. You can call this a coincidence. You can also call a sieve a coincidence. It depends how closely you are watching.

Adhikari made no effort to hide the arithmetic. In July 2025, he announced: "If around 50 lakh names were excluded in Bihar, Bengal could have as many as 1.25 crore such names. All Bangladeshis and Rohingyas in West Bengal will be pushed back after the SIR." At a Sodepur rally, he instructed party workers: "Your duty is to ensure that the names of Bangladeshi Muslims, Rohingyas and voters with double or triple entries do not appear in the fresh electoral rolls." And when TMC supporters raised slogans in response near a Kolkata polling booth during the election itself, he pointed at them and said: "They are all Bangladeshi Muslims. They are scared. Mamata will be wiped out."

When Muslim migrant workers from Nandigram, men with Aadhaar cards and voter IDs, men who had traveled to Gujarat and Maharashtra to earn a living, gathered near a rally, Adhikari addressed them directly: "Don't make a mistake. Mend your ways so that there are no problems after May 4. You can give threatening looks and say 'Joy Bangla', but I am writing down everything." Sit with that sentence for a moment. I am writing down everything. That is not campaign rhetoric. That is a man announcing in advance how he intends to use state power. That man now governs West Bengal. The list will now be law.

This is not a defense of Mamata Banerjee or the Trinamool Congress. Her fifteen years in power produced their own thick catalogue of booth capturing, political violence, and patronage architecture that would impress even the most cynical observer of South Asian politics. The Bengali Muslim voter who turned away from the TMC had reasons. Grievance is real. Corruption is real. The problem is not that the BJP won. The problem is the specific machinery by which it won, and the specific ideology it intends to govern with. These are separate conversations. Collapsing them, treating the BJP's victory as a deserved correction, is the intellectual equivalent of diagnosing a fever and prescribing arsenic.

Violence erupted within hours of the result. TMC offices burned in Tollygunge, Baruipur, Baranagar, and Howrah. A worker was killed in Birbhum. The BJP called these "sporadic incidents." They would. The violence of a party that has just consolidated power on the oxygen of communal fear is never described by that party as the logical outcome of its own campaign. It is always sporadic. Until it isn't. Hindus for Human Rights, not a body one would describe as partial to any opposition, called the SIR process "nothing less than the destruction of Indian democracy." When the most restrained voices in the room are using the word destruction, the room is already burning.

Now I want to say something that will make certain editors in Delhi uncomfortable, and I find I am no longer able to avoid it.

For the better part of two years, India's political establishment, its BJP governments, its primetime anchors, its think tanks, have described post-Hasina Bangladesh as an extremist state. Sheikh Hasina, from her residence in Delhi, has contributed generously to this narrative, warning in op-ed after op-ed of "radical Islamist ideology" spreading through Bangladesh, of "extremists filling the political vacuum." Indian media obliged with extraordinary enthusiasm. It framed Yunus as an enabler of Islamism. It framed Bangladesh's students as jihadi proxies. And here is the part that still astonishes me: a man wearing a panjabi kurta (the long tunic worn by Muslim men across South Asia) became, in the visual language of Indian television, shorthand for radicalism. The skullcap, the beard, the kurta: a uniform of suspicion, broadcast nightly into hundreds of millions of homes. The semiotic war on Muslim appearance was not incidental to the BJP's political project. It was the project.

So Bangladesh was extremist. Bengali Muslims were extremist. A kurta was extremist. And now, if you have been paying even moderate attention, one is entitled to ask: does India have an extremism problem?

A government that systematically removes the names of nine million minority voters from electoral rolls before an election. A senior leader who instructs party workers to purge Muslim names from voter lists and tells Muslim workers he is writing down their names. A campaign that treats Muslim identity as inherently foreign, inherently criminal, inherently incompatible with citizenship. A wave of violence after the election directed at political opponents. A governing slogan (Detect. Delete. Deport.) that the incoming chief minister deployed as policy, not metaphor.

If this were happening in Dhaka, we know exactly what the Times of India headline would read. We have seen those headlines. We have been those headlines.

What it means for us, and this is the part I am obligated to say plainly, is that the question of Bangladesh's proximity to West Bengal is no longer theoretical. Adhikari's government inherits a border. It inherits a stated policy of deportation. In 2025, before he even held this office, hundreds of Bengali-speaking Muslims, many holding Indian citizenship and pending court cases, were pushed to the Bangladesh border and expelled without documentation, without process, without appeal. The CPI(M) documented the cases. Human rights organizations documented the cases. Bangladesh's Foreign Minister has already issued a formal warning about intensified "push-ins." A man who said I am writing down everything is now in a position to act on that list, with a 2,000-kilometer border, a policy of three words, and 207 seats behind him.

The BJP's political machinery requires Bangladesh to be a permanent source of Islamic threat. We are not a neighbor in this architecture. We are a prop. The New York Times called this win the completion of "its decades-long campaign to remake the world's largest democracy." Remake is the operative word. We Bangladeshis know what that means.

For now, the man with the list is in office. He told us, clearly and on the record, that he has been writing everything down. We should believe him.

A 'Borderline' Victory

Faisal Mahmud — Wed, 06 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Will Kolkata's saffron spring be Dhaka's long winter?

The fortress has fallen. For decades, West Bengal stood as a singular redoubt, first for the monolithic Left and then for Mamata Banerjee's mercurial brand of subaltern populism, resisting the saffron tide that has flooded much of the Indian heartland.

As the dust settles on the 2026 assembly elections, the bhadralok (Bengali gentry) exceptionalism that long defined Kolkata's political identity lies dismantled. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won 207 of 298 assembly seats. The All India Trinamool Congress (TMC) has not just been defeated; it has been routed.

Mamata Banerjee's ouster after fifteen years marks a tectonic shift, one that will register far beyond the banks of the Hooghly.

The scale of this victory, well clear of the majority mark, closes one era and opens a fraught new chapter in South Asian geopolitics. India's most sensitive frontier is being recalibrated from the ground up. Nowhere is this reality weighed with more trepidation or clinical interest than in Bangladesh.

For Bangladesh, West Bengal is more than a neighbor: it is a cultural twin, a primary economic gateway, and a mirror in which Dhaka often sees its own reflection. With Tarique Rahman's new government in Dhaka still steering through a difficult transition, the arrival of a BJP-led administration in Kolkata adds a volatile chemistry to the bilateral relationship.

Yet to understand the BJP's leap from perennial outsider to master of the Writers' Building, one must look beyond the standard metrics of anti-incumbency.

The party's rise came from a sophisticated pincer move: fierce communal polarization paired with a granular, ground-up reorganization of the Bengali social fabric. By the time the first ballots dropped, the BJP had repositioned Hindutva (Hindu nationalism) as the new "big tent" of Indian politics, folding local identities into a broader nationalist project.

The BJP's rise in Bengal rested on a foundation of "demographic anxiety," a polite euphemism for a campaign fed by rhetoric on illegal migration and border insecurity.

Central to this shift was the tactical use of Bangladesh as a domestic political proxy. The fall of Sheikh Hasina's government and the rise of Muhammad Yunus's interim administration opened a timely vacuum, which the BJP filled with a narrative of existential threat.

In the party's framing, the border became a sieve through which "infiltrators" were said to be diluting Hindu demographics. This anxiety was calibrated to appeal to the Matua community and other Dalit groups, long neglected by the bhadralok elite, who see the Citizenship Amendment Act as their main vehicle for legal belonging.

By championing the CAA, the BJP peeled away large Dalit and OBC cohorts from the TMC's grasp, proving that Hindutva can be as much about social inclusion for the marginalized as it is about exclusion of the "other."

Such themes are potent electoral currency in India, but they translate poorly into diplomacy. To a BNP government in Dhaka, this rhetoric sounds less like administrative concern and more like the systemic stigmatization of Bengali Muslims. The result is an immediate paradox for New Delhi.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government has shown a pragmatic willingness to engage with Tarique Rahman's administration, moving past old loyalties. But if the new BJP satrapy in Kolkata keeps amplifying the rhetoric that alienates the Bangladeshi public, India risks a debilitating dissonance: speaking the language of partnership in New Delhi while shouting the language of polarization in Kolkata.

The media's role in this consolidation was indispensable. A steady diet of reportage on the vulnerability of Hindus in post-Hasina Bangladesh nationalized what was, on paper, a state election. When Indian news outlets played up the influence of Islamist elements in Dhaka during the interim regime, they supplied the "proof" for the BJP's warnings of a spillover effect.

This created a potent feedback loop in which foreign instability became a domestic electoral asset. The BJP's slogan, "detect, delete, deport," served as a security guarantee for a fearful electorate, rebranding the party as the only credible guardian of the frontier.

Narrative alone does not win elections of this magnitude. Beneath the grand stories of nationalism lay a ruthless organizational pivot.

For decades, the Left and the TMC held power through a "party-society" model in which local cadres mediated everything from dispute resolution to welfare access. The BJP dismantled this architecture by building its own organizational machinery, often recruiting disillusioned lower-tier cadres from both formations.

This allowed the party to match, and in many cases surpass, its rivals in booth-level management.

The BJP's success also rested on its ability to pair this grassroots muscle with a compelling economic narrative. While the TMC relied on a populist cocktail of welfare schemes and direct cash transfers, the BJP countered with the promise of "double-engine growth": the idea that a state governed by the same party as the Centre would see an influx of infrastructure and industry.

This economic pitch resonated with a youth population weary of stagnation and a middle class frustrated by the entrenched syndicate raj (cartel rule). By framing the TMC as a party of local corruption and itself as a vehicle for national aspiration, the BJP captured both the disgruntled youth and an older voter base anxious about security.

There is a tantalizing upside to this alignment. For years, the dispute over the Teesta River's waters has been held hostage by the federal structure of Indian democracy.

Mamata Banerjee was the lone "Dr. No" who consistently vetoed a deal brokered by the Centre. With a BJP government in West Bengal now in lockstep with New Delhi, the "Mamata Veto" has evaporated. On paper, the path to a Teesta agreement is clearer than it has been in a generation.

For a parched northern Bangladesh, this would be a material windfall, one that could buy the BJP substantial goodwill.

Yet cynicism remains a useful tool for the regional observer. Water is as much a local political obsession as a diplomatic one. A BJP Chief Minister in Kolkata will still answer to the same agrarian constituencies that once resisted such agreements.

And modern Bangladesh is not the compliant junior partner of yesteryear. The Rahman government operates in a multipolar neighborhood, diversifying its alliances and shrinking India's once-dominant leverage.

The strategic dilemma for Dhaka now lies bare. Under the TMC, the relationship was one of cultural comfort but structural stagnation. Mamata shared the language and the songs, but she blocked the rivers and the roads. The BJP offers the inverse: a partner likely to be ruthlessly efficient in clearing trade corridors and connectivity projects, but one whose political identity rests on a narrative that many in Bangladesh find hostile.

The election suggests that the "Bengal Exception," the idea that the state's unique cultural synthesis was immune to saffron politics, is dead.

The BJP's victory marks the triumph of what some call "subaltern Hindutva," in which the language of religious identity supplies a new vocabulary for old class and caste grievances. The victory is therefore not only electoral; it is civilizational in its implications, marking a deep shift in how identity, belonging, and power are bargained over in eastern India.

In this new political landscape, the border with Bangladesh is no longer just a diplomatic question; it is the central pillar of a permanent campaign. The irony is stark. The strategy has delivered a historic mandate in Kolkata, but it risks turning the neighborhood into a theater of perpetual friction, trading lasting regional stability for the quick rewards of the ballot box.

The verdict from West Bengal signals that the era of "sentimental diplomacy" is over. The shared heritage of Rabindranath Tagore and Kazi Nazrul Islam, still evocative, is yielding to the harsh realities of identity politics and national interest.

If the BJP uses its mandate to treat the border as a wound to be dressed rather than a bridge to be built, mistrust will only deepen. But if New Delhi can use this mandate to settle old grievances like Teesta, it may yet turn a moment of rupture into one of resolution.

The result in Kolkata is a victory for the BJP's machine; the test now is whether it can become a victory for Indian statesmanship.

From Constituent Power to "Mob" and "Gupto"

Ebadur Rahman — Wed, 06 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

"The demand for justice remains infinite, which is precisely why it must be made."

Jacques Derrida, Force of Law

Preface: The Facts on the Ground

The events that animate this essay occurred in a concentrated arc between late March and late April 2026. A brief account of them may usefully precede the analytical register they demand.

Between March 28 and April 17, at least four people were arrested for social media posts critical of the current government: Azizul Haque, detained on March 28 in Mymensingh; Shaon Mahmud, on April 3 in Munshiganj; Bibi Sauda, on April 6 in Bhola; and content creator A.M. Hasan Nasim, detained by plainclothes officers in Dhaka on or around April 17. Officers confiscated his wife's phone alongside his own electronic devices. Human Rights Watch documented these cases as part of a systematic pattern of misuse of the 2025 Cyber Security Ordinance, legislation that, rights groups argue, reproduces the repressive architecture of its predecessor. Authorities filed Nasim's case in connection with a cartoon he had shared, drawn from a public parliamentary statement. He was granted bail on April 21. His account, reported across Bangladeshi media, supplies a register that will recur throughout this essay.

In the same period, at least ten journalists accredited to Dhaka University were allegedly beaten at or near Shahbagh police station by cadres of Jatiyatabadi Chhatra Dal (JCD), the student wing of the ruling Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP). A further six journalists were separately reported as harassed or threatened. Manjur Hossain Mahi, president of the Dhaka University Journalists Association, and the association's general secretary, Liton Islam of Agami'r Shomoy, were among those affected, alongside correspondents from the Daily Star, Bangladesh Pratidin, Dhaka Tribune, Manabzamin, and several other national outlets. These are not the quantities of anecdote. They are the coordinates of a pattern.

Two contested institutional disputes form the deeper political grammar of this period. The first is the legal status of the February 2026 ganabhot (popular referendum), in which roughly sixty to sixty-one percent of participating voters endorsed a proposed national charter, and whose binding force remains, as of this writing, before the courts. The second is the parliamentary committee's handling of the 133 ordinances issued by the Yunus interim administration. Of those, 97 were ratified unchanged, 13 amended, 7 repealed, and 16 placed under further scrutiny. The implications of that process for accountability and constitutional reform are, as the analysis below will show, considerably more consequential than the arithmetic suggests. It is against this evidentiary floor that the following argument is made.

I. Assault and Impunity

What is most revelatory about the assault on Shahbagh is not the violence itself. Bangladesh has, across administrations, shown no shortage of that. The revelatory element is its atmosphere: the assault unfolded at or around a police station, with officers present, in a context in which the Home Minister had days earlier announced the government's intention to put an end to what he termed "mob culture." One of the attackers, barely a month into his first semester at the university, reportedly wondered publicly afterward whether the beatings had been sufficient. This quality of impunity, the way it performs itself for an audience without apparent anxiety about consequence, is worth pausing over. It is the impunity not of those who believe themselves invisible, but of those who have reason to believe that visibility is no longer the relevant variable.

Giorgio Agamben's concept of the "camp" applies here as something more than metaphor. He uses the term not for the literal camp of barbed wire and watchtowers, but for the structural condition in which law is made inoperative through its own application, in which legal protection is suspended without being formally withdrawn. The threshold between inside and outside the law is what Agamben identifies as the operative site of the state of exception. It appears to be at that threshold, neither inside nor outside ordinary legal protection, that journalists, elected student representatives, and opposition activists increasingly find themselves in post-uprising Bangladesh. A man is beaten inside a police station. A weapon appears in a photograph that goes viral. The administration announces it cannot identify the individual in question. The hard disk, as the saying goes, has been formatted.

Mohd. Julahas Islam, reportedly the cultural secretary of the Haji Muhammad Muhsin Hall parliament, is said to have suffered a ruptured eardrum during one of these attacks. The detail, if confirmed, adds a particular texture to the image of attackers who afterward mocked the news coverage of their own violence, picking over whether their photographs had been reproduced flatteringly. The attacker who is indifferent to whether his victim can hear properly: this is one register in which the present moment speaks.

II. What the Mob Was: Constituent Power and the Event of 36 July

To understand what is now being suppressed, one must first recover what was, in the summer of 2024, expressed. One must recover the "mob," whose semantic career since those months has been a study in how political language is colonized and reversed. During the weeks that Bangladeshi political mythology would come to call "36 July," a phrase that compresses the bloody July days and the decisive rupture of August 5, the street exercised something that the conventional vocabulary of political science is poorly equipped to name. Students, garment workers, the urban precariat, and a middle class exhausted by fifteen years of administered consensus converged into a force whose refusal extended past one government to the entire political architecture through which authoritarian power had been normalized: a constitutional order repeatedly mutilated by executive decree, a security apparatus operating beyond judicial oversight, a bipartisan alternation between two dynastic formations that had long since evacuated electoral competition of substantive content.

Claude Lefort's notion of "the people in the making" describes more faithfully what occurred than any of the managerial vocabularies since retrospectively applied to it. By that phrase Lefort meant the demos constituted through its own performative enactment, rather than preexisting as a fixed sociological entity whose will awaits expression. The crowd of 36 July was not irrational, and not anarchic in the pejorative sense. It was something closer to what Hannah Arendt called the power of people acting in concert: the specific political capacity that emerges when individuals gather without institutional mediation and act in the full presence of one another. Alain Badiou's concept of the Event captures the dimension of irreducibility. What occurred in those weeks could not be accounted for within the categories the situation made available. It exceeded the situation, and thereby forced new orientations upon those who had encountered it.

What did that Event demand?

The answer was stated, in the idioms of the street, with considerable clarity. The old 1972 constitution, repeatedly sutured through decades of executive amendment, could no longer contain the popular sovereignty being exercised in the open air. The demand for a "July Sanad" (July Charter), a written mandate ratifying the rupture in the form of a new constitutional settlement, was structurally central to the uprising's self-understanding. The ganabhot of February 2026, in which roughly sixty to sixty-one percent of participating voters endorsed the proposed National Charter, functioned as the available juridical vehicle for formalizing that demand. It was an attempt, through the mechanisms of the interregnum, to ratify the people's constituent act. Whether that referendum carries legally binding force is, at the time of writing, before the courts and remains a matter of genuine dispute. As a political expression, however, its force seems harder to contest. The people had attempted to decide, rather than accept the decision of others. The mob, during its brief interval of sovereignty, was never chaos. It was, in the precise sense, the political subject.

III. The Genealogy of "Gupto": How a Slur Is Born and What It Does

Every political order generates its necessary enemy. What is interesting about the post-July dispensation in Bangladesh is the rapidity with which it has generated a new one. To put the matter more precisely: the rapidity with which an old technology of political exclusion has been refitted with a new signifier for new operational purposes.

The Awami League's master term of exclusion was "Rajakar": the collaborator, the 1971 war criminal, the figure whose invocation cut short political argument by placing the accused outside the legitimate bounds of the national community. Its economy was remarkable. To call someone a Rajakar was to perform an exclusion rather than make a claim susceptible to evidence and refutation. It drew a boundary between the nation and its constitutive outside. That anyone organizing under Islamic identity, questioning Indian influence, or supporting BNP and Jamaat could be so labeled was no logical fallacy. It was a political technology, efficient, flexible, and durable across the decades during which the Awami League required an internal enemy whose elimination would justify exceptional measures. The term broke against the bodies of the uprising's students, when the Hasina government committed the catastrophic semantic overreach of applying it to the children of 1971 veterans. A signifier that absorbs too much loses its operational force. "Rajakar" was spent in the streets of July.

What would replace it?

The answer emerged through the usual channels of political semiotics: graffiti campaigns, social media lexicons, the incantatory repetition of party spokespersons. By the middle of 2025, with accelerating intensity through early 2026, the new term coalesced around the word Gupto (গুপ্ত), meaning hidden, covert, occult. TBS News and other outlets confirm that the term hardened into a political accusation in the aftermath of the July Uprising, and that JCD activists altered graffiti on university walls from "Student" to "Gupto." The substitution carries precise implications. The accusation, deployed primarily by Chhatra Dal against Islami Chhatra Shibir and others who organize under the signs of Islamic identity, holds that such activists lurk behind the cover of "general students," that they orchestrate violence from concealment, and that they spread what is characterized as sentiment against the uprising while performing loyalty to the July Event. These are accusations whose evidentiary bar is, by design, impossible to meet. Hiddenness, by definition, is not visible. Their political utility is therefore proportional to their epistemic unanswerability.

The structural similarity to "Rajakar" is legible in this feature. Both terms share the same grammatical function, performing exclusion rather than describing a condition susceptible to disproof. The Gupto is placed, in Agamben's framework, in a zone of indistinction: included in the political community through the mechanism of his exclusion from it, subject to the law in the most arbitrary way without being formally expelled from its protection. He is arrested under cybersecurity ordinances for a shared cartoon. He is beaten at a police station while officers observe with practiced neutrality. He is rendered publicly precarious through the accumulation of stigmatization. This is what Agamben means by homo sacer: a figure whose legal inclusion is maintained precisely in order to expose him to arbitrary treatment that the law nominally prohibits.

The crucial difference between "Rajakar" and Gupto lies in the temporal axis of accusation, and is worth dwelling on. "Rajakar" drew its force from the foundational trauma of 1971, from historical verdict and the authority of collective memory. It was retrospective, anchored to an event whose interpretation was controlled by the state. Gupto, by contrast, functions in the present tense and prospectively. It accuses not of what one's father did but of what one is doing now, in concealment, to betray the new order. This makes it the more efficient technology of the two: it can be applied at any moment, to anyone who mobilizes Islamic symbols or dissents from the new orthodoxy, without recourse to historical evidence that might be disputed. The threshold of exclusion is permanently open. The enemy is perpetually immanent.

IV. The False Flag and the Structural Logic of Campus Instability

The immediate trigger for the Shahbagh incidents appears to have been a fabricated screenshot. It was attributed to a Shibir leader, contained language about Tarique Rahman and Zaima Rahman, and was confirmed as fabricated by verification outlets including Rumor Scanner. What followed suggests the operation of a recognizable sequence: a manufactured provocation, the response it predictably generates, the legal complaints that follow naming opposition figures, and the infrastructure thereby created for clearing the campus of inconvenient organizations, since their continued presence has been made legally costly and physically dangerous. The attribution of the fabricated screenshot is not confirmed in available reporting, and this essay does not assert it. The pattern, however, is sufficiently legible that one can describe its grammar without certainty about every agent.

Beneath the tactical layer, there is a deeper structural logic worth naming. A university campus kept permanently at the edge of violence cannot function as an educational institution. A campus that cannot function as an educational institution produces graduates who are not equipped for intellectual independence. Graduates lacking intellectual independence do not rise through merit. They rise through factional loyalty. Those who rise through factional loyalty become, in the end, the reliable personnel of the system that kept their predecessors educationally deprived: working either as institutional apparatchiks or as the organizational muscle through which power reproduces itself across generations. The lasting consequence of campus instability is no incidental cost of elite reproduction. It appears, from the historical evidence of successive administrations, to be one of its mechanisms. The university is kept political so that it cannot become educational. It is kept educational in name so that the credential retains its exchange value. It is kept dependent so that its graduates remain dependent. Each link in that chain closes the one before it.

The image of a Chhatra Dal leader walking with a weapon in open daylight, a photograph that circulated widely even as the administration announced its inability to identify the individual, acquires, in this context, a meaning beyond the scandalous. The state's announced incapacity to see what is visible to everyone else is itself a statement: a demonstration, as legible as any policy document, of whose safety the state's sight is organized to protect, and whose is exposed by its organized blindness.

V. The Betrayal of the Ganabhot: Ordinances in Dispute, Exceptions Restored

The four faces associated with confirmed arrests, Azizul Haque, Shaon Mahmud, Bibi Sauda, and A.M. Hasan Nasim, constitute, taken together, a political argument made in the grammar of detention rather than in language. Nasim's case is particularly instructive. Plainclothes officers detained him on or around April 17, 2026, presenting themselves at his home. The case against him was filed under the 2025 Cyber Security Ordinance, related to online blackmail provisions, and arose from his sharing of a cartoon based on a public parliamentary statement by a ruling party legislator: a satirical re-presentation of something the state had not attempted to conceal. Officers confiscated his wife's mobile phone alongside his own electronic devices. He was granted bail on April 21. The charge, the method, and the timeline together suggest the operation of what Human Rights Watch has described as a systematic misuse of cybersecurity legislation, a pattern that, rights groups argue, is structurally continuous with the repressive practices the uprising was nominally fought to end.

This continuity is the index of what Badiou calls the management of the Event rather than fidelity to it. The July Uprising demanded accountability, independent institutions, an end to arbitrary detention for speech. The BNP government has offered, in the place of those demands, the perpetuation of those institutional mechanisms under new operators: a Thermidorian restoration that speaks the language of July while reproducing the architecture July was meant to dismantle.

The constitutional dimension of this pattern is made legible by the ordinance dispute. Of the 133 ordinances issued during the Yunus interregnum, 97 were ratified unchanged, 13 amended, 7 repealed, and 16 placed under further scrutiny. The division sounds administratively unremarkable until one examines which ordinances were repealed or deferred. Among those apparently not to be enacted: provisions touching on the prevention of enforced disappearances, the independent National Human Rights Commission, and most significantly for the argument of this essay, the referendum ordinance itself. The government's reported position, as cited in New Age, is that it lacks constitutional authority to enact the referendum ordinance. Ministers quoted in the Daily Star have suggested that the referendum is "valid by occurrence" and that its status is pending before the courts. This is a genuine legal dispute, and the essay does not adjudicate it. But the political effect of leaving the ganabhot's binding force unresolved is functionally equivalent, in terms of what it defers, to the non-ratification of the constituent demand, regardless of what the courts may eventually determine. The people's attempt to ratify their own act has been neither honored nor cleanly refused. It has been administered into uncertainty, which is the subtler form of the same refusal.

In Carl Schmitt's framework, the sovereign is whoever decides the exception. The BNP executive's management of the ordinance process, choosing what survives, what is deferred, what is lapsed, functions in this light as a reassertion of sovereign prerogative over the constituent moment: the reclosure of the opening through which, for a brief interval, the people had seized the power to found. Whether or not this reading is accepted in its Schmittian register, the political consequence is observable. The promises of the interregnum are being systematically converted into the compromises of the restoration.

VI. The Architecture of the Present: Exception, Impunity, and the Faithful Subject

What confronts us, then, is no simple regression to a prior political form. It is something structurally more precise: the reinstatement of the state of exception as norm, with new targets and new legitimating vocabularies. The powers that once designated Rajakars, that once suspended habeas corpus for Islamist organizers under the Awami League, appear to be exercised now against those who share cartoons, those who mobilize Islamic identity on campuses where a rival organization controls administrative access, those journalists who attempt to document what is occurring in front of them. Those powers operate through cybersecurity ordinances, through the tactical failure to identify activists who carry weapons, through the normalization of party violence outside police stations. The camera is confiscated. The CCTV footage is unavailable. The administration cannot identify the individual in the photograph.

Derrida's aporia of justice insists that law can never fully coincide with justice, that every legal order is founded on a violence it cannot acknowledge, and that this non-coincidence is precisely what keeps the demand for justice alive and its satisfaction perpetually deferred. The questions the July Uprising posed to the Bangladeshi state remain open. Can the security apparatus be subjected to genuine accountability? Can the bipartisan culture of enforced disappearance be dismantled rather than redirected? Can dissent that mobilizes Islamic idioms be protected with the same institutional vigor as dissent that mobilizes secular nationalist ones? These questions have not been formally refused. They have been deferred, managed, and dissolved in procedure. Which is, as Derrida might note, the characteristically legal form of refusal.

Badiou's notion of the faithful subject provides the complementary framework. A faithful subject is one who continues to inhabit the consequences of the Event, who refuses the managerial re-inscription of the rupture within the existing order of things, who insists, against every pressure toward normalization, that the break was real and its demands remain outstanding. The families of those who disappeared under previous administrations, many of whose cases appear to remain uninvestigated, are faithful subjects in this technical sense. The journalists who reported on the Shahbagh attacks despite the risk of being among the next to be beaten are faithful subjects. The student activists who refuse co-optation into the factional apparatus that has replaced the previous factional apparatus are faithful subjects. Azizul Haque, Shaon Mahmud, Bibi Sauda, and A.M. Hasan Nasim, detained for speech, which is to say for the minimal exercise of the freedom the uprising was nominally fought to secure, may be described as faithful subjects made precarious: homo sacer in the Agambenian sense, included in the political community specifically through the mechanism of their exposure to arbitrary power.

VII. Naming the Restoration

A restoration is no return. The political forces that succeed a revolutionary rupture do not replay the old film. They use the Event's vocabulary against itself, rebranding its exclusions as its fulfillments. "Mob culture" is condemned from the same platform on which organized violence is deployed against journalists and student representatives. Gupto organizations are hunted by organizations whose own internal discipline, where enforced at all, appears to extend primarily to ensuring factional loyalty rather than the non-violence demanded of others. The demand to "stabilize" the campus is prosecuted, it would seem, through precisely the forms of instability that have historically served to keep universities political rather than educational, and therefore incapable of producing the kind of independent graduates who might, in time, prove inconvenient.

What is happening is, in the plainest analytical description, the slow re-enclosure of the opening that the July Uprising briefly created. The constituent moment is being administered back into constituted power. The "mob" that was, for an interval, sovereign is being reclassified as a threat to sovereignty. The Gupto who mobilizes Islamic identity is being produced, through the accumulative force of beatings, arrests, terminological stigmatization, and the non-identification of those who carry weapons in daylight, as the internal enemy whose exclusion from full political belonging appears to function as a condition of the new order's coherence. These are not certainties. They are patterns that the evidence, read across the past eighteen months, appears to support, and that rights organizations have begun to name.

The minimal ethical demand of this moment, against every pressure toward the normalization of what is occurring, is precise and unsparing description. An attack on at least ten journalists at a police station is no "clash." Four arrests for social media posts under cybersecurity legislation are no "maintenance of order," at least not of any order that corresponds to the mandate of the uprising that brought the current government to power. The reported lapsing of accountability ordinances is no procedural housekeeping. The weapon in the photograph is visible, even if the administration has chosen not to see it. The demand for justice, infinite, structurally impossible within the current architecture of power, and therefore necessary, begins with refusing the euphemisms through which restoration disguises itself as revolution. The July Uprising was never about the removal of a leader alone. It was about refusing the permanent state of exception that had colonized Bangladeshi political life.

That refusal, on the evidence of the present, remains outstanding.

No One Yields

Apurba Jahangir — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Every morning in Dhaka, I get into my car and immediately begin losing faith in my country.

I am not speaking metaphorically. I mean the literal, grinding experience of trying to move from one point to another, horns blaring around you, in a city that has collectively decided that rules are for other people. The CNG cuts across three lanes without signalling. The rickshaw puller drifts into the centre of the road and stops. He is not confused. He has decided that stopping there is as valid an option as any other. A bus reverses against traffic on a flyover. Somewhere behind me, a car climbs the pavement because the pavement is, apparently, also a road. Nobody is surprised. Nobody yields.

I used to get angry. Tears would roll down my face. Now I just watch. And what I see, every single morning, is Bangladesh.

The metaphor is precise. Dhaka's roads and Bangladesh's politics operate on identical logic: the strong claim the right of way, the weak absorb the cost, rules exist on paper and are violated in practice, and no one is ever seriously accountable. We have built a city where movement itself has been defeated.

What defeated it? Not a lack of roads, not a lack of laws. A culture defeated it: a culture that has never genuinely internalised the idea that your right to move ends where someone else's begins.

This is the foundational deficit. And it shows up, with remarkable consistency, in every arena of Bangladeshi public life.

Political scientists have a word for this condition: anomie. The breakdown of social norms that govern a community. The state where rules are formally present but functionally meaningless because no one enforces them and no one believes others will follow them. Drive through Farmgate at rush hour and you will understand anomie better than any textbook can explain it.

Bangladesh's political culture has been described in academic literature as "parochial, low and destructive," characterised by an absence of patience, camaraderie, and respect for opposing views. I have spent years reading about politics, and I would not quarrel with that description. What strikes me is how perfectly it also describes the intersection at Bijoy Sarani on a weekday morning.

We are not, in other words, dealing with two separate problems. We are dealing with the same problem wearing two different outfits.

But one observation has stayed with me, and it tells me the disease is not terminal: it is untreated.

For three days in August 2024, after Sheikh Hasina fled the country on the afternoon of the 5th, Bangladesh had no functioning government, no police on the streets, and no traffic officers at any intersection in Dhaka. By every conventional logic, this should have been the city's worst traffic moment. A megalopolis of twenty million people, no law enforcement, no authority, no one in charge.

Instead, it was the best traffic Dhaka has seen in living memory.

At Bijoy Sarani, one of the most reliably chaotic intersections in the country, a junction I have navigated in varying states of despair for years, young men were directing cars with bamboo poles and cricket bats. At Mirpur-2, Mirpur-10, Agargaon, Mohakhali, and Bangla Motor, student volunteers fanned out across the city and did something the entire apparatus of the state had failed to do: they enforced the lanes. They stopped vehicles going the wrong way. They would not let rickshaws mount the pavement. They waved through traffic in orderly alternation, one direction at a time, the way it is theoretically supposed to work. One volunteer at Bijoy Sarani, when asked why he was standing in the August heat directing strangers, grinned and said: "There are no police: shob bhagse." They've all run away.

And somehow, without the police, without the traffic wardens, without the politicians or the VIP convoys or the party flags on the bonnets, the traffic flowed. Dhaka moved.

I have thought about those three days more than almost anything else that happened in 2024. They were extraordinary because of what kind of order emerged, and why. It was not enforced. It was chosen. Young people with no institutional authority, no uniforms, no threat of a fine or an arrest, stood at the city's most contested intersections and asked the simplest of questions: will you yield? And, for three days, the answer was yes.

Why? Because the social contract had been momentarily reset. The usual hierarchy (the VIP, the party man, the transport union boss, the constable with his hand out) had dissolved overnight. In its absence, something older and more fundamental surfaced: the basic recognition that the person in the next lane is also a person, with somewhere to be, and that the road belongs to both of you. Civil etiquette, it turns out, does not require a government. It requires only the genuine belief that rules are for everyone, including yourself.

The traffic returned to its normal dysfunction within two weeks. By mid August, the protests and rallies had resumed, human chains were blocking Farmgate and Shahbagh, and the metro was down. Volunteers put the bamboo poles away and went back to their campuses. The CNG drivers remembered that lane markings are merely a suggestion.

But those three days happened. They are evidence, irrefutable and witnessed by the whole country, that the problem is not who we are. It is who we have become under decades of a political culture that modelled, rewarded, and normalised the refusal to yield.

The CNG driver who cuts into oncoming traffic endangers the people around him. He knows this. He does it anyway, because his destination matters more to him than anyone else's safety. Scale that logic up to the level of national politics, arm it with petrol bombs, and you have the blockades.

Consider what happened on 14 July 2024. Tens of thousands of university students, the same young people who would, three weeks later, stand in the August heat directing traffic with bamboo poles, were on the streets protesting a quota system that reserved government jobs on the basis of family lineage rather than merit. They were asking a straightforward question: in a republic, should a man's grandfather's military service determine his grandchild's career prospects?

Sheikh Hasina, then prime minister, delivered her answer at a press conference. She called them Razakars.

In Bangladesh, there is no word heavier with historical violence than Razakar. It is not an insult: it is an accusation of genocide collaboration. To call a student who is asking about exam quotas a Razakar is to refuse engagement with his argument. It is to declare him an enemy of the nation, unworthy of basic civic regard, someone to be broken rather than answered.

The remark did not come from ignorance. It came from the same instinct that drives the bus driver who, finding a pedestrian in his lane, honks and accelerates rather than slows. The student is an inconvenience. The solution, in both cases, is to run them over.

We know how that story ended.

Bangladesh's parliament has, over the years, produced its own version of road rage. In 2013, a ruling party MP used language on the floor of the National Assembly so abusive that the entire opposition walked out. Days later, those same MPs admitted they were "embarrassed in social and family circles" by what they had said. They knew they had crossed a line. They crossed it anyway. And then, nothing. No sanction. No consequence. No institutional memory.

This is the traffic signal that no one respects because no one has been fined in living memory for running it.

What does all of this have in common? What connects the CNG driver who goes the wrong way down Mirpur Road and the politician who burns a bus, calls a student a traitor, or arrests a journalist before dawn?

Both have internalised the same proposition: I am the most important actor in this space, and the space exists to serve my purpose.

The CNG driver does not think he is a bad person. He thinks he is a practical one. The road is there to get him where he needs to go, and if the rules prevent that, the rules are the problem. The political leader who deploys a hartal (a general strike called to shut down public life and economic activity), a security law, or a slur operates on the same logic. The republic is there to produce outcomes favourable to him; if its institutions and citizens prevent that, those institutions and citizens are the problem.

Civil etiquette is more than the surface politeness of keeping your voice down in a restaurant. It is the recognition that your right of way ends at the point where it intersects with someone else's. It is the willingness to yield. You do not yield because you are weak. You do not yield because the other person is stronger. You yield because you have genuinely accepted that they have a right to be there too.

Bangladesh, in its politics and on its roads, has chronically refused this acceptance. We signal but do not turn. We pledge but do not comply. We write the laws and run the lights.

But those three days remind me that we are not incapable of it. We knew how to yield. We did it, spontaneously, in the absence of anyone forcing us to. The students at Bijoy Sarani with their bamboo poles did not need a ministry of transport or a traffic sergeant. They needed only the conviction that the road was shared, and the willingness to act on that conviction.

Every evening, I make the same drive home that I made in the morning. The same intersections. The same near misses. The same resigned rage on everyone's faces. But I think now of those three days and I cannot fully despair.

The disease is not in our nature. It is in our politics: in decades of leaders who modelled the opposite of yielding, who taught an entire country by example that the strong take the road and the weak get out of the way. Fix the politics, and you may, over time, fix the road. They are, as I have argued, the same problem.

Until then, I will keep driving. And watching. And remembering August.

Ships Sail on Dulu Aladar's Land

Md Ibrahim Khalilullah — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Another large piece of soil broke from the riverbank and disappeared into the Meghna. Dulu Aladar watched it go without a word. He sat on the bank, worry working across his face. The Chaitra sun, the last month of the Bengali year, hung overhead, but its heat had thinned. Dulu's only thatched house stood fifteen feet from the water. Erosion had already eaten the distance down to almost nothing. One more strong cut and the house would be in the river too.

Dulu stretched out his arm and pointed about two hundred meters into the middle of the Meghna. "Four years ago, I had my own house there," he said. "A cowshed, a courtyard, a graveyard. Now there is nothing. The Meghna swallowed everything. Now there is only endless water. Cargo ships pass over the place where I lived." I looked from the river back to his eyes. I saw nothing in them but emptiness.

Dulu lives in Hijla Upazila of Barisal district, in southeastern Bangladesh. In Dakshin Baushya, a village of Barajalia union, he once held land, a house, and rice fields. Now he holds river water.

"Every morning, people wake and think about food," Dulu said. "We wake and think about how close the water is to the wall. Every night before sleep, I pray the river does not take the house while we are inside. If it takes the house in daylight, at least we can run. At night we cannot." He sighed.

Hope of a normal life does not live in this part of the global south. The struggle here for survival is too plain to fit inside words.

Dulu's straw house

"Seven of us live in this house," Dulu told me, sitting on the open veranda in front. "My wife, my younger son Siddiq, my other son Rubel, his wife, and their two children." The walls are rice straw. The roof is old corrugated iron. There is no government electricity in this stretch of riverbank. A small solar panel was the only source of light, and it has been broken for several days. The house has one bedroom. The veranda doubles as a kitchen on its other half.

How do seven of you live in one room? I asked. "I hang a sheet across the middle like a curtain," he said. "On one side, my wife and younger son sleep. On the other side, Rubel sleeps with his wife and the two children." For families like Dulu's on the riverbank, this kind of arrangement is daily life. The house holds no furniture, only two large blue plastic oil drums. One holds a few clothes. The other holds cooking utensils, pots, pans. In the eastern corner sit a broken chowki (small wooden bed) and two oily pillows.

The drums are not for storage alone. "When the bank breaks and the house sinks into the river, these drums float," Dulu said, showing them to me. "What is inside sinks, but the drums themselves rise. I can grab them and carry them to higher ground. Even if the house and the land go under, I can save something." He told this story of saving lives without any heat in his voice.

Livelihood and economic hardship

Extreme poverty has never lifted from Dulu's family. "I have never had rice, fish, vegetables, and pulses on the same plate," he said. "We live by the river so we sometimes catch fish. The thing we lack most is rice." We walked together on the strip of land in front of his house. Dulu has farmed all his life. The river has taken the rice fields. What remains is sandy soil, fit only for pulses. To eat rice, the family has to buy it. With seven mouths, the math does not work.

Dulu Aladar is sixty-five now. His body no longer holds the strength for the field. His younger son Siddiq, sixteen, did not go to school for lack of money and now works in a betel garden. The other son, Rubel, takes daily labor where he can find it. "Whatever we earn goes to rice," Dulu said. "What is left for medicine, for school, for the house?" He asked the question and did not answer it.

Childhood and youth

Dulu spent his childhood and youth on the banks of the Meghna. The river that gave him much also took back many times more. His parents were poor, and he could not study or play. As a small boy he worked as a helper on a fishing boat. The river then was kinder. "When I was a child, I did not fear the river would take everything," he said. "Now erosion, floods, and tidal surges keep growing year by year. They have taken everything from us."

Marriage, family, children

In his youth, Dulu farmed rather than fished, even though the river was at hand. After marriage, his wife bore three sons and four daughters in turn. Pressed by money and custom, Dulu married off all four daughters as children. "So many daughters. As a father, it was my responsibility to marry them all. When someone asked, I gave them. How long could I feed so many faces?" He looked at me. I did not answer. For two of the weddings, he had to pay the groom's family a dowry. He raised the dowry by borrowing from a moneylender at high interest. The thought of the loan made him fall silent.

The children's lives

Dulu and I sat in front of the house. His wife was roasting dried chilies. The smell reached us. Lunch today would be simple: dried chili vorta (a paste of mashed chilies and salt), rice, and dal. None of his seven children had been able to study properly. Each one had to leave school early to keep the family going. Four did not finish primary. The four daughters married young and went to their in-laws' houses. The eldest son, Hasan, lives with his wife in the Kalyanpur slum in Dhaka. He has three sons and two daughters. He cleans for very low wages. The middle son, Rubel, and the younger son, Siddiq, live here with their father. None of them can spare much for him. "They cannot feed themselves properly," Dulu said. "How will they feed me? Let them live well with their families. I have no demands. How long do I have to live?"

Tax on water

Dulu offered me a piece of information that shook me. "We were five brothers and two sisters," he said. "My father left us one kani, about four-tenths of an acre. My share came to two and a half kathas, around eighteen hundred square feet. All of it has gone into the Meghna. The water there is deep enough now for ships. And every year I still walk to the government land office and pay the land tax on it."

I asked why. The land does not exist. "If I do not pay," he said, "it becomes government khas land. I lose any claim." But what does that change, I said. The land is gone. The river is not anyone's private property. Dulu answered, "If a char, a sandbar, ever rises again at this stretch of the river, my receipt will let me legally take back two and a half kathas there."

Do you think a char will rise in your lifetime? "No," he said. "But if one rises one day, my children or their children can go and claim the family's specific piece of land at that time." He said it with a small sigh.

Waiting for the fifth break

The afternoon went. The sun had already moved low in the west. Its light had thinned further. Fishermen of the Meghna had begun to return in their small boats. Their day's catch was over. Some would sell to the market, some to a household. Dulu set out to bring his cow back from the field. I went with him. Malnutrition has thinned his body. Long walking comes hard. The grazing field lies far. If this house collapses, I asked, where will you go? He did not look at me. He looked at the road. "My house has collapsed four times," he said as he walked. "Every time I have run west. If it goes this time, there is no more room to stay here. This time I will have to leave the area." Where will you go? I asked. He did not answer. After a silence he said, "I do not know."

The first need is to stay alive

Dulu does not know where he will go if the river takes the house again. Even at his age, life carries no promise. He lives every day in the fear of losing his roof. "People think about food, about treatment, about education. We think first about saving our lives," he said. "Every night I think about whether I will be alive in the morning. Whether the house will be." He drew a long breath. "We have not a single penny saved. We do not know if there will be a meal tomorrow. We have no money for medicine, no money for school. To think about those things is a luxury for us. We only think that the river will not take our lives, that the river will not drown our land."

I asked whether the village had ever received help. "What help? We have not received any," Dulu said at once. "Not for a house, not for food, not for treatment, not for land. None of it." Have you received help from any private organization? I asked. "No," he said. "No NGO has ever helped us."

What about the days ahead, I asked. How will you live, where will you go, what will you do, how will you earn? He did not answer the question directly. He said, "If I die, they will have to drown me in the water. There is no place left for a grave." Tears were falling silently from his eyes. His voice was heavy. The orange light of the western sun was on his cheeks and on the tears. His sad face caught the orange. Seeing him cry, his pet goat climbed restless into his lap. He patted the goat's head. Time passed. Evening came down on the Meghna. The water was calm. In my mind it was time to begin the road back to Dhaka.

Why no help has reached him

Bangladesh's main national fund for climate work is the Bangladesh Climate Change Trust (BCCT), set up in 2009 and 2010. Some money also comes from international sources, including the Green Climate Fund and the Bangladesh Climate Change Resilience Fund. Government estimates put the country's annual climate adaptation needs at about $12.5 billion, around 150,000 crore taka. Yet between 2015 and 2023 the climate share of the national budget averaged only 0.7 percent, around $86 million per year.

Through the BCCT, $458.5 million was allocated to 891 projects between 2010 and 2024. Of that, 54 percent, about $248 million, was lost to corruption, misuse, and irregularities. Transparency International Bangladesh (TIB) laid out these figures in its November 2025 report.

Where the money goes

The TIB report describes corruption at three stages of the project cycle. The first is bribery during project approval. Projects pass under the influence of ministers, the board chairman who is the minister of the environment, and political leaders. One board chairman, who served from 2010 to 2013, allocated 1473 percent more money than the average to projects in his own constituency. Proposals were submitted at the last minute and approval was settled in advance.

The second stage is the appointment of contractors. Tenders are rigged through contractors aligned with the ruling party. In the solar streetlight programme, 216 of 373 projects between 2019 and 2023 listed equipment prices 47 to 57 percent above the going rate. The loss came to between $17 million and $20.7 million.

The third stage is implementation. Some are "signboard projects," where state money is drawn down by simply putting up a board. In other cases the work is poor or unfinished. A solar panel might fail in a year while paperwork claims a five-year warranty. As a result, 61.6 percent of projects are delayed, and some by more than two thousand days. Monitoring is thin. Outside audits are almost absent.

Why the Meghna's erosion victims are missed

A deeper look raises further problems. Project allocations do not match the actual climate risk. The Spearman correlation between risk and money sent is only 0.2. Districts at high risk, such as Barisal, Bhola, and Patuakhali, receive less. Districts at lower risk receive more. Visible projects, like solar streetlights and eco-parks, attract money. Slow-onset problems, like river erosion, do not. In the Hijla and Meghna stretch, erosion takes 8,700 hectares of land each year and affects more than 200,000 people. Targeted projects for this area are very few.

Marginal communities are largely shut out of project design. Riverbank poor and landless families like Dulu's have no place at the planning table. No policy carves out a separate target for the "ultra-poor" or for "river erosion victims." Shelter projects and cash assistance exist on paper, but bureaucracy, political pull, and corruption keep them from reaching the people who need them. Decisions made in Dhaka rarely move into the field, and monitoring on the ground is missing as well. Shelter and rehabilitation projects for erosion victims do exist, but many people like Dulu have never received anything from them, because lists are drawn up irregularly and political preference shapes who appears on them.

This is more than wasted money, TIB writes. It is a betrayal of the people most exposed to the climate.

What could be done

TIB and other groups recommend several changes. The BCCT Act needs amendment to bring in an independent board, clauses against corruption, and stronger transparency. Project selection should be weighted to actual risk on the ground. Local communities should take part in monitoring, with grievance mechanisms at the field level. Cash and housing assistance should go directly to the marginal, as grants rather than microfinance. Corruption cases should be investigated by the Anti-Corruption Commission free of political interference, and the guilty punished as a matter of example.

Climate experts argue that the funds exist. Governance failure, corruption, and political interest keep them from reaching the people who need them. Millions like Dulu Aladar are the result. This is not only a climate problem. It is a governance problem. Without transparency and accountability, they say, the cycle will continue.

Why a Flat 15 Percent VAT Would Be a Costly Mistake

Faisal Mahmud — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The BNP government's latest plan to impose a uniform 15 percent VAT across almost all sectors is being sold as "reform." It is none of the kind. It is a revenue shortcut that would fall hardest on consumers, punish compliant firms, and do little to fix the country's real tax problem.

The case for a flat VAT looks tidy on paper. One rate is easier to administer than many. It reduces lobbying for special treatment. It can widen the base. International lenders often prefer it. Tidy tax design on paper is a different thing from workable tax design in a lower-middle-income economy with high informality, weak enforcement, and fragile household demand.

Begin with the arithmetic. VAT is a tax on consumption. Poorer households spend a far larger share of their income than richer ones. A family earning Tk30,000 a month may spend nearly all of it. A family earning Tk300,000 saves or invests a substantial portion. A higher VAT therefore takes a larger effective share from the poorer household. That is why economists classify consumption taxes as regressive, unless they are cushioned by exemptions, transfers, or progressive income taxes.

Bangladesh has little of that cushioning. Inflation has stayed elevated for much of the past two years. Food inflation has often run above the headline rate. Real wages for many urban workers have lagged behind prices. In these conditions, a broad jump to 15 percent VAT works as a direct squeeze on purchasing power.

The second issue is compliance. Bangladesh's tax problem is not that statutory rates are too low. The problem is that collection is narrow. The tax-to-GDP ratio has hovered around 7 to 8 percent in recent years, among the lowest in Asia. India collects roughly 17 to 18 percent of GDP in combined taxes. Vietnam is above 18. OECD countries average well above 30. Bangladesh's weakness is not insufficient taxation of those already visible. It is a failure to tax large parts of the economy at all.

That matters because a flat 15 percent VAT will not be paid uniformly. Large manufacturers, telecom firms, supermarkets, and formal service providers can be audited and made to comply. Small cash businesses often cannot. Many operate partly outside the documented economy. The predictable result is that firms already in the net pay more, while those outside continue to underpay or evade. Competition is distorted. Honest firms face a tax burden plus the cost of compliance. Their evasive rivals gain a price advantage.

This pattern is already visible in the country's retail and service sectors, where invoice discipline remains weak. Raising the rate before fixing enforcement only increases the reward for evasion.

The third problem is growth. Bangladesh needs stronger private investment, not weaker demand. Gross investment has stagnated in the low thirties as a share of GDP for years, while private sector credit conditions have tightened. Import compression, currency stress, and higher financing costs have already slowed activity. A broad consumption tax shock now would cut discretionary spending and pressure small firms' margins. Governments often assume VAT is paid by consumers. In practice, weak demand means businesses absorb part of it through lower profits, lower wages, or delayed hiring.

India offers a useful comparison. Its Goods and Services Tax, introduced in 2017, was meant to unify a fragmented internal market. It brought real gains: easier interstate trade, lower logistics frictions, and a much larger digital invoice trail. The original system's many slabs and frequent classification disputes also created complexity, compliance costs, and political friction. After years of adjustment, India moved in 2025 to simplify the structure rather than preserve the old maze of rates.

India now operates a narrower GST framework centred on 0, 5, and 18 percent, while applying a higher 40 percent levy on selected luxury and sin goods. That is the important lesson for Bangladesh. Even after simplifying the system, India did not adopt one flat universal rate. It kept differentiated taxation because taxing essentials, tractors, and luxury cars at the same rate is politically difficult and economically hard to justify in a highly unequal developing economy.

India's GST collections have improved partly because of digital compliance systems, e-invoicing, invoice matching, and stronger state capacity. They have not improved because of a single flat rate. Bangladesh has weaker administrative capacity and a larger informal share of employment. It should learn the right lesson. Administration matters more than headline rates.

There is also a question of fairness. Bangladesh leans heavily on indirect taxes while collecting relatively little from personal income, property, and wealth. That is backwards. Consumption taxes are easy to collect, so governments overuse them. Countries that build durable fiscal systems eventually shift toward direct taxation of income and assets.

Bangladesh has obvious untapped sources. High-income professionals in cash-heavy sectors often remain lightly taxed compared with salaried workers. Real estate holdings are under-assessed. Some firms earn excess profits from regulatory protection, market concentration, or privileged access to state business. These are better tax targets than mass consumption.

A sensible strategy would look different. Keep reduced VAT rates on essentials and mass-market services. Apply the standard rate selectively, where compliance is feasible. Use higher excises on luxury consumption. Expand withholding and third-party reporting for professionals. Link tax IDs to banking, property, and securities data. Introduce temporary windfall levies where extraordinary rents are evident. Above all, digitise enforcement before raising rates.

The fixation on a 15 percent VAT also reflects a broader policy mistake: treating the tax-to-GDP ratio as the sole scorecard. A country can lift that ratio by taxing the same compliant minority harder while leaving the rest untouched. That improves a metric. It does not improve a tax system.

Bangladesh does need more revenue. Debt servicing costs are rising. Public investment needs financing. Social spending remains modest. How that revenue is raised matters as much as how much is raised.

A flat 15 percent VAT would be efficient only in a country where most firms issue invoices, most workers are in the formal economy, and progressive taxes offset regressivity. Bangladesh is not there yet. Until it is, uniformity is not reform. It is convenience dressed up as policy.

Why Is the New Bank Resolution Act Stirring So Much Debate?

Faisal Mahmud — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Bangladesh's newly enacted Bank Resolution Act of 2026 has been framed as a morality play about whether disgraced owners, most notably S Alam, will be allowed back into banks they allegedly helped wreck. That framing is politically effective. It is also incomplete.

The Act is better understood as an attempt to unwind a prior policy choice that shifted private losses onto the public balance sheet at scale and now looks fiscally and monetarily untenable.

That earlier policy was the 2025 resolution ordinance under erstwhile Governor Ahsan H Mansur at Bangladesh Bank. Five distressed Islamic banks, First Security Islami, Social Islami, Global Islami, Union and EXIM, were merged into a single state-owned institution. The central bank removed sponsor directors, contained deposit outflows, and reduced immediate contagion risk. The intervention was presented as a cleanup. In substance, it consolidated insolvency.

Combined deposits stood at roughly Tk1.4tn, while loans were about Tk1.9tn, with the majority classified as non-performing or of dubious quality. Several analyses and press reports indicate that capital had already eroded, leaving the institutions with effectively negative net worth. A merger of such entities aggregates losses. The ordinance therefore shifted those losses from shareholders to the state.

That shift has proved expensive. Government disclosures and reporting suggest that more than Tk80,000 crore has already been injected or committed, with estimates of total support rising towards or beyond Tk1 lakh crore if the current framework is sustained. The structure of that support matters.

These expanded guarantees, funded by public resources, have stabilised the system in the short run. They have also socialised losses that would normally fall on equity holders, subordinated creditors, and, beyond insured limits, depositors. The consequence is a persistent fiscal and monetary burden.

Continuing the same approach implies further injections on the order of tens of thousands of crores, either through taxation or through money creation. The former compresses fiscal space; the latter raises prices. Neither is costless, and the distributional impact is skewed towards households least able to absorb it.

The new Act attempts to alter that trajectory. As reported in recent coverage, amendments, particularly Section 18(a), create a legal pathway for former shareholders or other approved investors to reclaim distressed banks under resolution.

In practical terms, a reacquisition under Section 18(a) would follow a defined sequence. An interested party, typically a former sponsor group or a consortium, would first seek approval from the resolution authority, disclosing funding sources and any related party exposures. Approval would trigger an upfront payment of roughly 7.5% of the public funds already injected.

A binding restructuring plan would then follow. It would include fresh equity to restore minimum capital adequacy, a defined schedule to repay remaining state support, and a strategy to resolve non-performing loans, including those linked to the sponsors themselves.

Governance conditions would ordinarily include limits on related party lending, reconstituted boards with independent directors, and supervisory oversight. In principle, failure at any stage would invite penalties or loss of control. In practice, the credibility of this sequence rests less on its design than on whether each step is enforced without dilution.

Critics interpret this as a reopening of the door to controversial previous owners like S Alam. That risk is explicit in the text and has been highlighted in reporting that the law change "paves the way" for such returns. Concerns go beyond optics.

A substantive fear runs through the debate: that allowing previous controllers back could dilute reforms and entrench weak governance in a system where regulatory enforcement has historically been uneven.

Still, the alternative carries its own costs. It continues the government bailout of deeply impaired balance sheets. Liquidation would impose losses beyond insured limits and risk destabilising depositor confidence, which remains fragile. Recent reporting points to persistent unease among depositors and a lack of trust in several institutions.

A market sale to new investors runs into fundamentals. Banks with negative net asset value and uncertain recovery prospects attract little interest without explicit or implicit state guarantees. Such guarantees would keep the liability with the public sector.

The feasible policy space is therefore narrow. The Act occupies one point within it: shifting liabilities back to private actors, including those who previously owned or controlled the institutions, in exchange for repayment and recapitalisation commitments. The economic rationale is straightforward. If the state cannot continue to absorb losses indefinitely, those losses must be reassigned.

The difficulty lies in incentives. The 2025 ordinance weakened market discipline by extending protection beyond statutory limits and financing it with public resources. If depositors expect full protection irrespective of bank behaviour, risk pricing deteriorates. If owners expect losses to be socialised, lending standards follow.

The current Act attempts to reintroduce private liability by conditioning ownership on repayment and capital injection. Whether that liability is real depends on enforcement. That is the binding uncertainty.

Bangladesh's regulatory history does not offer strong evidence of consistent enforcement against politically connected actors. Without credible supervision, conditions attached to reacquisition risk becoming negotiable rather than binding. The Act's effectiveness therefore hinges on the state's willingness to enforce it, more than on the provisions themselves.

Past episodes illustrate the pattern. The Hall-Mark Group loan scam at Sonali Bank involved the fraudulent disbursement of thousands of crores through collusion between bank officials and politically connected borrowers. Despite investigations and arrests, recovery has been limited and proceedings have dragged on.

The BASIC Bank loan scandal followed a similar shape. Large volumes of credit went to weak or fictitious firms under politically influenced management. Probes identified irregularities but yielded only modest recovery relative to losses.

In both cases, the rules existed. Enforcement did not. The implication for current policy is direct: if enforcement could not impose credible losses or accountability then, there is reason to question whether conditions attached to reacquisition will remain binding when they conflict with political or financial interests.

The political context compounds the constraint. The Bangladesh Nationalist Party, which backs the legislation, faces electoral incentives. It has limited appetite for imposing visible losses on depositors and limited fiscal space for indefinite bailouts. The new Act reduces contingent public liabilities on paper by transferring them to private balance sheets. Whether that transfer holds in practice will depend on implementation.

Another complication runs alongside. Some potential returnees are also among the largest borrowers from the same banks. Reacquiring ownership would require them to regularise or restructure those exposures and repay state support. That alignment could aid recovery of bad loans. It also reduces the attractiveness of return unless terms are softened or enforcement weakens.

The current debate treats the Act as a question of propriety: who should be allowed back into the system. The operative constraint is arithmetic: who bears losses that have already been incurred. The 2025 ordinance answered that question by placing the burden on the public. The 2026 Act attempts, imperfectly, to move it back to private actors. Neither option is clean. One risks inflation and fiscal strain; the other risks weak enforcement and reputational damage.

A coherent framework would set explicit limits on public support, impose losses in a defined order, and separate impaired assets from viable operations. Bangladesh has extended support, blurred loss hierarchies, and delayed asset separation. The result is a policy oscillation between bailout and reprivatisation, with each step constrained by the previous one.

The controversy will persist because it conflates accountability with allocation. The former requires investigation and sanction for past conduct. The latter requires assigning present losses across taxpayers, depositors, and investors.

That assignment cannot be made painless. Without a credible mechanism to absorb losses, they will continue to surface as fiscal pressure or higher prices. The new Act does not resolve that constraint. It reflects it.

The New Year and the Secular Mask

Pinaki Bhattacharya — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Pohela Boishakh in Bangladesh is usually described as a day of innocence: songs at Ramna Batamul, painted masks, bright saris, processions, renewal. But public culture in Bangladesh is rarely innocent. It is organised, curated and made to serve power. Over time, Pohela Boishakh, at least in its official Dhaka form, ceased to be only a festival and became a cultural instrument. It became a way for one elite class to present its own tastes, anxieties and political assumptions as the natural culture of the nation.

This transformation did not happen by accident. Institutions such as Charukola (the Faculty of Fine Art at the University of Dhaka) and Chhayanaut (the cultural organisation that hosts the annual dawn concert at Ramna) did more than preserve art and music. They helped construct an official cultural order. They shaped, in practice, what kind of Bengali could appear as enlightened, tasteful and civilised, and what kind would remain outside the frame: awkward, excessive, backward, suspect, or dangerous. What was presented as universal public culture was often the culture of a narrow urban elite, repeated so often that it hardened into common sense.

The annual procession, later elevated as the Mangal Shobhajatra, became one of the clearest expressions of this order. Its themes tracked the ideological needs of the Awami period with revealing precision. In 2012, as the state intensified its use of Liberation War memory and prepared the symbolic ground for the execution of Jamaat leaders, the slogan was "Rajakar-free Bangladesh, the inexhaustible Liberation War." In 2014, after an election so hollow that even victory could not conceal its legitimacy crisis, the theme leaned toward courage and fearlessness, as though ritual might compensate for democratic emptiness. In 2021, when the Rapid Action Battalion's record of abuses was under growing international scrutiny, the chosen line was: "In the guise of the dark and terrible, there comes beauty." The pattern is difficult to miss. Public poetry appeared precisely when power needed moral camouflage.

The imagery was even more explicit. Again and again, the procession returned to the figure of the monster: dark, predatory, often visibly coded through beard, cap, weaponry and religious symbolism. One did not need to label the boat as the ruling order and the demon as Islamist or nationalist opposition. The public had already been trained to read the code. This was not neutral culture. It was symbolic pedagogy. It taught citizens who counted as enlightened and who counted as dangerous, who belonged at the centre of the national story and who could be aestheticised into darkness.

At that point, the claim that this was a universal social festival collapses. A genuinely public celebration must leave room for people it does not admire. Society includes the devout, the conservative, the provincial, the culturally unfashionable. But official Pohela Boishakh in Dhaka often did not gather society. It graded it. One section of Bangladesh appeared as luminous and fit for the future. Another appeared as dark, crude and threatening. This was not social unity. It was symbolic hierarchy.

And this is where one must examine carefully the word that Bangladeshi elites use with such confidence: secularism.

At its most defensible, secularism means something modest and necessary. The state should not belong to one religious doctrine, and citizens of differing beliefs should stand equal before the law. That is not controversial. But in Bangladesh, elite use of the term has often gone far beyond that. "Secularism" became a diplomatic and cultural credential. It reassured the West. It signalled to embassies, donors, NGOs and international institutions that the speaker belonged to the camp of moderation, progress and civilisation. It was, and remains, an excellent export word.

Inside Bangladesh, though, the same word has often done a different kind of work. It has functioned as a mask for contempt toward Islam too polished to name itself openly. This goes beyond opposition to theocratic coercion, which is legitimate. It is discomfort with Islam as public presence, historical confidence and social vocabulary. The beard becomes ominous. The cap becomes embarrassing. The madrasa accent becomes uncultured. Islamic symbolism becomes a problem of taste. Muslim historical memory is quietly downgraded, treated as something to be managed, softened, aestheticised, or supervised so that the nation may remain acceptable to elite sensibilities and foreign approval.

That is why secularism in Bangladesh often carries two meanings at once. To the West it says: we are pluralist, moderate and modern. At home it often means: we will decide how much Islam may appear in public life, in what form, and under whose control. This is not neutrality. It is hierarchy in polite language.

Official Pohela Boishakh became one of the most effective theatres for this hierarchy. It taught people how to recognise virtue by sight. The good citizen admired the right motifs, feared the right monsters, and recoiled from overt Muslim social confidence while still calling that recoil progress. The bad citizen could be rendered with economy: beard, darkness, vulgarity, reaction. This matters because before a state moves against political enemies through harder means, courts, prisons, disappearances, violence, it first prepares the symbolic ground. The opponent must become ugly before he becomes disposable.

Even the songs of renewal belong to this story. Each year the public is invited to celebrate cleansing: sweeping away refuse, burning off decay, purifying the earth through fire. These can be dismissed as harmless metaphors. But metaphors shape feeling. A public trained to experience purification as beauty may become more comfortable with purification in other registers too. What is old becomes rubbish. What resists becomes dirt. What embarrasses elite modernity becomes something to be burned away.

But what is old is not always refuse. Much of what is old is memory, continuity, inheritance. Bangladesh did not begin in a faculty courtyard. Nor did it emerge from donor language or UNESCO approval. Its life is layered, regionally textured, morally untidy, and deeply shaped by Muslim history. A culture that treats these inheritances as awkward or contaminating is not building a universal civic order. It is building a narrow class aesthetic and presenting it as the nation itself.

This is why UNESCO recognition of Mangal Shobhajatra as intangible cultural heritage felt, to many, less like honour than like misrecognition. Heritage in the language of international institutions is broad and bureaucratic. But oitihya (inheritance carried through generations) in the deeper Bengali sense implies continuity, transmission and rootedness. Not every recent, curated and politically loaded urban ritual acquires that depth because an international body approves it. A thing can be recognised without being rooted. It can be admired abroad without being deeply shared at home.

The change in naming from Ananda Shobhajatra to Mangal Shobhajatra is revealing. Joy is open. Auspiciousness comes with moral weight. The older name suggested a festival. The newer one suggested a rite whose legitimacy should not be questioned. The issue is not semantic. It is about authority. Who gets to define the meaning of the Bengali New Year? The people, in all their diversity, or a cultural clergy that has long claimed a monopoly on national taste?

The answer is not to abolish festivity. Bangladesh does not need less joy. It needs less monopoly over joy. Pohela Boishakh should be released from the guardianship of power. The state should step back. The old gatekeepers should lose their automatic authority. The festival should return, as far as possible, to society itself.

That means taking seriously the discomfort many ordinary Bangladeshis have long felt toward the monstrous and animal iconography used in a civic ritual meant to represent everyone. Their objection has too often been dismissed as ignorance. But democratic culture cannot be built on permanent contempt for majority moral instinct.

A different Pohela Boishakh is entirely possible: less demonology, more memory; less ideological allegory, more historical recognition. Let it reflect the many inheritances through which Bangladesh became itself: the figures associated with the Bengali calendar, the saints who shaped Bengal's moral geography, the Sultanate and Mughal past, the struggle against colonial rule, the Language Movement, 1971, 1990, and the dead of more recent uprisings. Such a festival would still be political. All public memory is political. But it would at least abandon the old fraud by which one elite script alone claimed to be the nation's universal culture.

More importantly, it would restore a truth that elite rhetoric has long tried to keep in embarrassed shadow: Islam is not an unfortunate residue in Bangladesh, nor an awkward sociological fact to be managed under the perfume of secular refinement. It is one of the constitutive realities of the country's historical life. To say that is not to demand theocracy. It is to refuse falsification.

The larger issue is not Pohela Boishakh alone. It is the Bangladeshi habit of dressing power as culture and culture as innocence. Every elite wants its preferences mistaken for universality. The task of criticism is to interrupt that fraud and ask what has been hidden inside words like heritage, culture, progress and secularism.

Pohela Boishakh may yet survive that scrutiny. It may even become worthier because of it. But only if it stops functioning as an annual lesson in whom the nation is supposed to fear, aestheticise into darkness, or politely despise. Only if secularism, when uttered by Bangladeshi elites, is no longer treated as a virtue that certifies itself, but examined for the contempt toward Islam it has so often concealed. Only if the New Year stops serving as a managed accusation and returns as an occasion on which Bangladesh may meet more of itself than one class has so far been willing to permit.

The New Year should not belong to power. It should belong to the people whose memory, faith, grief, rebellion and continuity were edited out of the official script.

Only then would the mask begin to crack.

Only then might the festival become a beginning.

From Ni Hao to Know-How: Bangladesh's China Turn

Al Mamun Harun Ur Rashid — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Far to the north, beyond the familiar geographies of South and Southeast Asia, China begins in a landscape that feels almost European in its latitude and climate.

At roughly the same horizontal line as Hamburg, icy winds sweep across the vast plains of Heilongjiang, where the Black Dragon River (known across the border as the Amur) slides quietly along the edge of Russia. Dense taiga forests stretch endlessly behind it, austere and immense.

Travel nearly four thousand kilometers south, and the scene transforms entirely. The waters of the South China Sea lap gently onto the shores of Hainan, where palm trees lean into ocean breezes and children run along beaches that have earned the island its nickname: China's Hawaii.

Between these two extremes lies a country that defies easy comprehension. It is vast in scale, density, diversity, and ambition. Comparable in size to the United States, China houses more than four times its population, containing more people than Europe and Africa individually.

Its magnitude has always been difficult to grasp. In recent years, particularly under President Xi Jinping, that magnitude has acquired new clarity. China is no longer large; it is consequential in ways that reshape the global landscape.

Its political authority, economic reach, cultural diversity, and technological capabilities have converged into gravitational force. Like all such forces, it pulls others into its orbit.

Among those increasingly drawn into this orbit is Bangladesh.

"Ni hao," two simple Chinese words meaning "hello," echo across Dhaka's campuses and commercial districts. They are spoken tentatively at first, then with growing confidence, until they settle into the rhythms of everyday life. What was once foreign now feels familiar. What once required translation now arrives with ease.

This is how influence often begins: with habits.

The Rise of China

China's rise to superpower status has been widely chronicled, but often in ways that emphasize speed over structure. The story is not one of rapid economic growth alone, though that growth has been extraordinary. It is fundamentally a story of coordination: a state that has aligned its political authority and economic strategy with cultural narrative into a cohesive project.

Unlike the liberal democracies that dominated the late twentieth century, China has not pursued development through decentralization or ideological openness. It has instead embraced a model that prioritizes control, continuity, and extended planning. Under Xi, this model has become more pronounced.

Power has been consolidated, dissent has been managed, and institutions have been recalibrated to serve a singular vision of national rejuvenation.

This vision is rooted in a particular understanding of history. For centuries, China saw itself as a central civilization, surrounded by tributary states and bound together by a shared cultural framework. Periods of fragmentation, whether from internal strife or external invasion, are remembered as deviations from an ideal state of unity.

It is this historical memory that informs contemporary policy. Unity is a civilizational imperative and stability is its primary purpose. Harmony, often invoked in official discourse, is less about equality than about order: a carefully maintained balance in which each element knows its place.

This philosophy extends beyond China's borders. In its international engagements, China presents itself as a stabilizer. Its initiatives emphasize connectivity, cooperation, and mutual benefit. Beneath this language lies a strategic logic: to create networks of interdependence that reinforce China's centrality.

The Belt and Road Initiative exemplifies this approach. Stretching across continents, it links countries through infrastructure projects that facilitate trade while embedding them within a broader economic system. Ports, railways, and highways become conduits for influence.

What China Has to Offer Bangladesh

For Bangladesh, this system offers tangible advantages.

As a country seeking rapid industrialization and improved connectivity, it stands to benefit from Chinese investment and expertise. Infrastructure projects address longstanding bottlenecks, while trade links open new markets.

The expansion of roads and bridges connecting industrial zones, the modernization of ports such as Chattogram, and large energy projects (from coal plants to renewable initiatives) illustrate how Chinese investment is helping Bangladesh address chronic constraints in logistics and transportation. Industrial parks and special economic zones designed to attract foreign investors increasingly feature Chinese firms, embedding Bangladesh more deeply into regional production networks.

But the relationship extends beyond infrastructure.

In Bangladesh, China's presence is felt in subtler ways. It appears in classrooms, where students practice Mandarin with the same diligence once reserved for English proficiency tests. At institutions like the University of Dhaka and North South University, Confucius Institutes and language centers are often filled to capacity, with students preparing for scholarships or careers that require direct engagement with Chinese counterparts. Private coaching centers in Dhaka and Chattogram now advertise Mandarin courses alongside IELTS preparation, reflecting a shift in aspiration.

It surfaces in professional circles, where mid-career professionals enroll in language courses to engage more effectively with Chinese partners. Government officials from agencies such as BIDA (Bangladesh Investment Development Authority) and BEZA (Bangladesh Export Processing Zones Authority) undergo specialized training programs to facilitate negotiations with investors from China, while engineers and project managers working on joint ventures often find that basic Mandarin proficiency accelerates coordination and trust. In corporate offices, presentations increasingly include Chinese counterparts joining remotely, with translators or bilingual staff becoming indispensable.

It takes shape in the ambitions of entrepreneurs who look to cities like Guangzhou, Yiwu, and Shenzhen as integral nodes in their business networks. In Yiwu's wholesale markets, Bangladeshi traders source everything from textiles to electronics, often maintaining small offices or extended residences. In Shenzhen, tech entrepreneurs explore partnerships in electronics manufacturing, while garment exporters from Bangladesh travel regularly to Guangzhou to negotiate machinery purchases or raw material sourcing. Some have gone further, setting up permanent procurement offices that blur the line between domestic and overseas business operations.

The Emergence of the Sino-Literate

This shift is cultural and structural at once.

Education has become one of the most significant channels through which China exerts its influence. For decades, the Bangladeshi elite looked westward for higher education. Degrees from universities in the United States or the United Kingdom carried prestige and access to a globalized professional world.

Today, that orientation is changing. China has positioned itself as an alternative hub, offering fully funded scholarships, access to cutting edge fields, and immersion in a rapidly evolving economy. Tens of thousands of Bangladeshi students now study in Chinese universities, drawn by a combination of affordability and opportunity. Many enroll in institutions such as Peking University, Tsinghua University, and Shanghai Jiao Tong University, specializing in fields like artificial intelligence, data science, civil engineering, and pharmaceuticals: areas directly aligned with Bangladesh's development priorities.

The implications of this shift are profound. Education shapes perspectives and expectations. Students trained in China learn to navigate a system that emphasizes efficiency and state coordination. They become familiar with technologies and practices that reflect China's developmental model: exposure to smart city systems, high speed rail networks, and integrated digital payment ecosystems such as WeChat and Alipay, which demonstrate how digital infrastructure can transform everyday economic life.

When they return to Bangladesh, they bring these experiences with them. They enter sectors critical to the country's future: technology, healthcare, infrastructure. They apply what they have learned in ways that align, often implicitly, with Chinese approaches. Engineers trained in China contribute to large infrastructure projects; medical graduates bring back clinical techniques and hospital management practices; IT specialists replicate platform service models inspired by Chinese tech ecosystems.

This creates a new kind of elite: technically skilled and increasingly Sino-literate.

An Ecosystem of Engagement

The formation of this elite is reinforced by a broader ecosystem of engagement. Having acquired language skills and cultural familiarity, they act as intermediaries, facilitating trade and investment. Their presence in China enables Bangladeshi firms to navigate complex markets, while their connections in Bangladesh ensure a steady flow of opportunities.

This interplay between education and commerce creates a self reinforcing cycle. Each reinforces the other, deepening the relationship and expanding its scope.

For Bangladesh, the benefits are clear. Access to Chinese markets and technologies accelerates development. Educational exchanges build human capital. Infrastructure investments enhance connectivity. Yet the relationship also introduces new considerations.

Dependence, even when beneficial, carries risks. The challenge lies in balancing engagement with autonomy: in leveraging opportunities without constraining future choices.

This requires a strategic approach. Bangladesh must diversify its partnerships, strengthen its institutions, and articulate a clear vision of its national interests. Engagement with China can be a cornerstone of development, but it should not be the sole pillar.

The Gravitational Shift

Ultimately, the story of Bangladesh's growing connection with China is part of a broader transformation in the global order. The dominance of a single model is giving way to a more complex landscape, in which countries navigate multiple centers of influence.

For the next generation of Bangladeshi leaders, this landscape will be the norm. Many will have studied in Chinese universities, worked in Chinese companies, or participated in Chinese-funded projects. Their perspectives will reflect a world that is more interconnected, more diverse, and more fluid than that of their predecessors.

China's rise has created new possibilities for itself and for those who engage with it. For Bangladesh, the challenge is to navigate these possibilities with clarity and purpose.

The greeting "Ni Hao," then, is also an invitation: to participate in a conversation that is reshaping the future. As that conversation unfolds in classrooms and boardrooms, in policy circles and personal decisions, the words continue to resonate.

It is the sound of gravity shifting.

A War in the Gulf, a Village Without Its Son

Shaquib Ahmed — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Imagine a woman in a village outside Feni. Call her what you like. She is waiting for the monthly message from her son in Sharjah, the one that carries the taka that keeps her household fed, her grandchildren in school, the tin roof from leaking. She cannot read English. She does not subscribe to Jugantor or Samakal, but one of them passes through her son-in-law's hands at the tea stall, and the headlines reach her in fragments. In April she hears that a civilization may be destroyed in a single night. She does not know which civilization. She knows only that her son's flight home, if it ever comes, will cross the sky above it.

She is a composite, not a source. But the village is real, the son is real, and some version of her lives in every union parishad in this country.

This is the test her newspapers are failing. The Iran War, in whatever form it next assumes, is not a distant story for Bangladesh. It is an economic earthquake waiting for its trigger. Sixty percent of the country's crude oil crosses the Strait of Hormuz. Liquefied gas from Qatar and Oman lights roughly a fifth of the grid. Close to half of the $32.8 billion Bangladeshi workers send home each year originates in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, and Oman. The Gulf is not elsewhere. The Gulf is her rice field, her grandson's exercise book, her neighbor's new sewing machine.

And yet, to read the opinion pages of Bangladesh's four largest dailies through the sharpest weeks of the conflict is to encounter four different countries. The Daily Star writes for a Bangladesh that lives on the edge of the war's economic blast radius. Prothom Alo writes for a Bangladesh that has strong feelings about Tehran's sovereignty. Jugantor and Samakal write for a Bangladesh that could be anywhere in the world, because the anywhere of the world is what their wire copy describes. The woman in Feni lives in only one of these four countries. In the other three, she is an abstraction or she does not appear at all.

The Daily Star: the war as household arithmetic

The Daily Star is doing the one thing Bangladesh's press most needs to do. It translates the war into taka and rice and kilowatt-hours. Its opinion section reads like a ledger of exposure. "War fallout to slow growth, deepen poverty: WB." "Bangladesh economy caught in the crossfire." "The Iran war is exposing Bangladesh's economic vulnerabilities." The headlines repeat themselves because the point will not stop being true.

The contributors include an associate professor at IUBAT writing about rice fields, a senior manager at BRAC writing about empty wallets in village homes, and an opposition MP writing about when distant wars hit home. The register is plain. The numbers are specific. Refayet Ullah Mirdha's reporting on protracted war and Bangladesh's current account deficit sits next to Tasnuba Sinha's piece on a Gulf war and a village without its breadwinner. The two halves belong to the same story.

Security analysis appears too, and it asks larger questions. Will this war create a new world order? Does gangster imperialism threaten global peace? These are fair subjects. But the paper anchors them to Chattogram port and Bhola's gas fields before it lets them float. The editorial instinct, visible across weeks of coverage, is to pull the global back down to the local. It is the right instinct. It is also, among the four papers surveyed, close to unique.

Prothom Alo: sympathy for Tehran, and some attention to the worker

Prothom Alo, the country's largest Bengali daily, brings something the English paper does not, which is sustained ideological temperature. Its op-ed section leans toward Iran. Translations from Al Jazeera and Middle East Monitor frame the conflict as a civilizational provocation by the United States and its allies, with Iran's sovereignty treated as a principle worth defending. One translated headline reads "How the Iran War Could End" and casts territorial integrity as the path to peace. Another calls the war an American crusade dressed in apocalyptic language.

This is a real editorial stance, and Prothom Alo is entitled to it. The paper's readers want more than neutrality. They want to know whose side their newspaper is on, and the paper answers them.

Where Prothom Alo does better than its Bengali peers is in keeping the Bangladeshi worker on the page. মধ্যপ্রাচ্যে আমাদের শ্রমবাজারের ভবিষ্যৎ কী (What Is the Future of Our Labor Market in the Middle East?) asks the question that should be impossible to avoid in a country where the Gulf accounts for the majority of overseas jobs. The piece does not answer it the way The Daily Star would, with current account figures and migration strategy, but it asks, and the asking matters. The woman in Feni gets a few inches of column space.

The rest is world commentary, much of it translated. Dubai's hidden costs. Trump as a bungling Churchill. The reshaping of the global order. These are good op-eds for a reader who treats the newspaper as a window onto the world. They are less useful for a reader who treats the newspaper as a mirror held up to her own life.

Jugantor and Samakal: the view from a great-power summit

Jugantor leans on BBC, CNN, Time, and The Guardian. Its opinion pages could run in any country with a middle class interested in foreign affairs. Does Iran prefer a long war to a ceasefire? What does each side want? Why has American military power failed to close the conflict? These are legitimate questions, handled capably by writers in London and Washington and translated with care by Jugantor's staff.

What is missing is Bangladesh. Across the Jugantor op-eds surveyed, no essay asks what the conflict means for a garment worker in Narayanganj whose brother sends money from Doha, or for a farmer in Rangpur whose diesel costs will follow the price of Brent crude. Retired Brigadier General Bayezid Sarwar contributes memoir from his own Middle East postings, and the veteran commentator Anwar Hossain Manju writes on Israeli diplomacy. The frame is great-power rivalry and regional alignment, viewed from thirty thousand feet. The view is handsome. It is also not where most of Jugantor's readers live.

Samakal operates on the same model with a slightly wider sourcing net: The Guardian, Asia Times, Reuters, Al Jazeera. Damiana Bakardzhieva on the Hormuz blockade. Manzur Rashid on the erosion of humanitarian values in wars of hegemony. Badrul Hasan on peacekeeping diplomacy. Good writing, much of it. And, in one welcome exception, a piece by the banker Saiful Islam titled হরমুজ থেকে ঢাকায় ছড়িয়ে পড়া বৈশ্বিক সংকটের অর্থনীতি (The Economics of a Global Crisis Spreading from Hormuz to Dhaka). That headline is the piece the Bengali press should be running every week. At Samakal it runs once.

Five headlines, one threat

The clearest proof of how each paper reads the war sits in a single story. President Trump threatens to take out Iran "in one night" if Tehran does not reopen the Strait of Hormuz. The BBC runs a plain wire lede. Five Bangladeshi front pages translate it.

The Daily Star keeps the spine: "US can 'take out' entire Iran in a day." It is a headline a policy reader can do something with.

Prothom Alo adds Tehran's posture: এক রাতেই ইরানকে নিশ্চিহ্ন করার হুমকি ট্রাম্পের, অনড় তেহরান. Trump threatens obliteration; Tehran does not flinch. The sympathy is visible in the syntax.

Ittefaq raises the stakes to theology: আজ রাতে একটি সভ্যতা সম্পূর্ণ ধ্বংস হয়ে যাবে. A civilization will be destroyed tonight. The headline does not quote Trump. It pronounces the event.

Jugantor and Samakal stay closer to BBC phrasing, varying the attribution and the verb. Their readers get the wire, cleanly, with the source named.

Five translations of one threat. One version connects Bangladesh to the danger. One chooses a side. One reaches for apocalypse. Two hold up the wire copy like a document to be read rather than interpreted. None of them tells the woman in Feni, in her own language, what she needs to know, which is that the flight home her son is saving for may cost twice as much by September and that the company he works for may lay off Bangladeshi contract labor first.

The structural honesty Bangladesh's press owes its readers

The wire dependency is real and it is not, on its own, a scandal. No Bangladeshi paper has a correspondent in Tehran or Tel Aviv. The costs of stationing one, in money and in risk, are not trivial. For now, translation is what the editors can afford. The question is what they translate and how they frame it once they do.

Framing is an editorial choice, not a logistical constraint. A paper that runs three wire pieces on great-power maneuvering can also run one local piece on what this means for a family in Feni. That sort of piece requires a phone call to a labor recruiter, a visit to a hundi trader, an hour with a Bangladesh Bank economist. It is cheap journalism. It is also the journalism that connects the reader to the story. The Daily Star shows the connection can be made consistently in English. The Bengali papers have the larger readership and the greater obligation. They are mostly declining the assignment.

A press that speaks past its readers is not serving them, whatever its editorial sympathies. Sympathy for Tehran is a defensible position. So is alarm at American overreach, suspicion of Israeli policy, and concern for the collapse of the UN system. These are adult arguments, and Bangladeshi readers are adults. But they are also, most of them, adults whose household budget is one oil shock away from contraction, whose relatives are one evacuation notice away from joblessness, whose winter gas supply depends on ships that pass through a strait two Iranian missiles could close.

Back to the village

The woman in Feni does not know the name Bakardzhieva. She cannot pronounce Maududi. She has never heard of the Jamaat's founder or Churchill's Iran policy. She knows that her son's company has paused new contracts for three weeks, that the price of edible oil is rising again, that her neighbor's husband came back from Qatar without the savings he was supposed to bring, and that the newspapers someone reads aloud to her at the tea stall are full of words she does not recognize.

She is a composite. The pressures on her are not. Every union in this country has families whose monthly budget hinges on a remittance from the Gulf, and every one of those families is a reader, direct or once removed, of the Bangladeshi press.

The test of a newspaper is not whether it tells the world's story correctly. It is whether it tells its readers their own story well enough that they can act on it. On the Iran War, The Daily Star is doing that work for its English-reading audience. The Bengali press is treating its own readers as spectators at a global match, when in truth those readers are players on the field.

A war is unfolding in the Gulf, and a village in Feni is waiting for news. Bangladesh's largest newspapers should be in a hurry to reach it.

The Room with No CCTV

Ebadur Rahman — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Two quotes before we begin:

The state of exception has today reached its maximum worldwide development. The normative aspect of law can thus be obliterated and contradicted with impunity by a governmental violence that, while ignoring international law externally and producing a permanent state of exception internally, nevertheless still claims to be applying the law.

— Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception (2005)

Justice is an experience of the impossible.

— Jacques Derrida, Force of Law (1990)

I. The Room with No CCTV

On the evening of 30 March 2026, a group of filmmakers and cultural workers sat in the office of the Director General of the Department of Film and Publications (DFP) in Dhaka, waiting. They had been there since two in the afternoon. They were owed money: back payments for documentaries commissioned by the Ministry of Information on the songs of the July uprising, the revolution that had toppled fifteen years of authoritarian rule just eighteen months earlier. They had done the work correctly. They had followed the rules. They had come, as summoned, to collect what was theirs.

What happened next has the quality of a parable, except that parables do not leave people with burst eardrums.

A DFP cameraman, Md Moshiur Rahman, walked into the Director General's office uninvited. He declared himself a big man of the department. In front of the Director General, he demanded a percentage, a cut, from the filmmakers' payments. They refused. He made a phone call. Within minutes, fifty to sixty men, who identified themselves as members of the ruling party's student organisation, were inside a government building, beating artists, photographers, and human rights workers. Heads were split open. Blood pooled on the government floor. One filmmaker described shielding a colleague, turning to find another with blood streaming from his face. He screamed for the Director General to call the police. When the police arrived and asked for CCTV footage, they found the hard disk had been formatted. Wiped. The record, deleted.

Among the beaten was Mosfiqur Rahman Johan, a photographer whose archive contains thousands of images documenting enforced disappearances under the Hasina government. The faces of the missing. The waiting families. The government's own leaders had wept at his exhibitions less than a year before. He was now beaten in a government office by people who claimed to represent the revolution he had documented.

One of the filmmakers described this afterward with five Bengali words that need no academic translation: "ক্ষমতা পাইয়া দানব হইয়া" (having got power, they became monsters). The Bengali phrase captures an ancient moral intuition about corruption's speed.

II. The Deletion Is Not a Detail

The formatted hard disk is the essay's first and most important image. It is more than evidence of a cover up. It is the emblem of a method. A method that does not change with the party in power. A method that transfers from one government to the next, because it is not a property of the government. It is a property of the state.

Consider what the deletion required: a DFP employee who knew where the DVR was; a supervisor who permitted the access; and a system of mutual protection that made the formatting rational, because no one expects consequences. That expectation of no consequences is not born in a day. It is institutional. It is structural. It is the operating assumption of every arm of the Bangladeshi state that touches coercive power.

This essay's argument is that the events of 30 March 2026 at the DFP are not an isolated incident of party thuggery. They are a diagram: a small, legible version of something much larger — the systematic dismantling, in the weeks following Bangladesh's first elected parliament under the new government, of every institutional mechanism that might have made the state accountable to the people who bled for it in July 2024.

The French philosopher Alain Badiou calls this a restoration period: the moment when the revolution's own children begin to manage its energy instead of transforming it. The July Uprising was, in his terms, an Event: a genuine rupture that opened new possibilities for justice, institutional redesign, and human rights accountability. An Event requires fidelity, a sustained commitment to what it made possible. What follows an Event without fidelity is not transformation. It is Thermidor. It is the restoration of the old relations of power, dressed in the new government's clothes.

The 133 ordinances of the Dr. Younus' interim government were, taken together, an attempt at fidelity: an effort to formalize the July Uprising's consequences in law. The BNP government's special parliamentary committee reviewed all 133. Its report, presented to parliament on 3 April 2026, recommended converting 98 into law, amending 15, and allowing 20 to lapse or be repealed. The pattern of this selection — which ones were kept and which ones dropped — is the political theory of this moment in Bangladesh made visible.

III. The Referendum That Lapsed: Technical Legality vs. Sovereign Will

Before we go further, we need to address an argument that has been circulating online with some confidence, most loudly from government apologists. The argument goes like this: the referendum ordinance was event-specific. It was passed to enable the 12 February 2026 referendum on the July National Charter. That referendum happened. Yes won with approximately 68 percent of votes. The ordinance's purpose is therefore complete. Letting it lapse is routine legal housekeeping, the equivalent of not renewing a single-use camera once the film has been developed. Nothing to see here.

Let us give this argument the serious treatment it deserves and then take it apart.

What the Argument Gets Right

It is technically correct that the referendum ordinance was structured around a specific event. It is correct that under Article 93 of the Bangladesh Constitution, ordinances issued during the absence of parliament lapse if not ratified within thirty days of parliament's first sitting. It is correct that the BNP government did not need to "cancel" the referendum. The vote happened. The result stands. The July Charter has popular democratic legitimacy. A sunset clause is not a repeal. New bills will eventually follow from the referendum result. On these procedural facts, the apologists are right.

But procedural accuracy is not the same as political honesty. And political honesty is not the same as philosophical coherence.

What the Argument Gets Catastrophically Wrong

Here is the question the procedural defense refuses to ask: what happened to every other ordinance that lapsed alongside the referendum one?

The enforced disappearance prevention ordinance lapsed. The National Human Rights Commission independence ordinance lapsed. The Supreme Court Judges Appointment Ordinance, which would have removed the Prime Minister's effective control over High Court appointments, was actively repealed, not allowed to lapse. The Supreme Court Secretariat Ordinance, which would have freed lower court judges from Ministry of Law control, was also repealed. The Anti-Corruption Commission independence ordinance was allowed to lapse. These are not single-use cameras. These are the foundational accountability mechanisms of a democratic state. They had no sunset clause built into their purpose. They were dropped because the government chose to drop them.

So, when the apologist says "the referendum ordinance lapsed because it was event-specific," they are technically correct about one ordinance and completely silent about nineteen others. This is not analysis. It is misdirection, a conjuror's trick that asks you to watch the right hand while the left hand is busy.

But let us go deeper than political dishonesty, because the philosophical problem is more serious than the political one.

Carl Schmitt, the German legal philosopher whose ideas should make every democrat uncomfortable, but whose analytical precision remains useful, argued that the sovereign is he who decides on the exception. The exception is not a breakdown of the legal order; it is its foundation. Every legal system has zones where ordinary rules do not apply. The sovereign is the one who decides where those zones are and who lives inside them. This is not a description of dictatorship. It describes every state, including democracies.

The July Charter and the referendum that endorsed it were the Bangladeshi people's attempt to decide the exception for themselves: to say, these are the principles that will govern us, including the principle that no security force is above civilian oversight. The referendum ordinance was the legal vehicle for that declaration of popular sovereignty. Letting it lapse without immediate legislative follow-through is not housekeeping. It is the new sovereign, the BNP executive, reasserting its right to decide the exception. It is the sovereign saying: the people expressed a will in February, but I will determine what legislative consequences that will has.

Jacques Derrida argued that every constitution rests on a founding violence it cannot fully acknowledge, an act of power that precedes and exceeds the law it subsequently produces. The July Uprising was Bangladesh's most recent founding violence. The referendum was its ratification. The BNP government's selective implementation of the referendum's mandate is the new founding act: a constitutional settlement that preserves executive power while eliminating the mechanisms of accountability that the founding violence demanded.

Barrister Nowshad Zamir, a BNP parliamentarian and a member of the same committee that voted to lapse these ordinances, put it with legal precision in his written dissent: "If we don't do this, it will be correctly read as a retreat from human rights obligations by the BNP government in its very first month. This is not in our best interest." He was outvoted. The retreat was made. And it was read exactly as he predicted.

The apologist's answer to this is: wait for the bills. They will come. But Barrister Zamir's dissent explains precisely why waiting is not neutral. The Human Rights Commission ordinance, if it lapses, means Bangladesh loses its only path to GANHRI Status A, international certification of an independent human rights institution. The enforced disappearance ordinance, if it lapses, means Bangladesh has ratified the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance and then declined to enact its domestic equivalent. And the Supreme Court appointments ordinance, once repealed, does not wait in a drawer for a better day. Its repeal is a constitutional act that reasserts executive dominance. That act cannot be "undone" by procedural patience. And let us be clear on something else: a sunset clause for a referendum is procedural housekeeping; a sunset clause for judicial independence and enforced disappearance prevention is the sovereign deciding the exception once again.

A single-use camera, once used, has served its purpose. The accountability architecture of a democratic state is not a single-use camera. It is the entire plumbing system of the house. Letting it rust is not maintenance. It is a decision.

IV. The Constitutional Architecture of Impunity

Let us be precise about what was built and what was unbuilt in March and April 2026. Because precision matters here. Outrage without precision is just noise.

The Bangladesh constitution, as it now stands after the BNP government's decisions, contains at least five structural features that make the prosecution of security force members for systematic human rights violations functionally impossible. Not difficult. Not unlikely. Functionally impossible.

First: the executive controls judicial appointments. Article 48(3) means that the President acts on the Prime Minister's advice for virtually every executive act. Article 95 means that High Court appointments ultimately go through the Prime Minister. The repealed judicial appointments ordinance would have created a seven-member council, chaired by the Chief Justice, to shortlist candidates, effectively breaking the Prime Minister's control. It is gone. Courts whose judges are effectively appointed by the executive cannot be trusted to rule against the security forces that protect that executive.

Second: lower court judges remain under Ministry of Law control. The repealed Supreme Court Secretariat Ordinance would have transferred the appointment, transfer, and promotion of lower court judges from the Ministry of Law to the Supreme Court itself. It is gone. This means the judges most likely to encounter preliminary security force cases are directly dependent on the executive for their careers.

Third: the Human Rights Commission cannot independently investigate the security forces. The lapsed NHRC ordinance would have given the commission the power to investigate security forces on its own motion, without asking anyone's permission. The Law Ministry's objection was that "the commission is not under any ministry, which is an inconsistency." This objection deserves a direct reply: a Human Rights Commission that is under a ministry is not a Human Rights Commission. It is a ministry sub-department with a logo. Barrister Zamir's dissent states it plainly: "A watchdog that must ask the permission of the institution it is watching before it can investigate is not a watchdog. It is a shield for that institution."

Fourth: there is no independent prosecution. The Attorney General's office operates under the executive. Prosecutors who challenge the security forces face career consequences. Prosecutors who follow government preferences do not.

Fifth: the Home Ministry has formally declared that security force investigations are "sensitive." The ministry's own memorandum on the enforced disappearance ordinance states: "Enforced disappearance is a sensitive crime. Its investigation involves the security forces and law enforcement agencies." Note what this sentence does. It does not say the security forces were wrongly accused. It says the involvement of the security forces makes the matter too sensitive for independent investigation. This is the Awami League's logic, word for word, transplanted into a BNP Home Ministry memo. The current Home Minister, Salahuddin Ahmed, is himself a survivor of enforced disappearance. His ministry has produced an argument that his own disappearance was too sensitive to independently investigate.

This is not a political criticism dressed in philosophical language. This is the structure of the state, laid bare.

V. Necropolitics and the RAB Death Machine

On 13 January 2026, Bangladesh's Commission of Inquiry on Enforced Disappearances submitted its final 229-page report, titled "Unfolding the Truth: A Structural Diagnosis of Enforced Disappearance in Bangladesh." Its findings are worth sitting with, because they are not allegations. They are documented findings of a government-mandated commission.

Between 4,000 and 6,000 people were forcibly disappeared under the Hasina government. The commission found that disappearances were "coordinated, institutional and politically driven," relying on "a hidden detention infrastructure, coordinated security forces, routine torture, and a compliant justice system." The Rapid Action Battalion was responsible for approximately 25 percent of disappearances. The police for 23 percent. The DGFI, Detective Branch, and CTTC for substantial portions of the remainder. These were not isolated officers acting on individual impulse. They constituted what the commission called "a core instrument of governance."

The Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe argues that in the postcolonial state, sovereign power operates not through the management of life (who gets healthcare, who gets education) but through the management of death: who can be killed, by whom, with what impunity. He calls this necropolitics. The ultimate expression of sovereignty is the power and capacity to dictate who may live and who must die. This is not metaphor. In Bangladesh, it was operational procedure.

The RAB's "crossfire" methodology, documented by Netra News, Deutsche Welle, Human Rights Watch, and now the commission itself, was a standardized killing protocol. A target was identified. He was abducted at night. He was taken to a RAB facility. Hours or days later, he was found dead, with a gun placed nearby, in an "encounter." RAB officers, according to the Netra News investigation, received what amounted to kill points, career incentives for each confirmed kill. This was not a rogue unit. It was a bureaucratically organized death machine, with standardized procedures, institutional incentives, and a protection system that ran from the Directorate General of Forces Intelligence to the law courts that rubber-stamped the "encounter" verdicts.

Giorgio Agamben's concept of the homo sacer, the person who can be killed but whose death cannot be processed through law, describes the disappeared of Bangladesh with uncomfortable precision. They were taken from their families, held in facilities known as Aynaghar (House of Mirrors, named for the disorientation of the detainee who cannot locate himself), tortured, sometimes released, sometimes killed. Their detention was never officially acknowledged. Their deaths, where they occurred, were attributed to crossfire or natural causes. They existed in a zone that was neither legally inside nor legally outside the state: they were citizens whom the state could kill with impunity, and that is, historically, the most accurate definition of bare life.

The crucial point — the one that connects the Aynaghar to the DFP's formatted hard disk to the lapsed ordinances — is this: the RAB was not created by the Awami League. It was created in 2004, under a BNP government, as a "crossfire" machine from day one. The BNP invented the methodology. The Awami League intensified and politicized it. The difference between BNP-era RAB and AL-era RAB is a difference of target, not of structure. The structure was and is bipartisan.

This is why the BNP's reluctance to dismantle security force impunity is not hypocrisy, though it has hypocritical consequences. It is something more structurally honest: the BNP cannot dismantle the RAB's culture of impunity without dismantling the institutional logic that the BNP itself installed. To prosecute the RAB officers who disappeared BNP members under the Awami League, the BNP would also have to face questions about what RAB did under its own watch. The institution is too deep in the state's foundations to pull out without something crumbling.

VI. The Comparative Mirror: Peru, South Africa, and Why Bangladesh Cannot Follow

The question of whether a state can try its own security forces for crimes against humanity is not abstract. Other countries have tried, with varying success and instructive failures.

Argentina comes closest to success. After the 1976-1983 military junta disappeared an estimated 30,000 people, the return to democracy produced prosecutions that eventually, after pardons and reversals, convicted junta leaders for crimes against humanity. The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, who had marched with photographs of the disappeared for decades, became one of the most powerful civil society movements in modern history. What made Argentina's partial success possible? The military was discredited beyond recovery by the catastrophic Malvinas/Falklands defeat of 1982. Civil society organizations maintained sustained, co-optable pressure for decades. Independent prosecutors existed who were genuinely willing to pursue cases against senior officers. None of these conditions currently exist in Bangladesh. The military has not experienced a comparable discrediting event. Civil society is being co-opted. There is no independent prosecution infrastructure.

Peru achieved a remarkable landmark: the 2009 conviction of Alberto Fujimori himself, a head of state, for crimes against humanity committed by security forces under his command. But Peru's story has a bitter 2025 chapter. In June 2025, Peru's Congress passed an amnesty law covering security forces for the 1980-2000 conflict. In August 2025, the President announced implementation regardless of an Inter-American Court order to the contrary. Three decades of accountability work, undone by ordinary legislation. If this could happen in Peru, where accountability went furthest, Bangladesh's prospects deserve honest assessment.

South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission is frequently cited as a model. But its most important lesson for Bangladesh is the one least discussed: the senior leadership of the apartheid security forces did not participate. The top commanders, the architects of systematic murder, evaded the process. Only the foot soldiers bore the cost. Even Eugene de Kock, "Prime Evil," was a middle-ranking official. The generals kept their pensions and their silence. This is the structural pattern: when institutions are complicit in atrocity, accountability tends to stop at the level where institutional survival interests kick in.

The regional picture deepens the pessimism. Pakistan's ISI model, security forces as a state within a state, effectively immune from civilian judicial oversight, is not alien to Bangladesh's security architecture. It is its genealogy. After 1971, Bangladesh's intelligence and paramilitary structures inherited colonial and Pakistani templates of security force sovereignty. India's Armed Forces Special Powers Act zones, areas where security personnel are immune from prosecution without central government sanction, are the explicit legal model for what the BNP Home Ministry is asking for when it demands prior government approval for security force investigations. These are not separate national phenomena. They are a shared South Asian architecture of competitive authoritarianism, as Lucan Ahmad Way has called it: maintaining the forms of democracy while systematically insulating security power from democratic accountability.

VII. Derrida's Impossible Demand: The Question the State Cannot Ask Itself

We have arrived at the essay's hardest question. Can the Bangladeshi state try the military and intelligence officers who carried out thousands of enforced disappearances, extrajudicial killings, and acts of systematic torture?

Jacques Derrida argued that justice and law are permanently in tension. Law is calculable: it applies rules to cases. Justice is incalculable: it is the infinite demand that the law always be held accountable to something beyond itself. The moment a judge applies the law, Derrida says, she faces what he calls an aporia: a demand that exceeds what the law can provide. Justice is what law must always be reaching toward but never fully grasps. It is the impossible demand that makes the demand worth making.

Here is the aporia for Bangladesh in plain terms. The prosecution of security force officers for crimes against humanity would require the state to use its legal machinery against the institutions that make its legal machinery possible. The courts that would try them are appointed by the executive that commands them. The prosecutors who would prosecute them serve the government that benefits from their impunity. The security forces whose records would be used as evidence are the same forces that format hard disks when evidence becomes inconvenient. This is not a circle that can be squared from within the existing constitutional order. It is a structural contradiction.

Derrida's point is not that we should stop trying. It is the opposite. Justice is possible only as the infinite, unrelinquishable demand that the legal order be held to account for what it excludes and protects. The demand that the state try its own security forces is exactly this kind of demand: it asks the law to confront its own founding violence, the force on which its authority rests and which it cannot fully acknowledge without undermining itself.

Every state is founded on what Derrida calls a mystical foundation of authority: an original act of power that precedes law, that is itself neither legal nor illegal because legality had not yet been established. Bangladesh's founding violence includes 1971, the coups of 1975 and 1982, Operation Clean Heart in 2002, and the RAB from 2004 onwards. The July Uprising was an attempt to interrupt this founding violence, to subject it retrospectively to the rule of law. The lapsed ordinances were the instruments of that interruption. Their lapsing is the founding violence reasserting itself: the sovereign deciding, once again, that there are zones of state action that law does not reach.

VIII. The Pessimism of Clarity: Why Naming Matters

The argument of this essay is structurally pessimistic. Let us be clear about what kind of pessimism this is.

It is not the pessimism of the government apologist who says: everything is fine, the ordinances will come back as bills, wait and see. That is not pessimism. That is the political utility of patience deployed in the service of inaction.

It is not the pessimism of the outrage-without-analysis that fills social media with furious memes and zero institutional understanding. That is not pessimism either. That is rage performing itself.

It is the pessimism that Romain Rolland calls "pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will," that begins with a clear-eyed account of structural constraints as the precondition for any real strategy of change. You cannot fix a plumbing problem you have misdescribed. You cannot resist a restoration you have not identified.

So let us name what is happening.

The lapsing of the enforced disappearance ordinance is a decision to protect the institutional structures that carried out disappearances. It is not a procedural delay.

The deletion of the DFP CCTV footage goes beyond evidence destruction. It is the demonstration, in miniature, on a government hard disk, that the mechanisms of impunity are intact and operational under the new government.

The co-optation of human rights organisations, the marginalisation of independent civil society, the beating of a photographer whose archive contains the faces of the disappeared — these are not isolated incidents of post-revolutionary disorder. They are the systematic elimination of the infrastructure of accountability.

Badiou says that every genuine political Event produces what he calls "faithful subjects": people who maintain fidelity to what the Event made possible, against the forces of restoration. The faithful subjects of the July Uprising are identifiable. They are the human rights workers who continue to document disappearances despite the new government's indifference. They are the photographers, Johan among them, whose archives preserve the faces of the missing even when the state prefers they be forgotten. They are the parliamentarians like Barrister Nowshad Zamir who record their dissent knowing it will be outvoted, because the record matters. They are the families of the 330 people still missing, who have not stopped asking where their sons and daughters are.

These people are keeping the Event alive. They are doing so at personal cost. The least the rest of us can do is name, with precision, what is happening around them.

IX. Conclusion: The Sovereignty Question and Its Answer

Can the Bangladeshi state try the military and intelligence officers who carried out enforced disappearances, extrajudicial killings, and systematic torture?

The answer, as of April 2026, is no.

Not because the evidence does not exist. The Commission of Inquiry produced a 229-page report documenting coordinated institutional crime at the highest levels of the security apparatus.

Not because there is no legal framework. The International Crimes (Tribunals) Act could, in principle, be used for prosecutions of security force members.

Not because there are no brave lawyers, honest judges, or committed human rights workers. Bangladesh has all of these, though their institutional space is shrinking.

But because the constitutional architecture that would support such prosecution has been systematically dismantled in the weeks since the 13th parliament sat. Judicial independence has been re-confirmed as executive prerogative. The human rights commission has been prevented from becoming genuinely independent. The enforced disappearance law has been allowed to lapse. The security forces retain the structural immunity of institutions that the state, as currently constituted, cannot function without.

Schmitt tells us: the sovereign decides the exception. The BNP government has decided. The security forces are the exception.

Derrida tells us: law rests on a founding violence it cannot fully acknowledge. Bangladesh's founding violence is still operational, still producing bodies, still formatting hard disks.

Agamben tells us: the state of exception, once installed, tends to become the permanent paradigm of government. Bangladesh's security forces have been in a permanent state of exception since at least 2004.

Mbembe tells us: necropower is not a deviation from sovereignty. It is its purest expression. The RAB's kill protocols were not a failure of the state. They were a feature of it.

And Badiou tells us: restorations succeed when the political formation born of an Event becomes the manager of that Event's consequences instead of its faithful executor. The BNP government is managing the July Uprising's consequences. It is not serving its mandate.

This is the hard answer to the sovereignty question. The state cannot try itself because it is constituted, in part, by the practices that would need to be tried. To change this requires not a better ordinance or a cleverer parliamentary maneuver. It requires what Derrida calls a new founding act, a genuine reconstitution of the relationship between state power and the rule of law. It requires what Argentina's accountability history required: a discrediting of the security apparatus so complete that institutional self-protection becomes impossible. It requires sustained civil society pressure that cannot be co-opted because it is too distributed, too numerous, too embedded in the families of the disappeared. It requires international mechanisms with real enforcement power, which Bangladesh currently lacks.

None of this is available in April 2026.

But here is what Derrida's aporia insists: the impossibility of justice does not release us from its demand. The experience of the impossible is not the reason to stop. It is the reason the demand is worth making, because it is the only demand that is equal to the scale of what happened.

The families of the 330 people still missing are making exactly this demand. They are asking the impossible from a state that has demonstrated it cannot provide it. They have been asking for years. They were at Tarique Rahman's exhibition, faces still waiting, before the election. They are still waiting now.

The room with no CCTV is not a metaphor.

It is a method.

And the method works only if we let it.

Suffering That Begets Suffering

Md Ibrahim Khalilullah — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

It was noon when I reached the Kalyanpur slum. Nilufar Begum had finished cooking, taken a bath, and sat at the door of her single room house. No one else was home, though her family of six all share that room. Her son (36), who has cancer, had gone to the Mohakhali National Cancer Hospital. His wife and their three children had gone to her parents' house in Comilla.

What did she cook today? I asked. Only kalmi shak bhaji (stirred greens) and lentils, she said.

Nilufar Begum is 53 years old. In 1973, when she was two, the Meghna River swallowed their home in Bhola. She came to Dhaka holding her mother's hand, together with her two sisters.

She spoke fondly of her early days in Dhaka. They lived in a slum next to the Mohammadpur embankment. "When I came to Dhaka in 1973, we struggled for food. We knew no one. My mother and my two sisters were in danger. I was the youngest. My mother started working as a domestic helper in people's houses. We ate whatever food the householders gave us. Sometimes we would ask people for food. When I grew up, my mother enrolled me in a school. But I could not continue because of money."

Career at seven

Nilufar started her career at seven. Even as a child, she worked as a domestic helper because the family had no money. "But at that age, I did not like working. I told my mother, I won't stay here, take me away. Then my mother said, if you don't stay here, what will you eat? How will I feed you?"

The householder had another child the same age as Nilufar. "I worked and took care of that child. I played with her. They were both husband and wife doing jobs."

First victim of harassment

Nilufar worked in that house in Mohammadpur for a year. She was eight at the time. When the owner left Dhaka with his family, she lost that job. Her mother found her a new position as a domestic helper in the Asadgate area. That was where Nilufar first suffered abuse. "They gave me hard tasks: sweeping the house and washing dishes. But I was young, so I could not do them well." The owner dismissed her.

A construction worker's life

When Nilufar was nine, her mother pulled her from domestic work and took her to break bricks at a construction site. Her mother also worked as a bricklayer. Together they broke bricks to earn money for the family. She told us about an accident during the construction of a road near the agricultural market in the Mohammadpur area. "One day, I was breaking bricks when a hammer fell and crushed my hand. I cried. Then my mother told me, 'You don't have to work here anymore. You just sit here.'" Later, Nilufar took another domestic helper position in the Adabor area.

Child marriage

When Nilufar was twelve, she started selling pitha (rice cakes) on the sidewalk: bhapa pitha (steamed), patishapta pitha (rolled), and chitai pitha (thin, crisp). She fell silent when she came to the hardest days. She stood, drank a glass of water from the dark room, and returned to the door.

Her eyes were wet. "Our life is difficult. We have suffered so much that we cannot tell anyone. And even if we tell, no one will believe us."

At twelve, she was forced into marriage. Her husband, Anwar Hossain, worked in a small food shop. He had seen her selling pitha and liked her. He took her away without telling her family, then married her. Nilufar's family searched everywhere. They went to the Mohammadpur police station and prepared to file a missing person's case. After a week, Anwar brought her back. "I cried. I told my husband, why did you kidnap me and force me to marry you? Take me to my mother." Her mother was relieved to see her daughter. She had never consented to the marriage. But they had no choice.

The hardest days

Nilufar's husband did not want to work. They had no place to stay. Her mother gave them a small space next to her house in the Mohammadpur slum. Nilufar worked as a domestic helper and held the family together with great difficulty. Their first child died a few months after birth.

Her eyes grew wet again as she spoke. She wiped them with the hem of her saree. "If the Meghna River had not destroyed everything for us, we would not have come to Dhaka. We would not have suffered like refugees."

"When I think of my history, I cannot hold back my tears. How difficult our lives have been. I could never buy a fish to eat. I could never wear a new dress. I cried behind my mother. She would say, where will I get new clothes for you? Your father does not work. Where will we get the money?"

Nilufar's voice choked with tears.

The 1988 flood

As she spoke, her mother Anwara and younger sister Shahana joined her. Nilufar's other sister was born after the family came to Dhaka. They live in the next lane in the Kalyanpur slum and had come to see their sister.

During the 1988 flood, the family fell into great hardship. Nilufar was pregnant with her second child. She, her husband, mother, father, three sisters, and her elder sister's daughter (eight people) took shelter at a center on Iqbal Road in Dhaka. "In the flood, all the houses in our slum went under water. My parents, sisters, and my husband, the whole family, stayed there for two months. I had my second child there. His name is Roni."

After the flood: Kalyanpur slum

When the water receded, Nilufar's family crossed to the empty land opposite Government Bangla College in the Kalyanpur area and built a house. They put together a few flimsy shelters from scraps of wood.

Nilufar said the slum caught fire in 1989, the year after the flood. Everything in their house burned to ashes. Her family barely escaped. Nine residents died in that fire.

"When everything was gone, we started living here again with a polythene roof. We did not have the money to build a house with tin."

After the fire, Nilufar had no money to move. She sighed. "Our economic situation had become bad. We did not have the money to go to the market. I would go to the market in the morning and bring abandoned raw vegetables from the street. Then I would cook the cauliflower leaves and eat them. We would go without food for two meals."

Her mother and sister shed tears. Memories of suffering passed before their eyes.

They have lived in this Kalyanpur slum for 36 years since 1988. The slum has burned four times and been demolished six times by miscreants. Over the years, Nilufar saved enough to buy tin for her house.

Garment work

When her husband did not earn, Nilufar took a job at a garment factory through a relative. She cut cloth yarn. The salary was 12 takas. "At that time, garment factories did not pay salaries on schedule. If they paid for one month, they would keep three months in arrears." Since the income was not regular, she returned to domestic work.

The cycle of child marriage

Nilufar has three daughters and one son. After educating the eldest daughter to class five, she could not afford more schooling. She married her off at twelve.

The middle daughter passed the SSC examination. Then she could not continue. Nilufar married her off at sixteen.

The youngest daughter completed class ten and married at fourteen. Her husband is paying for her to continue studying.

When I asked why all three daughters married young, Nilufar gave a frank answer. In slums, parents marry off their daughters early for safety. She spoke in a cautious whisper: "All kinds of scoundrels disturb them. Unmarried girls cannot be kept in slums for long. Even if young men are warned, it makes no difference. They threaten to kidnap the girls."

The endless suffering

Nilufar said they never wanted to come to Dhaka. But when the Meghna River took everything, they had no choice. "Our difficult life sank into more difficulty after coming here. We gained nothing. Our lives did not improve. We burdened ourselves with new suffering."

Her mother nodded.

Now Nilufar has six people in her family: herself, her son, his wife, and their three children. Her son has cancer. Her husband died last month from a heart attack after hearing about the diagnosis. The family has no other income. She borrows at steep interest to treat her son. "I am 53 years old. At this age, people live a secure life. I still walk the streets selling clothes to earn handfuls of rice. If I stay at home for a day, the food will be gone."

"We have been in Dhaka for 51 years. But there has been no improvement. We still work hard to earn two meals a day. We don't even have a place to bury ourselves if we die."

Nilufar was sitting at the door of the house, crying, as she said these words. Her mother and sister had tears in their eyes too. By then, evening had fallen. Nilufar went to light a lamp. But there is no light in the lives of these climate migrants.

Climate migrants in Bangladesh

Bangladesh is one of the most climate vulnerable countries in the world. In 2022, over 7.1 million Bangladeshis were displaced by climate change, according to the World Health Organization. A World Bank report projects Bangladesh could have 13.3 million internal climate migrants by 2050. Atiqul Islam, then mayor of Dhaka North City Corporation, said around 2,000 people move to Dhaka each day, 70% because of natural disasters and climate change.

COPs and neglected climate migrants

I asked Nilufar whether she had heard of COP (Conference of the Parties, the annual UN climate summit where world leaders negotiate action on climate change). She looked at me in surprise. She does not know what COP is. This is the first time she has heard the word. She knows nothing about any conference.

She does not need to know what a COP is, because no one cares about poor climate migrants like her. WHO materials around COP29 mention migration, displacement, and migrant health, but no standalone COP29 declaration or funding package has emerged for climate migrants alone.

Experts' opinion

Harjeet Singh, a climate activist and Global Engagement Director at the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative, said: "Bangladesh or India or Nepal and many other countries are endangered because of sea level rise or because of glacial melt. Certain places are going to be uninhabitable. In that situation, people have to move, and we must respect their right to move, but then we need to provide them with support when they are migrating. There are also challenges with the host community, because cities in our part of the world are not ready to receive migrants."

Singh added: "Insufficient support has come to climate migrants in the form of adaptation. We are looking at a challenging situation, and we do not have a proper policy framework in developing countries to deal with it. There is no support coming from developed countries to help them develop that framework and help people forced to migrate. The situation is getting worse with increasing climate impacts."

Md Shamsuddoha, Chief Executive of the Center for Participatory Research and Development (CPRD), said: "Migration from rural to urban areas is growing. Urban areas should welcome migrants. They should develop the capacity to hold people and to provide essentials: water, education, health, and livelihood opportunities."

He added: "Developed countries should take responsibility for migrant people. But it is difficult, because developed countries will not accept responsibility for migrants in the name of climate change. They may consider labor migration, but they will not take responsibility for climate migrants. That is why we need to accommodate our people who migrate within the country, ensure their job security and food security, and provide essential services."

The Relief That Hides a Reckoning

Apurba Jahangir — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

India is relieved. You can feel it in the diplomatic choreography. Modi congratulated Tarique Rahman before the results were official. Dr S Jaishankar flew to Dhaka for Khaleda Zia's funeral. Foreign Minister Khalilur Rahman is now in New Delhi for talks with his Indian counterpart, the first senior-level visit by a member of the new BNP government. The signs are all there. South Block's language has shifted from cold silence to measured warmth. "Repairing ties." "A new phase." "Democratic, progressive, inclusive Bangladesh." After eighteen months of strained relations, New Delhi is exhaling.

But relief is not friendship. And a reset differs from a reckoning. Before India's warmth defines the terms of this relationship going forward, a more complicated history deserves examination. India did not always feel this way about the BNP. Not in 1991. Definitely not in 2001. The party that New Delhi now carefully courts is the same party that, for two consecutive democratic tenures, represented one of its most difficult bilateral relationships in the region.

When Khaleda Zia led the BNP to victory in 1991, India responded with cautious distance. The BNP had been built, ideologically, as a corrective to the Mujib era. Its Bangladeshi nationalism was a deliberate departure from the Bangladeshi-Indian cultural intimacy that the Awami League had always embodied. For New Delhi, the Awami League was a natural partner, rooted in the shared history of 1971. The BNP occupied different political ground. Relations during 1991–96 were transactional and managed, without particular warmth on either side. When Hasina won in 1996, Delhi moved quickly. The Ganges Water Treaty followed within months. The preference was clear.

The 2001–06 BNP-Jamaat government presented a different order of difficulty. That period occupies a specific place in Indian strategic memory as a genuine bilateral crisis, not a diplomatic inconvenience. Indian officials publicly accused Dhaka of allowing anti-India insurgent groups to operate from Bangladeshi territory. Senior NDA ministers, including L.K. Advani and Yashwant Sinha, made statements about al-Qaeda elements sheltered on Bangladeshi soil. Then came the Chittagong arms haul of 2004: ten truckloads of weapons allegedly destined for Indian rebel groups. Whatever diplomatic goodwill remained came under serious strain. The Khaleda Zia government signed major Chinese defense deals that New Delhi read as a strategic signal. Around that time a proposed $3 billion Tata investment in Bangladesh collapsed. Transit arrangements were firmly refused.

History suggests that India's current cordiality towards the BNP is a development shaped more by the past two years. Sheikh Hasina's government, for over fifteen years, became India's most reliable partner in Dhaka. Counterinsurgency cooperation, connectivity projects to the Northeast, a consistent check on Pakistani intelligence activity in Bangladesh. The relationship delivered on India's core security and economic interests. When the uprising of July-August 2024 swept Hasina from power, India faced a strategic disruption it had not anticipated.

The Yunus-led interim government presented India with a series of compounding difficulties. Dhaka formally demanded Hasina's extradition after her trial and conviction. Bilateral issues that had previously been handled through discreet diplomatic channels were raised publicly and in international forums. India suspended tourist visa services at several Bangladesh consular locations. Overtures towards other neighbors, including discussions on defense procurement and new maritime links between Chittagong and Karachi, were read as a deliberate reorientation.

Against this backdrop, the BNP's landslide on February 12, 2026 was, for India, less a democratic outcome to be celebrated than a crisis to be managed. New Delhi had spent eighteen months hoping the Yunus interim would fail quietly enough to be replaced by something more pliable. When it became clear that would not happen, that Bangladesh's political realignment was structural, not incidental, India did what it has always done in the neighborhood: it picked the least uncomfortable option and dressed the preference up as principle. The congratulatory call before the votes were counted was not goodwill. It was positioning. India was not welcoming a democratic mandate; it was securing an entry point into a government it could not afford to be locked out of. The relief was real. But it was the relief of a regional power that had miscalculated badly and was now scrambling to recover lost ground.

An elected government with a democratic mandate and constitutional structures is an entity that India or any regional power with a history of leveraging its neighbors knows how to work with. You can negotiate with it, apply pressure through it, exploit its dependencies, reward its compliance. The Yunus interim had been frustrating precisely because it operated outside the usual grammar of bilateral leverage: unelected, yet it held the whole country's mandate, internationally legitimized despite the flood of disinformation, and answerable to a street uprising instead of the kind of institutional interests that India has historically known how to influence.

At the same time, India's strategic anxieties have not disappeared; they have been deprioritized. Jamaat-e-Islami's surge to over sixty parliamentary seats from a historical ceiling of around eighteen is a development that Indian analysts are watching carefully, particularly given Jamaat's geographic concentration in constituencies along the border. We would be fools if we thought the historical associations between the BNP-Jamaat coalition and the crises of 2001–06 have been forgotten in South Block.

What is largely absent from India's reset narrative is any honest reckoning with why the relationship collapsed in the first place and more importantly, who bears responsibility for it. India did not stand by while Hasina dismantled Bangladesh's democratic institutions; it actively enabled her. New Delhi's diplomatic cover, its silence on rigged elections, its framing of authoritarian consolidation as "stability": these were not passive omissions. They were choices. And those choices, sustained over fifteen years, produced the deep structural anti-India sentiment that now runs through Bangladeshi public life like a fault line. The International Crisis Group noted plainly in December 2025 that India's support for Hasina "fanned longstanding anti-Indian feeling in Bangladesh, contributing to her ouster." Chatham House echoed it. These assessments come from institutions that India itself takes seriously, not Bangladeshi grievances being read back to India. The reset narrative that New Delhi is now constructing asks Bangladesh to move on without requiring India to account for what it moved on from. That is not diplomacy. That is the continuation of the same asymmetric logic by other means.

These are structural observations. They describe an accumulated pattern of a relationship built around a single political anchor, of bilateral asymmetries that generated resentment over years, of an Indian foreign policy posture in the neighborhood that has repeatedly struggled to outlast the governments it was built around. These describe an accumulated pattern, not a temporary diplomatic rupture. The Neighbourhood First policy has faced similar difficulties in Nepal, Sri Lanka, and the Maldives. Bangladesh is not an exception; it is part of a pattern.

The Khalilur Rahman visit carries a genuine agenda. Teesta water sharing, the tourist visa suspension, trade imbalances, border management, energy cooperation: these are substantive issues that affect ordinary people on both sides of the border. Movement on any of them would be meaningful. Two details from this visit deserve attention. Bangladesh raised the extradition of Faisal Karim Masud, prime accused in the murder of student leader Sharif Osman Hadi, who fled across the Meghalaya border into India after shooting Hadi in the head during an election campaign. This was placed squarely on the bilateral agenda. Khalilur Rahman also placed the extradition of Sheikh Hasina herself, sentenced to death by the International Crimes Tribunal, on the table. Regardless of what India decides, this is a sign that Bangladesh continues to use the backbone it gained after the 2024 uprising.

I hope BNP realizes that their own "Bangladesh Before All" foreign policy posture cannot be a campaign formulation alone. The public sentiment about the terms of Bangladesh's relationship with India remains a live and sensitive issue. BNP's own foreign affairs advisers have described the previous arrangement as one in which Dhaka lacked an equal voice. Any government in Bangladesh that is seen to be conceding that equality for the sake of Indian goodwill will face a political cost for it.

India can build a workable relationship with the BNP. Over time, it may become a genuinely productive one. But the relationship cannot replicate the terms of the Hasina era. That particular arrangement, whatever its strategic utility for India, generated the conditions that destabilized it. The relief that India feels today is understandable. The structural questions it has not yet answered are real.

Bangladesh: The Post-July 36 Syndrome

Rashed Chowdhury — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Bangladesh Nationalist Party was thrust back into governance after its landslide victory on February 12, 2026. Yet widespread speculation holds that today's BNP has drifted from the nationalist ideology of its founder, President Ziaur Rahman. It was no secret that party leaders approached the Indian ruling authority, at least from 2018, to position themselves as an alternative to the Awami League, which continued to slide in public esteem. India kept playing.

Earlier, the BNP had been ousted in what amounted to a palace coup staged by army chief General Moeen U Ahmed on January 11, 2007, the event known popularly as the 1/11 betrayal. India was believed to be behind the act. Pitching the Islamist card, Delhi's strategists brought the US and a few Western entities along, warning that if the BNP returned to power Bangladesh would become a bastion of fundamentalism, a fear amplified after 9/11. It was a false flag. The South Asian nation has been a moderate Muslim country for centuries and never espoused extremist ideologies, not even during the era of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan.

The India Factor

India's interest in Bangladesh lay elsewhere. Since the British left the subcontinent, Hindu India was never at ease between its two Muslim neighbours. J.N. Dixit, a former Indian Foreign Secretary, was candid when he wrote in Liberation and Beyond (1999) that separating the eastern part from Pakistan's west was as old an Indian agenda as their birth in 1947. What Dixit left unspoken was India's hegemonic eye on its eastern neighbour for economic and geostrategic reasons. Events since then bear this out. The hawkish Pakistani leaders in both the civil service and the military were equally responsible for creating the conditions that led to the 1971 conflict. The Awami League followed the Indian line and was content to serve as a pawn in that game, from Tajuddin Ahmad through Sheikh Mujibur Rahman to Sheikh Hasina. With the fall of Mujib in 1975, New Delhi lost control over Bangladesh. Its intelligence agency, the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), however, was not idle. RAW reportedly maintains tens of thousands of agents in Bangladesh to promote Indian interests. At the same time, the agency kept cultivating Sheikh Hasina, the daughter of Mujib who lived in exile in New Delhi following her father's assassination. RAW succeeded in placing its protege in state power in 1996. After a short break, the 1/11 episode put India back in the driving seat. The military controlled election of 2008 gave the Indian protege full control. That New Delhi received its fleeing protege with open arms when an angry student and public uprising swept Dhaka on August 5, 2024, also speaks to their close and mutually beneficial relationship.

After August 5, New Delhi intensified its activities with an alternate front: the BNP. Strategically quiet Awami elements remained on board. Dr. Pinaki Bhattacharya and other political activists never tired of warning about the schemes of what they called the India, Awami League, and BNP trio. This alliance, critics alleged, helped the BNP in the February 12 elections. On the other hand, Professor Muhammad Yunus, the Interim Government chief since August 8, 2024, appeared to have been misled into believing that the BNP upheld the values of the uprising known as July 36. He also failed to bring the opposing forces, both within and outside the system, fully under control. At 85, the Nobel Laureate had perhaps lost much of the energy needed to tackle the intricacies and ruthlessness of politics.

Accomplishments of the Interim Government

Professor Yunus started well. Riding a wave of local support and international goodwill, his accomplishments in the first year were significant by any standard. Drawing on the recommendations of several reform commissions, his team carried out visible reforms in finance, banking, administration, healthcare, labour rights, women's rights, the judiciary, and the electoral system. Many wrongs of the past were corrected. Perhaps the team's biggest achievements came in improving law and order and restoring political freedom after the fascist police state. The hardest task, though, was reforming an administration built to serve authoritarian rule for almost two decades. A few prominent figures of the old regime were neutralised, but vast numbers remained in place, many of them suspected of still serving the interests of their former benefactors. Many criminals, including Sheikh Hasina, have been brought to trial; some received capital sentences, while proceedings against others continue. The future of these legal outcomes, however, remains in question given the perceived shift in perspective under the new administration, which critics suspect operates under RAW guidance.

The Beneficiaries of the July Biplob

The largest beneficiary of the July Biplob (revolution) is the BNP, even though the party made little or no contribution to the movement and shied away from it when the protesting students sought its support. Its Chairperson, Begum Khaleda Zia; Acting Chairperson, Tareque Rahman; Secretary General, Mirza Fakhrul Islam Alamgir; senior leader Salahuddin Ahmed (who had been living in Shillong, said to be under RAW hospitality); Lutfuzzaman Babar (sentenced to death in the August 21 grenade attack case); and hundreds of others were freed from their serious legal entanglements of the previous era. The cases against Professor Yunus were also dropped. All or most of these cases were said to be politically motivated. Many judges and prosecutors from the fascist era were either retired or compelled to quit. The vacancies were filled by BNP aligned jurists.

What is ironic is that the BNP, the largest beneficiary of the July 36 Biplob, now denies the revolution, its জুলাই সনদ (July Declaration, the charter of reform demands), and the outcome of the referendum (which passed with roughly 69 percent support) on flimsy grounds. The party also continues to deny the significance of August 15, 1975, the event that brought Ziaur Rahman to prominence and made the BNP possible. It is like denying one's own parentage. Critics have begun to say: "Betrayal, thy name is BNP."

Avail the Moment of Glory, Mr. Prime Minister

Mr. Prime Minister, the July 36 Revolution has afforded you a moment of glory. Honour it in the most befitting manner. This is a rare opportunity bestowed on you by the Almighty (SWT) to prove that you are the son of Shaheed (martyred) President Ziaur Rahman and Desh Netri (Leader of the Nation) Begum Khaleda Zia. Do not be swayed by the scheming and opportunistic people within and outside the party. Be guided by your own conscience. Your focus, Mr. Tareque Rahman, should be your people; your promise is to them and your country. You need to stand on their side and fulfil their suppressed aspirations. If the people are with you, no force can harm or distract you. But you must earn their trust, Sir, the way your great father did.

Remember what a great person Ziaur Rahman was. Recall the love and respect he earned from the people. সারা বাংলার ধানের শীষে, জিয়া তুমি আছো মিশে ("Zia is woven into the sheaf of paddy across all of Bangladesh") echoed the hearts of millions after his tragic assassination. The streams of mourners at his Mazar (mausoleum) went on for days, for months, for years. (I witnessed it myself a year later, visiting the place at midnight.) Globally, he is remembered with admiration. Begum Zia dedicated her life to establishing democracy and defending people's rights. Millions showed their love and respect at her passing. Such devotion is worth a million times more than any earthly gain, even in death. These are moments of glory, Mr. Prime Minister. I beseech you to earn yours.

And above all, Mr. Prime Minister, honour the blood and sacrifice of the July 36. তাদের হৃদয়ের ক্রন্দন ১৮ কোটি প্রাণে বাজে ("Their cries resonate in 180 million hearts"). May Allah (SWT) be on our side.

Caught Between War and Work in the Gulf

Faisal Mahmud — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The first thing Tofazzal Hossain does every morning now is look up.

For 11 years in Dubai, the sky was a backdrop of blank blue stretched over glass and cranes, static and safe. That has changed. Stepping out of a room shared with seven others, he scans the horizon for the metallic glint of a drone or an unfamiliar flash.

"I was scared," said Hossain, a municipal cleaner in Dubai who comes from Bangladesh's Narsingdi district, recalling the first night the explosions began. Reports of American strikes in Iran had broken, and rumors of retaliation began to spread.

"It was hard to believe. It's Dubai. It always felt peaceful, glitzy. Now, I've lived in constant fear for a month," he told The Three by phone.

In the same city, Shorafot Ali, a construction worker from Kishoreganj, has stopped counting days and started thinking of ways to go home. But the mechanics of migrant labor hold him in place.

"If I could, I would go home now," he said. "But my employer has my passport, and tickets are far beyond my reach."

Hossain and Ali are two of the millions of Bangladeshi migrant workers in the Gulf whose lives have been upended by the shadow of the Iran conflict. A full war has yet to arrive, but its psychological and economic weight has already settled over them. It shows in broken sleep and the dawning awareness that the gleaming cities they built are now potential targets.

For Ali, the crisis is also a slow financial strangling. Construction has ground to a halt, and inflation is soaring. "We have no money," he said. "The war has pushed up the price of everything: vegetables, meat, everything."

Unlike Ali, Hossain cannot shelter in place. As a street cleaner, his job demands he stay in the open. "I have to go out every day," he said. "Sometimes the explosions happen at night, sometimes in broad daylight."

The unpredictability is what breaks him. "It's a psychological toll," he said, his voice dropping. "I am scared for my life."

The fear of losing life is not abstract. It has already taken lives.

In Bahrain, a Bangladeshi worker, A.M. Tarek, was struck by shrapnel while leaving work. In the United Arab Emirates, Saleh Ahmed, a driver, was killed when debris hit his water tanker. Another Bangladeshi, a delivery worker, died while on duty in Saudi Arabia, as reported by Al Jazeera.

According to Human Rights Watch, migrant workers across the Gulf face growing danger, often without clear safety guidance or adequate protection.

"Millions of migrant workers employed across the Gulf countries are navigating threats to their physical safety and job security amid the conflict," said Michael Page, deputy Middle East and North Africa director at Human Rights Watch.

"The conflict has brought new risks to migrant workers while also exposing gaps in labor and other rights, including those enabled by the kafala (sponsorship) system."

The HRW report noted that many migrant workers live in packed housing near industrial zones, areas that can sit close to strategic infrastructure.

That compulsion to keep working despite the risk lies at the heart of the migrant experience. For Bangladeshi workers, leaving is seldom an option.

"I have to keep working. If I die, my family will have no money," Kawsar, a Bangladeshi cleaner at Doha's international airport, told The Three by phone. He did not want to share his last name. "If I go home, my family will have no money."

The Gulf economies (Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, Oman, and Bahrain) are built on migrant labor. Over decades of rapid growth fueled by oil wealth, these countries have relied on imported workers to construct cities and staff service industries. In some Gulf states, migrants make up more than 80 percent of the population.

Bangladesh is one of the largest suppliers of this labor. Roughly six to seven million Bangladeshis work in West Asia, forming the backbone of construction, domestic work, transport, cleaning, and retail. They are the men and women who pour concrete in 45 degree heat, the drivers on endless highways, the cleaners who keep the cities running unseen, and the household workers who labour through the day to keep their employers' homes in order.

Their earnings, modest by Gulf standards, are transformative back home.

Remittances from migrant workers have become one of Bangladesh's most vital economic pillars, bringing in more than $20 billion a year in recent years. Around 70 percent of that flows from the Gulf.

In villages across the country, that money has reshaped landscapes and aspirations. In South Mahini, a village in Cumilla documented by The Business Standard, rows of concrete houses have replaced tin roofed structures. Duplexes rise where paddy fields once stretched. Of the village's roughly 6,000 residents, about 500 work abroad.

"Remittances have transformed this village," a local resident told the paper.

The change is visible everywhere: children attending private schools, families opening small businesses, new roads and shops appearing in once quiet areas. Migration has become an economic strategy and a social expectation. In many communities, success is measured by whether someone in the family works abroad.

That transformation rests on a fragile foundation, one now under strain.

Economists and policymakers in Bangladesh are watching the Gulf crisis closely. The Asian Development Bank has warned that remittance inflows could slow if the conflict disrupts labor markets or forces workers to return home.

Early signs are already visible. Recruitment has declined in some corridors. Flights have been disrupted. Workers report delays in wages and reduced hours.

At a recent seminar reported by The Financial Express, officials described migrant workers as being "caught between war and work," a phrase that captures the precariousness of their position.

For many, the decision to stay is shaped by debt. Migrating to the Gulf often requires paying recruitment fees that run into thousands of dollars, frequently financed through loans. Returning home too soon would mean financial ruin.

Hossain, like many others, still owes money. Each month, he sends most of his salary back to his family in Narsingdi, who use it to repay loans, fund his children's schooling, and continue building a brick house that stands half finished in his village.

"I think about going home," he said. "But then what will happen to them?"

Back in Bangladesh, the stakes are just as high. Whole communities depend on remittances. A sudden return of large numbers of workers could strain an economy already grappling with inflation and unemployment.

"I know how tense my brother is, but if he comes back, then we all will be in serious trouble," Iqbal Hossain, brother of Tofazzal Hossain, told The Three.

A drawn out conflict in West Asia could force a significant number of migrant workers to return home, squeezing Bangladesh's foreign currency reserves as remittance inflows weaken.

Officials say they are alert to that possibility but cautious about overreacting. Speaking to The Three, Dr Rashed Al Mahmud Titumir, adviser to Prime Minister Tarique Rahman on economic and planning affairs, said it was important not to jump "immediately to worst case assumptions."

"Our priority is to protect the welfare, legal status, mobility and earning capacity of Bangladeshi workers abroad through active engagement by our missions and close coordination with host governments," he said.

He acknowledged that contingency plans are in place. If the conflict begins to disrupt labor markets or triggers large returns, the government's response would span foreign affairs, expatriates' welfare, labor, finance, and the banking system.

The focus, he said, would be on "orderly return management, providing temporary support to affected workers, facilitating reintegration into domestic employment and skills programmes, and strengthening labor diplomacy to diversify overseas job opportunities."

Not everyone sees the crisis purely as a threat. Nurul Haq Nur, state minister for expatriates' welfare and overseas employment, has offered a different view. He told local media that upheaval in the Gulf could, in a paradox, "create new labor demand."

Conflicts, he suggested, often lead to reconstruction needs and shifts in labor markets, openings that countries like Bangladesh have historically filled. In that sense, he said, the crisis "could generate new opportunities for migrant workers," even as it endangers those already there.

But for workers on the ground, such possibilities feel distant.

In labor camps and shared apartments across the Gulf, conversations revolve around more pressing concerns: whether salaries will be paid, and whether flights will be available if things worsen.

There is also the quiet, constant pressure from home. Families call more often now, worried by news of missile strikes and casualties. Workers, in turn, downplay the risks.

"I tell them everything is fine," construction worker Ali from Kishoreganj said. "If I tell them the truth, they will not sleep."

From Shipbreakers to Shipbuilders

Faisal Mahmud — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Bangladesh has long been known for what it dismantles: ships. Along the muddy shores of the coastal city of Chattogram, workers in flip-flops and welding masks have, for decades, taken apart the world's discarded oil tankers and container vessels.

It is a brutal, hazardous industry, but also a profitable one. Bangladesh is among the largest shipbreaking nations on Earth, supplying a significant share of the steel that fuels its construction boom.

But in a century defined by disruption (wars reshaping trade routes, supply chains splintering under geopolitical strain), Bangladesh's more important question is what it could build: ships, again.

The global shipbuilding industry is undergoing a quiet but consequential shift. For decades, dominance rested in East Asia, particularly in three countries: China, South Korea, and Japan. These nations built their advantage through scale, state support, technological investment, and disciplined industrial policy.

Today, they control the overwhelming majority of global ship production, especially for large, complex vessels like LNG carriers and mega container ships.

Yet cracks are beginning to show. Rising labor costs, capacity constraints, investment limits, and a growing backlog of orders, exacerbated by pandemic disruptions and demand surges tied to geopolitical tensions, have stretched these traditional shipbuilding hubs.

Meanwhile, the nature of global demand is evolving. There is growing demand for small and midsize vessels: coastal ships, feeder container vessels, patrol boats, ferries, and specialized craft suited to fragmented, regionalized trade patterns.

This is precisely where Bangladesh enters the frame.

The country's shipbuilding industry, though still modest, has gained steady recognition. Over the past decade, Bangladeshi shipyards have exported dozens of vessels to Europe, Africa, and parts of Asia. These are smaller, technically competent ships that meet international standards.

Industry observers note that Bangladesh has already produced vessels up to 25,000 deadweight tons, a segment of the market expanding as global trade decentralizes.

Why Bangladesh Fits In

The logic behind Bangladesh's potential is clear.

First, there is labor. Shipbuilding is labor intensive, and Bangladesh possesses one of the world's largest pools of cheap industrial workers. While wages in traditional shipbuilding nations have risen sharply, Bangladesh remains competitive on cost.

This advantage resembles what propelled its garment industry to global prominence, turning the country into one of the largest apparel exporters in the world.

Second, there is experience, though of a different kind. Shipbreaking, for all its dangers, has created a workforce intimately familiar with the anatomy of ships. Workers who have spent years dismantling vessels understand their structure, materials, and systems.

This knowledge, if redirected and formalized through training, could form the backbone of a shipbuilding labor force.

Third, there is geography. Bangladesh sits at the crossroads of the Bay of Bengal, close to major shipping lanes that connect East Asia, South Asia, West Asia, and beyond. In times of global instability (conflict in the Red Sea, tensions in the South China Sea, disruptions in the Black Sea), such positioning becomes strategically valuable.

Bangladesh could serve as a risk-absorbing maritime node, a place where trade reroutes even as traditional corridors become contested.

Recent global crises have shown how vulnerable shipping networks are to geopolitical shocks. Conflicts and blockades can force ships to take longer, costlier routes. Insurance premiums rise. Delivery schedules become unpredictable.

In such an environment, regional shipbuilding capacity becomes more important. Countries and companies are less willing to rely solely on distant suppliers for critical maritime assets. Bangladesh, with its emerging industrial base and strategic location, is positioned to benefit.

There is also a compelling economic argument at home. Shipbuilding offers much higher value addition than shipbreaking. While dismantling ships generates raw materials (primarily scrap steel), building them creates a chain of industries: steel processing, engineering, electronics, design, and logistics. It creates skilled jobs and drives technological upgrading.

Shipbuilding could become a second pillar of Bangladesh's export economy, complementing or even eventually rivaling garments.

The parallel holds. Like garments, shipbuilding thrives on scale, cost competitiveness, and integration into global supply chains. But unlike garments, it also brings significant technological spillovers.

Can Bangladesh Cash In?

Bangladesh has already attracted attention for green shipbuilding, an emerging niche focused on environmentally friendly vessels. As global regulations tighten (particularly around emissions and fuel efficiency), demand is rising for ships built to stricter environmental standards.

Bangladeshi shipyards, some of which are relatively new, have the opportunity to adopt modern, greener technologies from the outset rather than retrofitting older facilities.

At the same time, investment in the broader economy has shown resilience, even amid global gloom. Infrastructure projects and industrial expansion are gradually strengthening the country's capacity to support more complex manufacturing sectors.

Shipbuilding, which requires reliable power, transport links, and financial systems, will benefit from these improvements.

Yet the path forward is far from guaranteed. The challenges are substantial. Shipbuilding demands capital and technical precision. Competing with established giants requires more than cheap labor: precision engineering, quality assurance, and adherence to strict international standards.

Financing remains a major hurdle, as shipbuilding projects involve large upfront costs and long payback periods. There are also regulatory and environmental concerns. Bangladesh's shipbreaking industry has long been criticized for poor safety standards and environmental damage.

Transitioning to shipbuilding will require a different mindset: one that prioritizes worker safety, environmental protection, and compliance with global norms. Without this shift, the country risks carrying over the liabilities of its shipbreaking past into its shipbuilding future.

To succeed, Bangladesh will need a coordinated strategy: investment in technical education, incentives for shipyard modernization, access to affordable financing, and partnerships with foreign firms to acquire technology and expertise. Governments in East Asia nurtured the industry through decades of targeted support.

The existing shipbreaking sector also needs reimagining. Rather than treating it as an end in itself, policymakers could use it as a stepping stone.

The materials recovered from dismantled ships (particularly steel) could feed into domestic shipbuilding, creating a circular maritime economy. Workers could be retrained, shifting from hazardous dismantling to skilled construction.

Such a transformation would boost economic growth and address longstanding social concerns. Shipbreaking has been associated with dangerous working conditions and environmental degradation. Shipbuilding, if properly regulated, offers a path toward more sustainable industrialization.

The timing may be unusually favorable for Bangladesh. Global demand for ships is rising, driven by both economic recovery and strategic recalibration. At the same time, traditional shipbuilding hubs are grappling with capacity limits and cost pressures. This creates an opening that may not remain indefinitely.

Bangladesh's challenge is to move quickly enough to seize it.

The March Massacre: Beginning of the End

Rashed Chowdhury — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

"Teach them a lesson. Teach them hard." President General Agha Mohammad Yahya Khan gave this mandate to Lieutenant General Mohammad Tikka Khan at the headquarters of Eastern Command in Dhaka.

It was the evening of March 24, 1971. The elite gathering in the Operations Room did not miss the grinding teeth and fierce voice of the stocky, chain smoking president. He had just given the go-ahead signal for "Operation Searchlight," aimed at annihilating the Bengalis in East Pakistan.

Earlier, on February 22, the generals in Islamabad had made the decision. Four additional army divisions were to militarize East Pakistan. By the time Searchlight started, two full divisions (one from Karachi, the other from Quetta) had been airlifted to Dhaka.

"Kill three million of them," said the president in that meeting, "and the rest will eat out of our hands."

"We are ready, sir," said the stoic Tikka, the military governor of the province. "Everything is lined up." His deputies, Major General Rao Farman Ali, Major General Khadim Hossain Raja and Major General Abu Osman Mitha, nodded in agreement.

"It starts at Zero Hours tomorrow," ordered the president.

Smoke Screen

President Yahya Khan had been in town for the past ten days, ostensibly to negotiate Pakistan's future with majority leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, called Sheikh Mujib or Mujib by his people. His Awami League won the elections three months earlier. By March 24, the two sides appeared to have agreed on the major issues, and the charismatic Bengali politician was optimistic. He stood at the doorstep of becoming Pakistan's next leader.

That same afternoon, the public saw nothing unusual when the presidential motorcade left the downtown Governor's House (now Bangabhaban, the presidential palace) headed north to the military base twenty minutes away, and returned shortly afterwards. The official explanation was that the president went for tea with his colleagues. What people did not know was that the president was not inside the returning Flag Car.

Behind the facade of serious dialogue, ominous and rapid activities were underway within the military. Planes and ships loaded with troops and concealed armaments landed daily in Dhaka and Chittagong. On March 24, generals took helicopter rides to deliver top secret instructions to local commanders in Chittagong, Comilla, Jessore, Sylhet, Rajshahi and Rangpur.

In a meeting between Yahya and Mujib scheduled for March 25, the president was to make an important announcement on the transfer of power to elected representatives. An upbeat Mujib looked forward to his moment of glory.

The provincial capital was unusually calm on March 25 in an otherwise volatile political environment. Mujib waited all day for the promised meeting and declaration. Most Bengalis had grown skeptical by now, suspicious of the military's intentions. Top aides tried and failed to convince Mujib not to trust the generals.

In the afternoon, a black Mercedes left military Command Headquarters and took an internal route through the Air Force gate to arrive at nearby Tejgaon Airport. A Pakistan International Airlines Boeing 707 was preparing to take off. Group Captain A Karim Khandakar, a grounded Bengali pilot, was curious as he looked out through his office window.

"I see the president leaving," he said over the phone to his friend, retired Squadron Leader Mirza, who had political connections. "Do we have a deal?" Like most conscientious persons following the political discourse, Khandakar wanted to know if the central leaders and the Awami League had come to an understanding.

"Not that I know," replied Mirza. "Let me check."

Shortly before March 25, the military junta had grounded all Bengali pilots. Bengali personnel in the military, paramilitary rifles and police in East Pakistan were disarmed. No reason given.

Several foreign journalists defied military orders to leave Dhaka and stayed in the city. I depended largely on their accounts and subsequent written materials for the events that followed.

An almost full moon surrounded by twinkling stars commanded the midnight sky. Dhaka, a city of six million, was resting, despite the political uncertainties that had overwhelmed the province for weeks. The destitute, the beggars and homeless men, women and children claimed most of the downtown sidewalks. Dogs fought in the garbage nearby; jackals howled at a distance and owls hooted in the trees as rickshaws and three-wheeled baby taxis patrolled the streets looking for nightly riders.

Then the cranking noise of military machines broke the quiet serenity of the night. American M-24 tanks rolled out of the cantonment, their main guns swiveling on turrets like raised cobras with exposed fangs, itching to hurl their venom. Mobile columns carrying troops with loaded Chinese automatics followed for the groundwork. US-supplied F-86 fighter bombers sat ready at takeoff points, poised to strike. Artillery cannons were zeroed on Dhaka University, the paramilitary rifles headquarters at Peelkhana, the Police Centre at Rajarbagh and the old town's dense residential quarters.

Military Fireworks

Thirty minutes past midnight, the fireworks began. For the Bengalis of East Pakistan, Doomsday had arrived. It was Jallianwala Bagh, Nanking and Pearl Harbor combined. It was the start of the Million Kills. Before the unarmed and unsuspecting residents knew what had happened, a few thousand lay dead.

Surviving university students never knew why their dormitories were shelled, crushing thousands of their classmates under the debris. Few boarders at girls' hostels returned to their families. Most succumbed to gang rapes; some committed suicide, choosing death over dishonour.

Rahima, a woman in middle age, would never know why her husband, four children and a few hundred other destitute at Gulistan became victims of military brush fires. A racing military truck crushed the wandering woman two days later, saving her from the agony of loss.

Samad, a young passenger at the Kamalapur Railway Station, heard the staccato of machine guns and dived into a nearby garbage bin; he could not make out why 200 other passengers fell to their deaths on the platform.

Late night shoppers bled and collapsed at Nawabpur, Sadarghat and New Market. Rickshaw drivers would never see fare again, nor would cart pullers ever see another sunrise.

Outside Dhaka, local military commanders staged their own operations, following directions contained in the top secret packets they received a day earlier.

The next morning, streets and marketplaces lay covered with mutilated bodies, as if the Kurukshetra (the mythical battleground of the Mahabharata) had spilled from legend into the streets, while the killing continued throughout the day.

An exodus of panicked city residents commenced, but few reached safety. The army sank boats, bombed trains and torched buses.

Oblivious to the mayhem, dogs, crows and fish in the waters feasted on human flesh. In the countryside, vultures and eagles joined in for their share of the bounty.

International journalists who stayed within the safe zone of the Hotel Intercontinental, defying the military orders to leave, leaked bits of news to a shocked world.

Death Toll

On March 28, 1971, the New York Times put the two-day death toll in Operation Searchlight at 10,000. Four days later, that same newspaper said 35,000 were killed in Dhaka alone. The Sydney Morning Herald of March 29 estimated the number between 10,000 and 100,000. The International Herald Tribune on March 30 quoted an eyewitness who gave the number murdered in Dhaka at 7,000. The Daily Telegraph on March 29 reported that the shelling of the capital had been indiscriminate and cold blooded, with almost no sign of armed resistance. According to the New York Times of April 12, troops had been "utterly merciless." A month later, the Times reported that 80,000 Punjabi and Pathan soldiers had killed an estimated 300,000 Bengalis by the end of April.

Within hours after ordering Operation Searchlight, President Yahya Khan addressed the nation from a safe distance in Karachi. He put the entire blame on Sheikh Mujibur Rahman for the failure of the Dhaka talks. He did not say a word about the butchery he had ordered.

Tikka Khan had earlier earned the title "Butcher of Balochistan" for crushing political dissidents in that province. He now added a new title: "Butcher of Bangal."

The sins of the Bengalis? They dared to demand freedom from exploitation by their military and Punjabi overlords. They were audacious enough to ask for economic emancipation, administrative equality and political fair play.

Most Bengali leaders who did not face immediate bullets went into hiding. Sheikh Mujib did not. An army commando group picked up the tall, dark, bespectacled politician from his residence without any resistance.

A week later, newspapers featured a pensive Mujib wearing his traditional white kurta pajama and sleeveless black coat. He was at Karachi Airport, surrounded by police.

Two questions have followed me since those days. A politician as seasoned as Sheikh Mujibur Rahman watched plane loads of troops and armaments pour in before his eyes. A delegation from Chittagong, led by Captain Amin Ahmed Chowdhury, came to warn him about the military's plans but was dismissed. Was Mujib so consumed by the prospect of power in Islamabad that he could not see, or refused to see, the generals' game?

And why did Mujib surrender on March 25 instead of declaring independence and joining the liberation war? On March 7, he had told the nation: এবারের সংগ্রাম স্বাধীনতার সংগ্রাম ...আমাদের মুক্তির সংগ্রাম...রক্ত যখন দিয়েছি, আরো রক্ত দিব... (Our struggle this time is for our independence, our freedom. We have given blood, and will give more blood when needed.)

Call for Independence

Thirty hours later, on March 27, an announcement came from the Kalurghat radio station in Chittagong:

"I, Major Ziaur Rahman, hereby declare the independence of the Republic of Bangladesh. As the temporary Head of the Republic, I call upon all Bengalis to rise against the attack by the West Pakistani Army. We shall fight to the last to free our motherland. By the grace of Allah, victory is ours."

The announcement was later modified to state that it had been given on behalf of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the supreme Bengali political leader at the time.

A Japanese merchant ship at the Bay of Bengal picked up the broadcast and relayed it to the outside world. The effect was immediate. The disoriented people of East Pakistan received their direction and started the war of independence.

Before the start of the onslaught, the Pakistani Army had disarmed Bengali elements at their bases in East Pakistan, but many Bengalis in the outlying areas still possessed weapons. They revolted, with or without arms. In some cases, they broke the armouries and seized the weapons.

A Soldier's Debt

I missed the carnage. I escaped the horror. I was 1,300 miles away in Sialkot, West Pakistan, serving as an army captain. Strict news censorship kept me in the dark. International papers were kept out of reach. Listening to overseas broadcasts that reported on East Pakistan was discouraged. The official explanation: "That information is false and biased." Being an apolitical person, I accepted that. I even believed the president when he said on March 26 that whatever steps he had taken were necessary to save the nation from disintegration. I did not give much credence to the rumours trickling in, until two months later.

In May, on a visit to a Bengali family in Islamabad, I came across a pack of clippings they had received in secret from a relative overseas. The New York Times, Newsweek, TIME, International Herald Tribune, Telegraph, and The Guardian described in detail the true stories of East Pakistan: the massacre, the rape, the destruction, the barbarity. Not all of these descriptions could be false and biased, I reasoned. And then my emotions imploded, caused by the agony of shattered trust and the curse of misplaced loyalty.

I was no longer at peace with myself. I kept seeing countless dead bodies, endless wailing of sufferers and blank gazes of violated women that posed a million questions to me.

"I am a soldier," I said to myself. "It is my obligation to respond to their cries. I have a mission to complete. I have a debt to pay to my people: a soldier's debt."

Adapted from A Soldier's Debt, Rashed Chowdhury, 2015, Amazon. Its Bangla version, titled রক্তের ঋণ, was published in Dhaka in 2024.

As an army Captain in 1971, the writer fled from Lahore in a military Jeep, through dangerous deployments and crossed the border to India. He joined the liberation war with the Z Force of Colonel Ziaur Rahman, later becoming a decorated freedom fighter. He lives in retirement, reading, writing and gardening. He writes regularly in the media, mostly on Bangladesh's contemporary issues. He has authored half a dozen books and co-authored a dozen.

Anwara Begum Has No Place for Her Grave

Md Ibrahim Khalilullah — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Anwara Begum lives in a one-room house beside a narrow road in Dhaka's Kalyanpur slum. The light stays on during the day because the room has no windows. Frequent power cuts leave the house in darkness for hours.

Every morning, Anwara sits in front of her door feeding rice to the chickens she keeps in a cage on the road outside. She is 75. She wears a faded saree.

In 1973, floodwaters from the Meghna River destroyed her home in Bhola, a district on the Bay of Bengal. She came to Dhaka with her four children. More than seven million people in Bangladesh have been displaced by climate change since 1971, according to the World Health Organization. Anwara was among the first.

"In Bhola, some people from my area helped put me and my children on a launch. The next morning, we arrived at Sadarghat in Dhaka. I did not know where to go with my children. My husband stayed behind in Bhola," she said.

"After arriving, I wandered through different parts of Dhaka. For some time, I stayed with someone from my village in Tongi. Then I moved to Motijheel, where we lived in a tiny room behind a cinema hall. For many days, we had little food, often just a loaf of bread. Sometimes, the cinema's janitor would give me food. Later, I found work as a housemaid in Mohammadpur. My husband joined me in Dhaka, but soon after, he fell ill and died."

Anwara paused and breathed. She settled in Kalyanpur slum in 1988 after years of moving through the city. She has lived there for 36 years. She has spent 51 years in Dhaka.

"All my life, I worked as a domestic worker and a brick breaker, earning almost nothing. Now I no longer have the strength to work. I depend on my daughters. In old age, I have nothing. I am helpless."

Tears filled her eyes. She wiped them with the edge of her saree while her eldest daughter, Sahana, handed her a glass of water. Anwara drank it in front of her door.

Sahana takes care of her now. Sahana's husband left her. She raises her daughter, Shiuli, alone. Shiuli is 13 and studies in class seven at a government school in Kalyanpur. The three of them share the one-room house.

Sahana wants to arrange Shiuli's marriage. She believes that the sooner her daughter is married, the safer she will be. Dhaka's slums are dangerous for teenage girls. Marriage, in Sahana's calculation, offers protection that Kalyanpur cannot.

"We lost everything in the village, and even here in the city, we have no decent place to live," Anwara said. "Our only shelter is this filthy, unhealthy slum. I have spent my whole life here."

"I came to Dhaka hoping for a better life, but nothing changed. My life of suffering has remained a life of suffering."

"I never received a single taka of help from anyone. The river did not just take away our house. It destroyed our entire lives."

She paused again.

"Now I do not even have a place for my own grave."

A 2021 World Bank report projects that climate change could displace more than 13 million people in Bangladesh by 2050. Former Dhaka South City Corporation mayor Fazle Noor Taposh has estimated that 2,000 people move to Dhaka every day, and that 70 percent of them are climate migrants. They arrive looking for what Anwara looked for half a century ago. Most find the same answer she did: a slum, a small room, and a city that offers survival without dignity.

Bangladesh's Fragile 'Power' Play

Faisal Mahmud — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

On an overcast Eid afternoon this year, Mahadi Abdur Rauf, a Dhaka-based physician, found himself facing a dilemma that is becoming increasingly common across Bangladesh in the past week. Planning to travel from Dhanmondi to Khilgaon, he hesitated before taking his car out.

His fuel gauge showed less than half a tank, prompting him to consider calling an Uber in order to conserve what he described as "precious fuel." However, after trying unsuccessfully for more than half an hour to secure a ride, he ultimately had no choice but to drive himself.

His concern soon proved justified. The following day, his car ran out of fuel entirely, and despite waiting in line for half an hour at a petrol station in Dhaka, he was unable to obtain any.

"It's so frustrating," Rauf told The Three. "My dread was proven right. Getting fuel now has become a hard and tiring task."

Rauf's experience illustrates how a global energy crisis has filtered down into the daily lives of ordinary citizens in Dhaka. What initially appeared to be a distant geopolitical disturbance in West Asia has now evolved into a direct and severe challenge for the country's economy. The escalation of hostilities in the Persian Gulf has severely disrupted global energy markets, driving prices upward and tightening supply chains.

This has had immediate consequences for Bangladesh's balance of payments and overall macroeconomic stability. At the heart of this disruption is the Strait of Hormuz, a critical global maritime chokepoint through which approximately 21 percent of global petroleum liquids pass.

Ongoing threats to this strait have heightened uncertainty in global energy markets, pushing prices to levels that are increasingly unsustainable for import-dependent economies.

Bangladesh is especially vulnerable due to its heavy reliance on foreign energy. Approximately 95 percent of the country's fuel requirements are met through imports, exposing it to fluctuations in global prices and supply disruptions. In response to the worsening situation, the government has been compelled to implement emergency fuel rationing measures.

Although restrictions were temporarily eased during the Eid ul-Fitr holidays, shortages have persisted, underscoring the severity of the crisis. At the same time, the new government led by Prime Minister Tarique Rahman is actively seeking billions of dollars in external financing to secure supplies of fuel and liquefied natural gas (LNG) as part of broader efforts to stabilize the economy.

Rashed Al Mahmud Titumir, adviser to the prime minister on finance and planning, stated on March 20 that Bangladesh is currently in discussions with several major development partners. These include the Asian Development Bank, the World Bank, the International Islamic Trade Finance Corporation, and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.

According to Titumir, there are encouraging signs that multilateral agencies will provide financial support aimed at sustaining oil and energy imports, which in turn would help accelerate economic growth. He also indicated that Bangladesh expects to receive approximately $1.3 billion from the International Monetary Fund under an existing program, along with an additional $250 million to $500 million.

This would be complemented by roughly $500 million in budgetary support from the Asian Development Bank.

The financial strain is particularly acute in the natural gas sector, where state buyers have increasingly turned to the volatile spot market for LNG procurement. Prices in this market have surged dramatically, recently peaking at $28.28 per million British thermal units (mmBtu), representing a 183 percent increase from the $10 baseline observed in January.

This sharp rise has a significant impact on Bangladesh's foreign exchange reserves, which stood at $34.22 billion as of mid-March. To manage the situation and prevent panic buying, the Bangladesh Petroleum Corporation has introduced strict controls on fuel sales. Initially, motorcycle fuel purchases were capped at two liters, though this limit was later raised to five liters for ride-sharing operators.

Bulk diesel purchases now require formal documentation, and mobile courts have been deployed to monitor filling stations and prevent hoarding.

The effects of the crisis are being felt across multiple sectors of the economy. In order to prioritize electricity supply for the national grid, the government has shut down several fertilizer factories and imposed gas rationing across industrial zones. These measures pose a significant threat to the garment sector, which accounts for approximately 84 percent of Bangladesh's total exports.

Any sustained disruption to this sector could have far-reaching implications for employment, export earnings, and overall economic growth. The severity of fuel shortages is also evident at the individual level.

Abdullah Al Mamum, a freelance market analyst based in Dhaka, reported traveling to at least seven different filling stations without success before finally finding fuel being dispensed at the Ramna filling station after hours of searching. "I don't know whether I will have the energy and nerve to do this [searching] on a regular basis," Mamun told The Three.

In an effort to reduce peak electricity demand, authorities have already taken the unusual step of temporarily closing universities during mid-Ramadan, targeting the high energy consumption associated with dormitories and laboratories. At the same time, the crisis has highlighted deeper structural weaknesses within Bangladesh's energy system.

Domestic gas production has remained largely stagnant over the past decade, currently hovering at around 2,440 million cubic feet per day. This stagnation has forced the country to rely increasingly on imported energy sources, making it more susceptible to global market volatility. Although Bangladesh maintains a strategic diesel reserve sufficient for approximately 30 days, this buffer is limited in the face of prolonged disruptions.

To address these vulnerabilities, the Bangladesh Petroleum Corporation is working to diversify its supplier base. One significant development in this regard is the Bangladesh-India Friendship Pipeline, a 131-kilometer project that has emerged as a critical lifeline. In the first half of March, the pipeline delivered an emergency shipment of 5,000 tonnes of diesel from India's Numaligarh Refinery, part of a broader commitment to supply 180,000 tonnes by 2026.

Bangladesh is also negotiating with India for an additional 50,000-tonne emergency buffer to support northern districts. In parallel, additional cargoes have been secured from international traders based in China and Singapore, including companies such as Vitol and Gunvor.

Despite these efforts, economists at the Centre for Policy Dialogue argue that the crisis is not merely logistical but also fundamentally mathematical. With global LNG prices consistently exceeding $20 per mmBtu, the subsidy burden on the national budget has become increasingly unsustainable.

Petrobangla estimates that the country's fuel import bill for the current fiscal year will reach approximately 550 billion BDT, or $4.5 billion, with nearly 30 percent of imports sourced from the expensive spot market.

While Bangladesh Petroleum Corporation Chairman Muhammad Rezanur Rahman has expressed confidence that emergency procurement measures will prevent a total collapse of the power grid, he acknowledges that the long-term outlook remains closely tied to developments in the Middle East.

At the retail level, the crisis has generated widespread frustration among consumers. A faction of the Bangladesh Petrol Pump Dealers, Distributors, Agents and Petrol Pump Owners Association reported that daily allocations from oil distributors are insufficient to meet the growing demand.

In a Facebook post, the group noted that this shortfall has left fuel stations unable to serve millions of motorcycle users and other customers, while frontline workers struggle to cope with mounting pressure and occasional conflicts.

Syed Sajjadul Karim Kabul, a leader of the faction, explained that petrol pumps operate under fixed supply limits and cannot exceed their allocated volumes. He emphasized that panic buying is a major factor exacerbating the crisis, as long queues create a perception of scarcity and prompt more people to rush to fuel stations out of fear of future shortages.

The situation is further complicated by Bangladesh's heavy reliance on imports from two particular Middle Eastern countries heavily affected by the escalation in the Gulf region. Approximately three-quarters of the country's LNG imports in 2025 were sourced from Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, both of which depend on the Strait of Hormuz for exports.

A prolonged disruption of this route could have devastating consequences for Bangladesh's energy supply. Analysts at Wood Mackenzie have suggested that South Asian LNG demand could decline by up to 3 million tonnes by the end of 2026, as regional buyers are increasingly priced out by competition from wealthier markets in Europe and East Asia.

In response, Petrobangla has fast-tracked long-term procurement to curb exposure to volatile spot markets, signing three new sales and purchase agreements with QatarEnergy and Excelerate Energy. The strategy aims to raise the share of term LNG cargoes to 86 percent by 2026, reducing reliance on high-cost spot purchases. QatarEnergy has already been a key supplier to Bangladesh under a 15-year agreement signed with Petrobangla on September 25, 2017.

However, uncertainty persists. Senior Petrobangla officials told the local media that QatarEnergy has declared force majeure until April 18 following disruptions, and it remains unclear whether this will be extended after a second wave of strikes on Ras Laffan, Qatar's main LNG production hub.

Force majeure, a standard contractual clause, allows parties to suspend obligations without liability when extraordinary events — such as war, pandemics, or natural disasters — make fulfillment impossible.

Meanwhile, broader macroeconomic pressures are intensifying. The Bangladeshi taka continues to face downward pressure, and every $5 increase in global oil prices is estimated to add $500 million to the country's annual import bill. These rising costs are ultimately passed on to consumers through higher transportation and irrigation expenses.

In the agriculturally significant northern regions, shortages of diesel for irrigation during the Boro rice season pose a serious threat to food security. To mitigate this risk, the government is prioritizing fuel distribution through the "Farmer Card" system and rural fuel depots, ensuring that the 1.38 million tonnes of refined petroleum products scheduled for the first half of 2026 reach the agricultural sector in time.

Ultimately, the crisis has forced Bangladesh to reassess its long-standing "import-first" energy policy. While the government has set a target of achieving 20 percent renewable energy by 2030, current contributions remain below 2 percent, leaving coal and gas to fill the gap.

As the Bangladesh Petroleum Corporation works to secure 185,000 tonnes of Jet A-1 fuel and 890,000 tonnes of diesel for the next quarter, it is becoming increasingly clear that reliance on volatile global markets is no longer a viable long-term strategy.

"The current emergency underscores the urgent need for domestic energy exploration and stronger regional integration," energy expert M Tamim told The Three.

Without such measures, future geopolitical shocks — particularly those affecting critical supply routes like the Strait of Hormuz — could have even more devastating consequences, says Tamim.

Watching Delhi Think

Apurba Jahangir — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

India's foreign policy no longer walks into Dhaka as a demarche. It drops into our week like a new OTT thriller, complete with teaser posters and a hashtag. Between August 2024 and February 2026, I watched that foreign policy from two angles. In the Chief Adviser's Office, we wrote statements and rebuttals for an interim government that Indian channels baptised as everything from "jihadi coup" to "Western puppet." At home, YouTube shorts for Tehran and Dhurandhar kept playing on loop, as if the algorithm itself had been briefed by South Block. It is one thing to be misread by another capital. It is another to watch that misreading rehearse itself in Dolby surround.

Tehran (2025) arrived for me somewhere between a border incident and a fresh round of hoax videos about temple attacks. John Abraham plays an Indian operative moving through the Iran and Israel shadow wars, loosely pinned to the 2012 car bombing of an Israeli diplomat in Delhi. The plot does its duty. The image that lodged in my head was painfully simple: a mutilated rabbi, and on the wall behind him, "Palestine" scrawled like a smoking gun. "Free Palestine," the phrase I had grown up seeing on banners, in student processions, in those tired posters that never peel off campus walls, is demoted in a single shot to bloodied set dressing in a terror scene. The slogan does not speak. It just glows, mute and guilty, in the background.

Outside the theatre, Delhi's real West Asia policy is all hedging and homework. India is closer than ever to Israel, still buying oil from Iran, officially mouthing a solution built on two states while breaking into hives at the sight of a Gaza solidarity march. Tehran takes that entire tangle — energy dependence, diaspora pressure, American moods — and boils it down to a feeling you can carry home in your popcorn fingers. India as the tragic adult in a room full of zealots. Palestinian markers as atmospheric menace, not the visual shorthand of a grievance stretching back a century. It is not a briefing. It is a vibe. And vibes travel faster than South Block PDFs.

The morning after, I was back at my desk drafting yet another clarification that Bangladesh's Palestine solidarity rallies did not make us an "emerging jihadi hub," that a green flag in Chittagong was not a preview of the caliphate. I was not arguing only with anchors and anonymous handles. I was arguing with that shot on the wall, the one that had retrained millions of eyes to read "Palestine" as prop, not politics. In 140 minutes and one frame, Tehran had done what months of Indian talk shows could only attempt with blunt force: it turned a neighbour's moral vocabulary into visual evidence for the prosecution.

For Bangladesh, this is not a theoretical complaint. Palestine has been part of our emotion for as long as I can remember, in khutbas (Friday sermons) and in slogans, in the banners of Islamist parties and leftist student fronts who agree on nothing else. The same students who were out on the streets in late 2024, dodging rubber bullets and tear gas in Dhaka, now go home and scroll the same platforms that will host Tehran. They see the word they chanted all afternoon repositioned on screen from struggle to smear. Indian prime time already plays Gaza as a Hamas loop. Tehran upgrades the production design. The next time a Bangladeshi undergrad lifts a Palestinian flag on campus, they will be waving against states, yes, but also against a cinematic mood that has already marked them as suspect.

If Tehran repaints the wallpaper, Dhurandhar (2025) walks into the frame and tells you who owns the house. Aditya Dhar's espionage and gangland epic is stitched together from slices of familiar trauma: Karachi, Kandahar, Parliament, 26/11, assorted covert operations you can call "deniable," all scored to a familiar mix of chants, strings and drone shots. Ranveer Singh's Hamza is the state's visible musculature, all fists and frowns. The film's real devotional centre is a watchful National Security Adviser who pulls strings, takes calls, and suffers in tasteful silence for the nation. You do not need to be a South Asia watcher to decode the homage. If you have ever scrolled through an Indian news channel in the last decade, you know which silhouette they have traced.

Watching Dhurandhar while still employed by the Bangladeshi state felt less like viewing a film and more like watching a PowerPoint acquire lighting and a costume budget. By that point I had sat through months of Indian coverage that treated an uprising led by students in Dhaka as a jihadist rehearsal, that described our insistence on due process as softness, unseriousness, even treason. In Dhar's universe, the NSA is never wrong, rarely questioned, always ready to do what weak or compromised politicians cannot. Critics in Mumbai called the film "overtly hyper-nationalist" and "as subtle as a troll." Fair. Those adjectives still miss the core service the film performs. Somewhere between scene three and scene thirty, due process dies offscreen. No one investigates the murder. They stand up and clap at the funeral.

Offscreen, in the Delhi I had to engage from August 2024 onwards, that office came with a specific doctrinal CV: "defensive offence," raids across borders, the view that neighbours like Bangladesh are problems to be "managed," not publics to be persuaded. Around the same time, India's parliamentary committee on external affairs warned that Bangladesh after Hasina, with Chinese, Turkish and Gulf footprints and a generation of young Bangladeshis newly allergic to Indian media, was Delhi's "most formidable strategic challenge since 1971." Put that sentence next to Dhurandhar's haloed NSA and you get the temperature at which every future meeting on Teesta, transit or trade will simmer: paternal, locked in permanent crisis, impatient with the idea that a small country might have an opinion.

From my side of the border, trying to explain for the hundredth time that a demand for credible elections did not equal Talibanisation, I could feel how neatly Tehran and Dhurandhar closed the narrative loop. Tehran instructs you to read "Palestine" as the smear at a crime scene. Dhurandhar invites you to outsource all further thinking to a security patriarch who will handle it, preferably without witnesses. In that pairing, a Bangladeshi crowd with flags becomes, almost by default, a stack of files on an NSA's desk, not a political subject with its own history, factions and foolishness. The camera has already done the redacting before the policy memo arrives.

If you sit where I sat between 2024 and 2026, wedged between press briefings, WhatsApp hoaxes and calls from bewildered correspondents late at night, the convergence stops being cute and starts feeling structural. An Indian anchor misreading a Dhaka protest is not being lazy. They are reporting from inside a universe already lit for them, one in which "Palestine" on a wall equals terror and a stern man in a Nehru jacket exists to discipline unruly Muslim neighbours. The official language of connectivity, trade, blue economy and shared prosperity floats on top like subtitles. The main track is still security, siege and salvation.

The asymmetry makes this more than an anecdote for media scholars. An interim government can hold a press conference. A streaming platform can replay Tehran and Dhurandhar in bedrooms, buses and airport lounges for years. We can send a clarification to one newsroom. The films brief millions. The next time a committee in Delhi sits down to discuss "options" on Bangladesh, the words in the room will owe as much to that mutilated wall and that saintly NSA as to any confidential cable from their High Commission in Dhaka. For a neighbour trying, however clumsily, to assert that it is a sovereign state and not a recurring plot device, that is a genuine security concern.

I did not always see it this way. As a teenager in Dhaka in the late 1990s, I watched Border on pirated VCDs like everyone else. India's clean, noble war played out against faceless Pakistani treachery while Bangladesh's messy birth stayed offscreen. The Bengali freedom fighter did not exist, only the Indian jawan with the better song and the better uniform. We still cheered when Sunny Deol and Jackie Shroff nodded to each other across impossible distances in the sky, feeling our genes for hating Pakistan kick in right on cue. Later came LOC, Gadar, the whole universe of immaculate Indian sacrifice and permanently suspect neighbours. Somewhere between the hand pump and the martyrdom in slow motion, a generation of us learned that some wars are pure and some countries only exist in establishing shots.

Years later, hunched over a laptop with yet another response to yet another Indian panel about "Bangladeshi infiltrators," I realised that Border had not been a one-off. It was the pilot episode. Back then, India's wars were pure and we were the silent backdrop. Today, we are both target and reluctant audience of a security cinema that has upgraded its budget and sharpened its lines, but not its gaze. The question for Dhaka is painfully simple: the next time Delhi's camera pans east, do we still let ourselves be written as the problem to be solved, or do we insist, however awkwardly, on walking into the frame as ourselves?

Marx, Or the Intimacy of the Unfamiliar

Pinaki Bhattacharya — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Karl Marx remains one of those rare thinkers whose ideas did not interpret the world so much as rearrange it. Revolutions were waged in his name, states were built upon his vocabulary, and entire generations learned to see society through categories he introduced. A paradox persists: those who speak most confidently as his inheritors often appear least certain of what he meant.

The question, then, is disarmingly simple: what was Marx trying to say?

A certain suspicion may arise here. The gesture is familiar: an explanation that leans toward persuasion. One is reminded of a story from Bogura, a district in northern Bangladesh known more for its yogurt than its philosophers. Two brothers, notorious for their disinterest in mathematics, were placed under the care of an enthusiastic tutor. Finding them counting guavas in a tree, the tutor turned the exercise into an arithmetic problem. At once, the younger brother shouted up: Don't answer: he's teaching you maths. The warning may not be misplaced here.

Still, even if Marx is to be resisted, it is seldom wise to resist what one has not understood.

I. Recognition and Its Loss

What is called Marx's theory of "alienation" risks sounding more abstract than the experience it describes. The condition is simpler and stranger: the familiar appearing as unfamiliar.

One might approach this through cinema. In an earlier essay, I had written about Surjakanya, a film by Alamgir Kabir, where a line from a song lingers with unusual insistence: Chena chena lage, tobu ochena; bhalobasho jodi, kache eshona (It feels familiar, and yet unfamiliar; if you love me, come closer, won't you?).

At first hearing, the line seems to belong to the grammar of romantic distance. It admits another reading. The ambiguity it carries is not confined to love; it echoes, with surprising precision, the condition Marx describes.

The worker encounters the product of his own labour much like the lover in that song: something that feels recognisable, yet remains unowned. There is a trace of oneself in it, and no claim over that trace. The estrangement is a distorted proximity: close enough to suggest recognition, distant enough to deny it.

Beneath the lyric, one might hear a quiet appeal. If you are mine, if you have emerged from my hands, then come closer, so that I may know you, and in knowing you, recover myself.

Alienation, in this sense, belongs as much to feeling as to structure and cannot be reduced to either.

This was not always the case. In simpler forms of production, the maker could recognise himself in what he made. A grandmother stitching a nakshi kantha, a traditional quilted embroidery stitched from old cloth and layered with folk motifs, did not produce an object alone; she externalised memory, imagination, and care. The object returned that recognition. It completed a circuit between self and world.

Capitalism, in perfecting efficiency through the division of labour, breaks that circuit. Production becomes so fragmented that no individual can locate themselves within it. The worker contributes and cannot recognise the contribution. He labours and cannot see himself.

II. The Anxiety of Survival

A second difficulty follows. Capitalism renders livelihood precarious. Employment is contingent, subject to decisions made elsewhere, by people whose calculations are indifferent to individual lives.

The result is material insecurity and a condition of anxiety that runs beneath it. Human beings require income, yes, and also a sense of place: a recognition that their existence has use, that their presence is not accidental.

Capitalism offers neither. It produces a life lived in anticipation of dismissal, of replacement, of irrelevance. Life becomes uncertain, and then difficult to justify.

III. Value and Its Appropriation

A further tension emerges in the question of value. Workers are paid enough to continue and seldom enough to claim what they have produced. The surplus appears elsewhere, under another name.

Profit appears as creation and rests, more often than not, on appropriation. What appears as reward is inseparable from what has already been withheld.

One need not adopt the full architecture of Marx's theory to recognise the intuition beneath it. A system that depends on minimising wages while maximising returns steadily narrows the distance between survival and insufficiency. Income persists; meaning thins.

IV. Crisis Without Scarcity

The instability of capitalism lies in a paradox. Its crises do not arise from scarcity. They arise from abundance.

Too much is produced; too little can be absorbed. The system, unable to absorb the value it has generated, turns against those who produced it. Workers are dismissed because their necessity cannot be accommodated, not because they have ceased to be necessary.

Capitalism does not falter from producing too little. It falters from producing more than it can recognise.

What might have become time, time for life beyond labour, reappears instead as unemployment. The promise of abundance is converted into its opposite.

V. Commodities and the Shape of Desire

This transformation extends beyond production into the texture of social life. Relations begin to take on the form of transactions. Love, marriage, and intimacy acquire the logic of exchange.

Marx described this as "commodity fetishism": the tendency to attribute value to things while obscuring the relations that produced them. We begin by surrounding ourselves with objects, and end by mistaking objects for relations.

Where everything can be priced, little remains beyond price.

VI. The Quiet Work of Ideology

The durability of capitalism depends on belief as much as markets. It cultivates an ethos in which rest appears unproductive, leisure suspect, and wealth synonymous with happiness.

These assumptions are seldom imposed. They are absorbed. Individuals learn to inhabit a life that is restless, competitive, and detached: politically disengaged, yet structurally compliant.

The system organises expectation as much as it organises production.

Conclusion

One need not be a Marxist to recognise the force of these observations. They do not demand agreement; they ask for attention.

Understanding Marx does not require allegiance. It requires a certain honesty.

To understand capitalism without understanding its most systematic critic is to see half the picture.

And if, in the course of that understanding, something begins to feel familiar in an unfamiliar way, if one encounters, for the first time, a faint recognition of oneself in what had previously seemed distant, then one might recall the warning from Bogura. Don't answer: he's teaching you maths.

The Eid That Lived Outside Our Walls

Faisal Mahmud — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In the Dhaka of my childhood, Eid-ul-Fitr arrived with the smell of semai and the careful rustle of new clothes. But that particular day also came with something rarer for a child: a temporary expansion of freedom.

Like many children who grew up in the 1990s, I measured Eid by a subtle, unwritten relaxation of rules. Those invisible fences drawn by our parents and murubbis (respected elders) otherwise governed the geography of our days.

Back then Dhaka still possessed something people call para culture. A para (neighbourhood) was a universe with its own invisible borders and social constitution. Children between seven and twelve lived inside these limits like citizens of a small republic. The rule was simple. Play anywhere within the para but do not cross its edges. Return home before darkness thickened into night.

Cricket in the alley, football in dusty open patches, improvised games like Saat-chara, King-queen, or whatever variation our imaginations invented. These filled the hours between school and dusk. Our movements were supervised not only by our own parents but by the entire para. Every shopkeeper, every rickshaw puller, every elderly uncle sitting on a wooden chair outside his house possessed a kind of quiet jurisdiction over us.

Where I grew up, that para culture was even stricter. It was the teachers' colony of BUET, a place that felt both privileged and oddly cloistered. The colony was leafy and orderly, dotted with generous fields and shaded by trees that seemed older than the institution itself. Children there had more than enough space to run wild inside the walls.

We played endless cricket matches on open grounds, staged football tournaments that felt, to us, as consequential as the World Cup, and wandered through quiet lanes lined with faculty housing. In theory, we had everything.

But just beyond the wall — a literal wall — lay a world that seemed far more alive.

On the other side began Old Dhaka.

Inside the colony we lived in a kind of academic calm. Many of our parents were professors or lecturers, people whose lives revolved around lectures and departmental meetings. The air carried a subdued rhythm: bicycles rolling down shaded roads, the occasional whistle of a pressure cooker from someone's kitchen, the quiet discipline of a campus community.

Outside, from what little we glimpsed, Old Dhaka throbbed with colour, noise, strange smells and an energy that seemed mythic to our young minds.

Even within the BUET housing clusters (Red Colony, White Colony, and Yellow Colony) there were small physical reminders of that tantalizing proximity. In Red Colony there was a small gate. It was easy to miss if you didn't know where to look. But if you slipped through it and crossed the boundary wall, you emerged into Lalbagh, not far from Bakshibazar chowrasta. It felt like stepping through a wardrobe into another country.

Yet that gate might as well have been guarded by dragons.

Our parents, like many academics raising children in a tightly knit campus environment, had strict ideas about safety and propriety. Venturing into Old Dhaka alone was discouraged, sometimes outright forbidden. To them, the colony represented order and security; beyond the wall lay unpredictability: crowded streets, traffic, noise, strangers.

To us it looked like all the fun in the universe. We would stand near the wall sometimes, hearing faint echoes of loudspeakers, distant music, the restless hum of people living life at full volume. On one side: shaded pathways and careful routines. On the other: a dense labyrinth that promised endless adventure.

For most of the year the wall held firm. Except on Eid.

Something about Eid-ul-Fitr softened the rules. Perhaps it was the communal spirit of the day or the fact that many colony uncles preferred to attend Eid prayers in the historic mosques of Old Dhaka. Families would gather early in the morning, dressed in crisp panjabis and freshly ironed pajamas, and head out together through that little gate.

For us children, this was the opening of a forbidden city. Once the morning prayer ended, the invisible leash that normally kept us inside the colony loosened. Groups of us — colony kids in shiny new Eid clothes — would spill into the streets of Lalbagh, Khajedewan, Bakshibazar, sometimes even venturing as far as Chowkbazar.

The difference in atmosphere hit you at once. In the narrow alleys, clusters of men gathered in spontaneous addas. Plastic stools and mismatched chairs formed loose circles around enormous soundboxes placed in the middle of the lane. From these speakers blasted Bollywood songs at heroic volume: "Hawa Hawa o Hawa, Khushbu Luta de" or "Hay mere, ham safar." The music bounced off old brick walls and drifted through balconies draped with laundry.

People lingered everywhere. Conversations stretched lazily. Laughter rolled through the streets. There was also the ritual of collecting salami at the local Panchayet clubs. In places like Khajedewan Panchayet Club or Posta Panchayet Club, elders sat like benevolent magistrates while children and young men dropped by to offer Eid greetings and receive small notes of cash. The clubs functioned like tiny civic centres, where the neighbourhood's social life condensed into a festive ceremony of greetings and generosity.

One year, wandering through those lanes, I stumbled upon something remarkable: an Eid procession.

It moved slowly through the street, a cheerful crowd of elderly men and younger boys. At the front marched a group of singers whose voices rose above the murmur of the crowd. Only later did I learn they were qasida singers.

Throughout Ramadan, these singers walked the streets before dawn, performing sehri songs to wake people for the pre-dawn meal. Their melodies floated through the sleeping city like gentle alarms, equal parts devotion and neighbourhood service. On Eid day they gathered together, moving from lane to lane before assembling in front of the local Panchayet club.

There, amid cheers and greetings, they received their collective Eid salami.

The procession had a buoyant rhythm. The singers' voices rose in melodic waves, and people joined in clapping or humming along. For a child who had grown up within the quieter confines of the colony, it felt like witnessing a festival inside a festival.

Old Dhaka cannot be remembered without its food.

During those Eid wanderings I tasted combinations that seemed strange to my colony-bred palate. One of my closest childhood friends lived in Khajedewan, and visiting his house during Eid was a culinary expedition. Their family served bakorkhani with dudh shemai (rich milk vermicelli) whose sweetness balanced against the flaky, slightly salty bread. They also paired bakorkhani with a pale, creamy chicken roast. I had never imagined that bread associated with tea could accompany roast chicken, yet the combination worked.

There was also shemai sharbat, lightly scented with rose water, which arrived in tall glasses and cooled you from the inside out.

Then there was Chowkbazar.

For us colony kids, Chowkbazar occupied a place somewhere between rumour and legend. It was famous for its iftar market during Ramadan, but reaching it from the colony required venturing deeper into Old Dhaka than most parents would comfortably allow. By the time we were twelve or thirteen, however, curiosity had grown stronger than caution.

A few days before Eid, on the 28th or 29th of Ramadan, we began making secret expeditions there. We might tell our parents we were going somewhere nearby. In truth we were on a mission. Firecrackers.

For the younger children of the colony, Chaand Raat (the night when the Eid moon is sighted) meant one thing: fireworks. Our colony boro bhais (elder brothers) bought elaborate assortments of crackers with names that sounded mysterious and thrilling: Murras, chocolate bombs, shalta. The younger ones followed them around all evening, watching in awe as sparks erupted and echoes bounced off the colony buildings.

We longed for the day when we would be old enough to buy our own.

Once we crossed that invisible threshold of age — eleven or twelve — we joined the hunt ourselves. Chowkbazar was the place to go, though the process had the excitement of a treasure hunt. Firecrackers were not sold openly. Shops dealing in dried fruits, spices, or wholesale goods might stock them somewhere in the back.

You had to ask the right person.

Sometimes a shopkeeper would glance around, then disappear behind a curtain and return with a dusty cardboard box filled with explosives disguised as toys. Negotiations followed in hushed voices. The thrill lay in the discovery itself, like finding contraband artefacts in a secret market.

On one of those expeditions we heard about a small Eid mela near Chowkbazar chowrasta. We returned on Eid day.

The fair was modest — nothing like the large melas we read about in books or saw on television — but to us it felt special. Stalls displayed cheap plastic toys we had never seen in New Market. Strange candies in improbable colours, balloons, spinning pinwheels, tin whistles, and tiny battery-powered gadgets.

We wandered through the fair with pockets full of Eid salami, buying things that probably broke within hours but felt priceless in the moment.

What remains most vivid now is not any single object or meal or firecracker. It is the feeling of crossing that small gate in Red Colony and entering another world.

Inside the colony, life was calm. Outside, Old Dhaka pulsed with improvisation and noise and generosity. Eid became the bridge between those two worlds, a day when boundaries softened and a child could move freely between them.

Those brief adventures — slipping through the gate into Lalbagh or Khajedewan, following music through narrow lanes, tasting unfamiliar foods, hunting contraband firecrackers in Chowkbazar — formed a map of wonder in my memory.

Even now, when Eid arrives, I think of that small gate in Red Colony and the city waiting just beyond it.

The Wanderer Dhaka Had to Invent

Pinaki Bhattacharya — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Before I ever visited Paris, I knew Guillaume Apollinaire's name only faintly. It appeared in translations, a distant presence in the literature of European modernism. One afternoon, browsing without much purpose, I discovered his poem Le Pont Mirabeau. The idea puzzled me. Why would a poet devote an entire poem to a bridge?

Later, after arriving in France, curiosity led me to the bridge itself.

The revelation was spatial, not visual.

The bridge could be stood upon. Small recesses along the parapet allowed pedestrians to lean without obstructing others. Suspended above the slow current of the Seine, one could remain there indefinitely, watching the water pass beneath the arches.

Standing there, the poem clarified itself. The bridge was not the subject at all. What the poem assumed was something more basic: that a person could remain in one place long enough to watch time pass beneath him.

Cities teach bodies these possibilities. From such small permissions, where one may linger and how long one may remain, entire forms of thought emerge.

Nineteenth-century Paris gave a name to the figure who inhabits such spaces: the flâneur.

First sketched by Baudelaire and later theorised by Walter Benjamin, the flâneur is a wanderer of the modern city. He walks through crowds without urgent destination. He observes without belonging. The city becomes legible through his drifting movement.

But the flâneur is also a spatial product.

Paris produced him because Paris produced the conditions in which he could exist. Haussmann's boulevards permitted strolling rather than squeezing through traffic. The arcades created sheltered corridors for idle observation. Bridges across the Seine offered vantage points where a person could pause above the river without interrupting pedestrian flow.

These spaces permitted something radical: useless presence. A person could remain in public space without explanation. The flâneur exists because the city tolerates him.

Dhaka offers a different lesson

Like Paris, Dhaka is a city of rivers. The Buriganga and the Turag once shaped its commercial life much as the Seine shaped Paris. Bridges now cross these waters in growing numbers. Yet the experience of standing upon them reveals a sharp difference.

A pedestrian stepping onto one of Dhaka's bridges discovers that lingering is difficult. Pavements narrow between roaring lanes of traffic. Buses thunder past with impatient horns. Motorcycles weave through any remaining space. The pedestrian becomes a temporary obstacle within a system designed for movement.

One crosses the bridge and keeps moving.

To pause is to disrupt the rhythm of engines. The bridge is a corridor, not a balcony above the river.

This small architectural difference shapes the kinds of urban subjects cities produce. The flâneur requires pockets of tolerated stillness within the machinery of movement. Without such spaces, wandering becomes difficult. Dhaka's tempo rarely encourages stillness. Its modern history has been shaped by urgency: migration, density, political upheaval, economic pressure. Movement is seldom leisurely. One walks because one must reach somewhere else.

In such a city, the purposeless wanderer appears improbable.

And yet Bengali literature possesses one

Created by Humayun Ahmed, Himu enters literature in a simple but unforgettable form: a young man wearing a yellow panjabi without pockets, walking barefoot through Dhaka's streets. The absence of pockets is deliberate. Pockets imply money, work, responsibility. Himu carries none of these.

He walks.

Across the twenty-one Himu novels, he drifts through tea stalls, hospital corridors, railway stations, and residential streets long after midnight. Sometimes he appears at the house of Majeda Khala, where he eats before disappearing again into the city. Sometimes he meets Rupa, the woman who loves him with a patience that borders on tragedy. Rupa represents the possibility of ordinary life: marriage, stability, belonging. Himu never enters that world. He approaches it but remains outside.

He might stand beneath her window speaking about strange philosophical matters. Then he disappears for weeks, wandering through the city, and returns as if nothing had happened. This pattern repeats throughout the stories. Himu approaches life but never settles inside it.

At night, the city loosens its grip on urgency

In many stories, Himu walks through Dhaka long after midnight. Streetlights flicker above empty intersections. Tea stalls remain half open. A few stray dogs follow him from one neighbourhood to another. The traffic that dominates the day has thinned into occasional distant engines. He walks through these hours as if the city belonged to him alone, stopping to speak to strangers who are never sure whether they have encountered a mystic, a madman, or something in between. In those moments, the city becomes visible because someone is looking at it without hurry.

At first glance, Himu resembles the flâneur. Both figures wander through the city observing people and places. Both appear detached from ordinary work and obligation.

But the resemblance is deceptive.

The Parisian flâneur is socially permitted. In Paris, the wandering observer dissolves into the crowd. His purposelessness attracts little attention. In Dhaka, purposelessness becomes spectacle. A barefoot man wearing a bright yellow panjabi and speaking in riddles to strangers becomes an object of fascination. Some characters believe he possesses supernatural powers. Others dismiss him as eccentric. Humayun Ahmed sustains this ambiguity with care. Himu never claims supernatural insight, yet coincidences accumulate around him. Predictions come true. Problems resolve themselves after he appears. The mystery remains unresolved. But one fact is clear: Himu commands attention.

The ragpicker's shadow

From a theoretical angle, Himu resembles another figure from Benjamin's reflections on Paris: the ragpicker.

In Benjamin's writing on the nineteenth-century city, the ragpicker is a marginal figure who wanders at night collecting discarded objects from the streets. Unlike the flâneur, who observes from a position of leisure, the ragpicker moves through the city's forgotten edges. He gathers fragments, remnants, debris. He lives inside the city's refuse.

This difference matters. The classical flâneur belongs to a confident bourgeois modernity. His wandering presupposes a city that can afford leisure and spectatorship. The ragpicker belongs to another urban reality, one marked by poverty, improvisation, and survival.

From this angle, Himu looks less like a Parisian stroller and more like Benjamin's ragpicker. He moves through the margins of the city rather than its boulevards. His companions are stray dogs, night guards, and tea stall workers rather than elegant pedestrians. His wandering occurs in streets temporarily emptied of pressure, not in spaces designed for strolling. The ragpicker gathers fragments of the city's material life. Himu gathers fragments of its human life: conversations, encounters, small mysteries. Where the flâneur reads the city like a book, the ragpicker sifts through its discarded pages.

A post-colonial flâneur

Himu may be better understood, then, as a post-colonial flâneur.

The classical flâneur emerged from the confident spaces of European modernity. His wandering assumed the form of a city designed for spectatorship. Dhaka emerged from a different history: colonial extraction, post-colonial expansion, relentless density, economic pressure. The city rarely produces the idle observer.

Himu performs a strange inversion. He wanders because he refuses the city's logic, not because the city permits it. Barefoot and pocketless, detached from work and property, he moves through Dhaka as a figure who rejects the rhythm of productivity that governs it.

The flâneur of Paris reads the city. The ragpicker gathers its fragments. Himu unsettles it.

What cities permit, fiction provides

Cities shape literature in ways that often remain invisible. The bridges of Paris allowed poets to imagine time flowing beneath a stationary observer. The bridges of Dhaka rarely offer such vantage.

But imagination compensates for what space denies. In the absence of a wandering observer produced by its streets, Bengali fiction created one. Himu walks where the city itself cannot allow such walking. Paris produced its flâneur through architecture. Dhaka had to invent its wanderer through fiction.

And perhaps this is the irony of the modern city: the freedom to wander without purpose survives most securely in the pages of a book.

The Journalists Who Serve the Throne

Shaquib Ahmed — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

On January 20, 2014, The Daily Star published a piece by two of its senior journalists, Shakhawat Liton and Inam Ahmed, eviscerating Begum Khaleda Zia. The article, titled "Dangerous insinuation, distortion of facts," accused the former prime minister of lying in a public speech, patronizing militant outfits, and stoking communal fears for political gain. The tone was prosecutorial. The framing left no room for ambiguity. Khaleda Zia was a danger. Her words could not be trusted.

Eleven years later, Khaleda Zia died. And Shakhawat Liton wrote her obituary.

In The Business Standard's tribute published December 2025, Liton cast the same woman in a different light. Her 1991 election victory became a "catalyst for change," ushering in economic reforms, trade liberalization, and expanded girls' education. Gone was any mention of the covert arrangement with Jamaat-e-Islami that Liton himself had once condemned in an op-ed for Pakistan's Dawn newspaper. Gone was the accusation that Khaleda Zia had appointed a known 1971 peace committee collaborator to the presidency. The prose glowed where it once burned.

The politician had not changed. The facts had not changed. The political weather had.

Three weeks ago, Tarique Rahman took his oath as Prime Minister at the South Plaza of the Jatiya Sangsad. His BNP won 209 of 297 declared seats, a landslide that ended the interim period and returned Bangladesh to elected government for the first time since the July 2024 uprising. Jamaat-e-Islami took 68 seats to become the principal opposition. The student-led National Citizen Party entered parliament with six. And now, as a new government assembles its 49-member cabinet and begins to govern, the question that should concern every journalist in this country is not who holds power. It is whether we will, once again, serve whoever does.

Loyalty that shifts with the wind

The two documents at the heart of this story follow the same cast of characters across two decades and two newspapers. Shakhawat Liton and Inam Ahmed built their careers at The Daily Star, Bangladesh's most influential English-language daily, before moving to senior positions at The Business Standard, where Ahmed now serves as editor and Liton as deputy executive editor.

During the Awami League years, their reporting constructed a sustained portrait of Tarique Rahman and former state minister Lutfuzzaman Babar as figures at the center of corruption and political violence. Drawing on court proceedings, investigation files, and witness accounts, they described Hawa Bhaban as a parallel power center where Tarique Rahman exercised authority through informal channels. They traced how Babar's name surfaced in connection with militant networks and political violence, including the August 21, 2004 grenade attack on an Awami League rally. They portrayed corruption as a system involving banks, shell entities, and international jurisdictions.

The reporting was detailed and sourced. It relied on judicial records and investigation findings. And it arrived under a government that had every interest in seeing these stories told.

When the Awami League fell on August 5, 2024, multiple sources allege that several of these same articles vanished from The Business Standard's website. The evidence that once seemed so urgent, so necessary for public accountability, became inconvenient under new political realities.

Meanwhile, Inam Ahmed had served as secretary general of the Editors' Guild led by Mozammel Babu, a body widely viewed as partisan and aligned with the Hasina government during its final years. This was not a case of a journalist caught in the crossfire between competing loyalties. It was proximity to power, formalized and institutional.

The missing context that tells the story

What makes the 2014 attack on Khaleda Zia instructive is what it left out.

Liton and Ahmed accused Khaleda Zia and her BNP government of patronizing the Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh, or JMB. They did not mention that JMB was established in 1997, during an Awami League government. They dismissed her claim that the ruling party bore responsibility for post-election violence against the Hindu community. Eight days before their article ran, BBC Bangla had published a report of their Bangladesh Sanglap program in which Awami League leader Asaduzzaman Noor admitted that members of his own party had carried out attacks on minorities. "I admit it," Noor said. "Such an incident has occurred somewhere." Liton and Ahmed did not reference this admission.

This is selective emphasis at its most corrosive. The individual facts in each article may survive scrutiny. The framing does not. When you present one side's claims as dangerous fabrication while burying evidence that supports them, you are not reporting. You are prosecuting on behalf of an unnamed client.

The mirror image problem

The temptation here is to see this as an Awami League problem, a story about journalists who served Sheikh Hasina's government and attacked her rivals. But the pattern runs both ways. Khaleda Zia's BNP years produced their own stable of compliant editors and obliging headlines. Every government in Bangladesh's history has found willing partners in the press — journalists who traded independence for access, advertising revenue, or simple survival in a political environment where the wrong editorial line could bring the state's full weight down on a newspaper.

The Awami League version was more sophisticated. It operated through formal institutions like the Editors' Guild. It benefited from the global prestige of English-language media. It wrapped its persecution of press freedom in the language of combating extremism and defending liberation values. But the underlying transaction was the same one BNP offered its favored editors during its own tenure: serve us, and we will protect you. Cross us, and we will remember.

This is the double bind that has trapped Bangladeshi journalism for decades. Newspapers that should function as the loyal opposition — holding power accountable regardless of who wields it — instead function as rotating mouthpieces. The masthead stays the same. The target changes. The method is identical: selective sourcing, strategic omission, and the framing of contested political claims as settled fact when it serves the interests of whoever sits in Dhaka.

What honest journalism looks like

None of this means that Tarique Rahman deserved no scrutiny. The Hawa Bhaban allegations, the grenade attack case, the financial trail through infrastructure contracts: these are legitimate subjects for investigative reporting. No serious journalist would argue otherwise. Khaleda Zia's government record, her political rhetoric, her alliances: all fair game. And now that her son leads the country, every decision his cabinet makes deserves the same skeptical attention that any responsible press would give any government.

The problem was never the subject matter. The problem is the timing, the selectivity, and the servility.

Honest journalism would have reported on Hawa Bhaban's alleged corruption when the Awami League was in power and continued reporting on it when the Awami League fell. It would not have deleted articles from its own website when the political winds shifted. It would have included the BBC Bangla report that undercut its own narrative. It would have noted that JMB formed under a different government. It would not have written an obituary that erased everything it once considered vital to the public record.

Honest journalism treats the facts as fixed points and the government as a moving variable. What we have seen in Bangladesh is the opposite: the government treated as the fixed point and the facts arranged around it.

The test begins now

On February 17, Tarique Rahman stood at the South Plaza of the Parliament Complex and pledged to preserve, protect, and defend the constitution. He spoke of law and order and anticorruption measures. He told the nation that those who voted for BNP and those who did not have equal rights to this government. These were fine words. They deserve to be measured against action.

And this is where Bangladeshi journalism must prove it has learned something from the past three decades.

The BNP now commands a two-thirds majority. Jamaat-e-Islami sits in formal opposition with 68 seats. The NCP holds six. The July Charter, approved by 60 percent of voters in the referendum, outlines constitutional reforms including a bicameral parliament, term limits, and strengthened judicial independence. Every one of these developments demands rigorous, independent coverage from a press that answers to the public and not to the ruling party.

Will the newspapers that once attacked Tarique Rahman under Awami League patronage now flatter him under his own government? Will the outlets that praised Hasina's economic record for fifteen years turn their forensic attention to BNP's promised ten million jobs and family card program? Will the opposition parties — including Jamaat and the NCP — receive fair coverage of their parliamentary role, or will they be framed through the lens of whatever narrative the new government prefers?

These questions are not abstract. They describe choices that editors and reporters across Bangladesh are making right now, in March 2026, as the new political order takes shape around them.

The newsrooms we love deserve better from us

I write this as someone who loves Bangladeshi journalism. The Daily Star, The Business Standard, Prothom Alo: these institutions matter. They employ talented reporters who do difficult work under dangerous conditions. Mahfuz Anam's staff faced mob attacks in December 2025. Journalists across the country risk their safety every day to report stories that the powerful would prefer stayed buried.

That courage makes the servility harder to bear. When talented journalists bend their work to suit the government of the day, they betray their own best instincts. They betray their colleagues who take the real risks. And they betray a public that needs honest information to govern itself.

Bangladesh just held what international observers called one of its most peaceful and credible elections in decades. Nearly 60 percent of 127 million eligible voters turned out. They chose a new parliament across party lines: BNP, Jamaat, NCP, independents. They approved a constitutional reform charter. They did their part. The question is whether the press will do its.

We serve the truth. We speak truth to power. We do not serve power's whims.

That sentence is easy to write and hard to live. But this is the moment. The old binary of BNP versus Awami League that defined Bangladeshi politics for 35 years has shattered. A new parliament with new faces and new parties has taken shape. If Bangladeshi journalism cannot find its independence now, in the most open political space this country has seen in a generation, then it never will.

The throne will always find new occupants. The question is whether we will find journalists who refuse to kneel.

When the Wind Carried Me to Iranian Cinema

Faisal Mahmud — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Television in Bangladesh in the early nineties had a strange authority. There was one channel. No competition. When something unusual appeared on BTV, it tended to linger in the imagination longer than it might have in a more saturated media environment.

I was eight or nine years old, maybe 1993 or 1994, and BTV had scheduled something outside the usual movie-of-the-week slot. Some cultural occasion I can no longer name, something that timed with an Iranian event. What I remember is the film itself. An elderly person and a boy traveled through a region wrecked by an earthquake. They wandered through rubble where sad, broken people sat with blank, haunted looks, having lost family and everything they owned.

There was silence. Still, photograph-like scenes. Sad music that settled into a melancholic image in my mind. I did not understand much of the film and could not recall its name. But the images stayed the way certain childhood scenes do, without explanation. Rubble. Quiet roads. Grayish blue skies. People standing amid ruins with a look of exhausted stillness. Even at that age, I sensed the difference between this film and the ones that usually appeared on television. There were no villains. No sudden bursts of action. The camera seemed content to watch.

Much later, when I developed a taste for world cinema, I learned it was Abbas Kiarostami's 1992 film Life and Nothing More. By then Kiarostami occupied a special space in my mind and had ignited a thirst for the kind of cinema that made people pause and think.

I owe my cousin for pushing me through the door. It was 2003, and my movie taste was shaped almost entirely by Hollywood. My post-teenage mind had a predilection for American college comedies. I was never a big fan of action, except for some 90s cult favorites: The Rock, Con Air, Broken Arrow, Face/Off. Those were the golden years of Hollywood action.

Many teenagers in that era followed similar paths. Hollywood provided the language of entertainment: the rhythm of jokes, the dependable arc of conflict and resolution. The action films of the nineties possessed a certain flamboyant charm. Sean Connery stalking through Alcatraz. Nicolas Cage racing through chaos. The surreal face-swapping spectacle of John Travolta and Cage squaring off. Excessive and fun.

So to a mind shaped by those films, Kiarostami had no chance of entry unless someone pushed.

My cousin Yusuf Banna, a poet my own age, had developed a far more mature taste for cinema by then. I did not know how, exactly, but he ran with the Little Mags crowd at Aziz Super Market in Dhaka. Aziz Super Market was, and in many ways still is, one of those curious urban enclaves where literary and artistic subcultures gather. Small magazines circulated among poets, students, writers, and critics. Conversations about literature and cinema flowed with the same casual intensity as tea. It was the sort of place where one might stumble upon filmmakers whose names never appeared on mainstream screens.

Banna once took me to the Russian Cultural Center for a screening of a film by the master Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu. I sat through 20 or 25 minutes and felt so sleepy that I stormed out, took a rickshaw to Banna's house on the opposite side of Dhanmondi Lake, went upstairs, and fell asleep in his bed. I told him later that Ozu's films had a gift for putting people into a deep sleep.

At the time, the remark felt reasonable. Ozu's deliberate pacing seemed less like contemplation and more like sedation. The still camera and the lack of dramatic urgency did not align with the cinematic language I had grown accustomed to.

On another occasion Banna brought me to a screening of some lesser known Polish director at Aziz Super Market. I felt bored. The famous Bangladeshi actor Gazi Rakayet sat beside me, visibly annoyed that I kept trying to strike up a conversation with Banna during the film.

The etiquette of art house cinema was still foreign territory for me. Then The Wind Will Carry Us happened.

One rainy afternoon, Banna, a friend of ours, and I were having adda at Banna's place in Dhanmondi. He told me he would show me a film that would change my mind about "artsy cinema," which is what I used to call it, half joking. He put on a DVD of The Wind Will Carry Us.

The first few minutes hooked me. A rugged, hilly terrain in the Iranian hinterland. A somewhat annoyed, middle-aged engineer wandering through a village, talking with local people, sipping tea in a beautiful hillside tea shop where elderly men and women discussed the stranger from the city.

Nothing dramatic happened. Yet something about the rhythm of the film, its patience, its attention to ordinary gestures, began to pull me in. The landscape. The people. The conversation. Without realizing it, I started to appreciate the long shot, the pause, the space, the photogenic framing that Kiarostami used to build his world.

From then on, there was no turning back.

For those who discover it late, Iranian cinema often feels less like a film industry and more like a quiet arrival. It does not announce itself with spectacle. It enters gently.

That gentleness is tied to Iran's cultural inheritance. The country's artistic traditions stretch back through Persian poetry and storytelling rooted in the golden age of the Persian Empire. Cinema, when it arrived in the late twentieth century, inherited that sensibility: a patient eye for detail, a reverence for landscape, a philosophical curiosity about the human condition.

The rise of Iranian cinema as a global force from the late 1980s onward remains one of the most striking stories in modern film. Directors like Kiarostami, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Jafar Panahi, and Majid Majidi forged a cinematic language that was local in its textures but universal in its concerns. Their films relied on non-professional actors, natural landscapes, spare storytelling, and narratives rooted in everyday life. Beneath that simplicity lay serious questions about morality, identity, childhood, and resilience.

What surprised many international critics was that such a movement could emerge from a country with strict censorship and limited production resources. But the restrictions became part of the creative engine. Iranian filmmakers learned to speak through metaphor, allegory, and visual suggestion to explore social realities they could not address head on.

Kiarostami mastered this balance between simplicity and depth. His films often appear straightforward. A child searching for a notebook (Where Is the Friend's House?). A man driving through the countryside, contemplating life (Taste of Cherry). A visitor waiting in a remote village (The Wind Will Carry Us). Yet these stories carry a philosophical weight that stays with a viewer long after the screen goes dark.

The Wind Will Carry Us, the film that changed my own sense of what cinema could do, follows a man who arrives in a remote Kurdish village to wait for an elderly woman's death so he can document traditional mourning rituals. Yet the film rarely shows the event he is waiting for. Instead, it lingers on daily life. Tea shops, dusty roads, conversations with villagers, the quiet rhythm of rural existence. In Kiarostami's world, the most important moments often occur off screen.

That approach reflects a broader tradition in Iranian storytelling, one that values suggestion over declaration. Persian literature, from Rumi and Hafez to modern Iranian prose, has long embraced ambiguity and layered meaning. Iranian filmmakers inherited that tradition and transformed it into visual language. A long shot of a winding road across hills becomes a metaphor for a journey through life. A child's question carries philosophical weight. Silence becomes dialogue.

For viewers raised on faster commercial cinema, the adjustment can be difficult. I remember the initial resistance. The stillness felt unfamiliar. The pacing seemed slow. The narratives appeared minimal. But once the rhythm settles into the mind, the experience changes you. You begin to notice things you once overlooked: the way light moves across a hillside, the pauses between conversations, the humanity embedded in everyday gestures. Iranian cinema teaches the viewer how to watch again. And once you learn that way of watching, it becomes hard to go back.

International audiences began recognizing this power in the 1990s. Films from Iran started winning major prizes at Cannes, Venice, Busan, and Berlin. Critics praised the movement for its humanism, its realism, and its ability to cross political borders.

As the scholar Hamid Dabashi has observed, Iranian cinema became global because it embraced its own cultural identity. By telling local stories about villages, families, children, and moral dilemmas, it reached universal emotions.

A child searching for a friend's house in a small Iranian village felt relatable to viewers on the other side of the world. Through cinema, many viewers discovered a side of Iran rarely shown in political headlines: a society rich in literature, philosophy, humor, and artistic creativity.

In Makhmalbaf's Gabbeh, the Iranian landscape itself becomes part of the narrative. Set among nomadic tribes, the film opens with an elderly couple washing a colorful carpet by a river. From the patterns of the carpet emerges the story of a young woman in love. The camera lingers on rolling hills, migrating tribes, and bright textiles fluttering in the wind, turning everyday life into something lyrical. A simple love story becomes a meditation on memory, folklore, nostalgia, and the bond between people and land.

Jafar Panahi, by contrast, finds depth within the ordinary rhythms of urban life. In The White Balloon, a little girl searching for money she dropped through a street grate wanders through crowded Tehran, encountering shopkeepers and strangers who briefly become part of her story. The plot is simple, yet through these encounters Panahi reveals the fragile kindness that holds everyday life together. In Taxi, conversations between passengers inside a cab unfold into reflections on law, morality, love, and freedom.

This emphasis on observation is what struck me when I first watched The Wind Will Carry Us. The film seemed to slow time itself. The camera lingered on hillsides and faces, and the silence felt meaningful. Somewhere during those quiet conversations at the village tea shop, something shifted in my understanding of cinema.

Movies, I realized, did not have to rush toward climax or spectacle. They could simply exist.

Our Photocopied Republic

Ahsan Akbar — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

A certain kind of geography almost killed our love of reading. Almost.

My generation of readers growing up in Dhaka in the 1990s was saved and shaped by photocopied books. They were not pirated in the grand, criminal sense. They were imperfect shadows of the real thing: Crooked margins, grainy ink and the occasional missing page, which charged the imagination to fill in the blanks.

This was not an act of rebellion. It was simply how literature reached us: as an afterimage. The original object existed somewhere else – in London, perhaps, or New York. What arrived in our hands was its echo. Stapled. Faded. Often bearing the purple seal of a bookseller from Nilkhet, the neighbourhood near Dhaka University that functioned as the city's unofficial republic of books. Nilkhet defied copyright with cheerful efficiency. If a single copy of a book existed anywhere in the city, it could be reproduced and rebound in plastic covers sturdy enough to survive years of circulation.

Our formal education in literature at school did little to inspire us. Teachers delivered English through classic texts, via Shakespeare and Dickens and memorised "Tyger Tyger" poems, often seeming as disengaged as their students (and equally incapable of explaining why Blake chose to spell tiger that way.) We used to joke the English teacher was simply someone who couldn't land a job in the Foreign Service. The problem, I later realised, was not the stories but the manner of their delivery. We were hungry for voices that felt closer to our own moment. Contemporary fiction offered not just escape but connection, a glimpse of other lives that felt strangely legible to our own.

The photocopy machine made this possible.

If someone managed to obtain a book, a small group of us would pool our tiffin money, the crumpled bank notes meant for school snacks, and commission copies. Sometimes a photocopy was itself copied again, and then again. With each generation the text degraded slightly, as if distance were being measured in ink. By the third reproduction, entire sentences might fade into suggestion.

The shops that performed this quiet work were everywhere. Narrow rooms lit by fluorescent tubes, with machines that hummed without rest. The men who ran them approached the task with calm professionalism. You could bring them anything – a textbook, a passport, a manuscript, a certificate – and they would reproduce it faithfully enough. They always asked the same question: "Offset or plain?" Offset cost a little more and promised greater clarity. But even offset could not restore what had already been lost. The ink faded toward the spine. The text slipped into shadow. Occasionally a page disappeared altogether, and you discovered its absence only when the narrative stopped making sense. The magic realism of Garcia Marquez was on another level.

Contemporary classics did not belong to our geography, let alone newly published ones. They travelled slowly, if at all. When they did appear, they entered an informal circulation, passing from one private hand to another. A returning relative brought a novel from abroad. A teacher lent a cherished copy. Inevitably, it found its way to a photocopy shop.

None of this diminished the magic. If anything, it deepened it. What you held did not feel like a commodity. It felt like access.

We did not worry too much about the sensual pleasure readers associate with books: the weight of good paper, the sharpness of fresh print, the cover design, a detail on the font used – all hallmarks of the quiet authority of a well-made object. My books were warm from the machine, their bindings improvised, their covers arbitrary. They possessed no aesthetic confidence. Only the authority of survival.

This culture of reproduction even gave me my first experience of publishing. (Publishing is a noble word, I hasten to add, and my attempt was small.) As a teenager, I lamented our school not having a paper, a magazine. I had no interest in the annual yearbook, published with our mugshots, a copy of which we were forced to buy for the pleasure of seeing people we already saw every day. When my litany of complaints went unregistered, I started a monthly journal called The Spectrum. I solicited poems and stories from friends, who gave me handwritten pieces. I compiled them and took them to be typed by professional typists who sat waiting beside the photocopy machines, then produced stapled editions for circulation. I sold them at cost. Contributors paid in solidarity; everyone else expected free copies. We were glad to pass the copy along. The spirit was collegial, almost without anyone intending it. Some readers left comments and drawings in the margins, with the occasional heart sign that made ours race and filled the days with restless curiosity. As exams took precedence, the magazine shrank into a single notebook, moving quietly from hand to hand. In its modest way, it was a literary commons, and now a happy memory.

Years later, as one of the organisers of the Dhaka Literary Festival, I encountered the structural side of the same problem. Visiting authors wanted their books to be available to readers. Bangladesh lacked the local publishing imprints that existed in India, where international publishers printed affordable regional editions. Foreign books remained expensive. Importing them into Bangladesh was complicated by foreign exchange constraints, high shipping costs and long delays at customs. The local joke is that customs officers are avid readers, not the sort to let a free reading opportunity slip by.

Theoretically, the economic reforms of trade liberalisation in the early 90s meant no duty on imported books. In practice, they remained scarce in an era before the internet, when we had only two television channels, both terrible. The barrier was not censorship, except if the author managed to obtain a fatwa. It was distance, and the economics of access. Literature did not arrive through some trade policy. For our generation it arrived through photocopiers.

In London, where I live today, books exist in abundance and in their intended forms. Bookshops present them in carefully curated displays. They wait patiently to be chosen. The colourful spines draw you in, and before you know, you have spent hours browsing. Nothing about their existence feels uncertain.

And yet, I sometimes find myself thinking about those earlier copies. Faint, stapled, and slightly askew, they travelled further to reach me than any book I now own. Those offset pages with colourless spines meant so much to us, and only because of our geographical reality. Perhaps that is why I have spent much of my adult life trying to shorten that distance. Through festivals, gatherings and small acts of convening, I have tried to create spaces where ideas arrive intact, and where access does not depend on accident or endurance.

In the end, it was not I who had arrived at literature. It was literature that had arrived, imperfectly and against the odds, at me.

After the Landslide

Pinaki Bhattacharya — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The results are in. The Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) has secured more than two hundred seats in the 300-member Jatiya Sangsad and will form the next government. In any functioning democracy, the defeated must begin with grace. Victory deserves acknowledgment. Congratulations are due.

And yet elections are not judged by numbers alone. They are judged by the story those numbers tell.

This election has left behind an unease that will not dissolve. Polling day appeared orderly. Ballots were cast. The streets were calm. But in South Asia, the true drama of elections often begins after sunset, when counting starts, when agents are asked to leave, when numbers begin their quiet migration.

When Numbers Stop Behaving

Until around 10:30 p.m., the national scoreboard resembled a genuine contest. Two alliances advanced neck and neck, separated by three or four seats. One edged ahead; then the other reclaimed the lead. It felt competitive, uncertain, almost balanced.

Then came stillness.

One side's progress froze. The other surged. From forty seats to two hundred and eight, the acceleration was smooth, uninterrupted, almost frictionless. Meanwhile the opposing alliance appeared trapped, its tally unmoving, as if stalled in Dhaka traffic.

Data does not behave this way.

Consider a Monte Carlo simulation. Assume two blocs with comparable support across 300 constituencies. Randomize the order of seat declarations. Repeat the experiment one hundred thousand times. How often would you observe a prolonged neck-and-neck contest followed by the complete stalling of one side and an uninterrupted surge of the other?

The probability approaches zero.

Even with billions of simulations, such a pattern would barely appear. Yet the final numbers aligned almost perfectly with pre-election predictions circulating within BNP intellectual circles: over two hundred seats for themselves, around eighty for the Jamaat–NCP alliance.

Precision of that order invites either admiration, or scrutiny.

The Night After the Ballots

Bangladesh has long known that elections can shift after counting begins.

The late economist and former caretaker adviser Akbar Ali Khan wrote in Obak Bangladesh about how electoral outcomes are often altered not during voting but during compilation, when opposition polling agents are intimidated or removed, and when final aggregation occurs before results are transmitted upward.

A calm day can become a different night.

There were quiet anomalies in this election too. Constituencies where one candidate was declared victorious across media platforms, only for headlines to disappear hours later. High-profile seats where margins remained narrow with multiple polling centers yet to be counted, yet final declarations were issued.

In closely contested races, small adjustments produce large consequences.

History's Warnings

Overwhelming majorities have rarely guaranteed stability in Bangladesh.

In 1973, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman presided over a sweeping parliamentary victory that soon drifted toward political crisis. Decades later, Sheikh Hasina governed through elections lacking full opposition participation, and legitimacy eroded accordingly.

Elsewhere in the region, disputed electoral verdicts have fueled unrest for generations. Electoral engineering may deliver power. It rarely delivers trust.

The Rangpur Paradox

One of the most striking features of this election was the collapse of the Jatiya Party fortress in Rangpur. For decades, neither BNP nor Awami League could fracture it. This time, it fell.

If the Jamaat–NCP alliance was strong enough to dismantle such an entrenched bastion, how did it simultaneously falter across the rest of the country? Political strength does not evaporate geographically overnight. The contradiction lingers.

Churchill's Lesson

Electoral defeat is not political extinction.

During the Second World War, Winston Churchill stood as Britain's undisputed hero. He led his nation through existential crisis. Yet in the first election after victory, voters chose Labour. Five years later, Churchill returned to power.

Public mood shifts. Momentum reverses. Triumph and loss are temporary conditions.

The Jamaat–NCP alliance would do well to remember this.

The Work of a Responsible Opposition

Rage is tempting; strategy is harder.

A responsible opposition does not rush to agitation on day one. Immediate confrontation would offer the new government an excuse: we could not deliver because they obstructed us.

Instead, documentation becomes power. Every signed polling-station result sheet. Every video clip. Every testimony from polling agents. Every report of intimidation. Every documented attack, including those against women activists.

Archive everything. Democracies forget. Archives do not.

At the same time, self-reflection is necessary. Unity crystallized late. Polling-center coverage was uneven. Media infrastructure was thin. Key issues, including women's representation and foreign policy positioning, were not articulated with sufficient clarity. Electoral politics rewards organization as much as conviction.

Beyond the Majority

The new government now faces the harder test: governing.

Bangladesh's economic pressures, administrative fragilities, and geopolitical balances will challenge even a commanding majority. If stability were the highest priority, a visibly unquestioned election would have strengthened it. Suppressing an emerging alternative may secure short-term control; it rarely extinguishes long-term momentum.

There are already unsettling signals. Celebratory rhetoric that echoes older vendettas. Early gestures suggesting old rivalries may be repurposed.

History tends to repeat itself. Sometimes faster the second time.

A New Force in the Field

This election revealed two truths at once.

Bangladesh has not yet reached democratic maturity; the mechanics of legitimacy remain fragile.

But the political landscape is no longer binary. A third force has emerged, tested, bruised, but present. Parliamentary arithmetic cannot erase millions of votes.

The winners will govern. The opposition must reorganize. The archives must be preserved.

And history, patient, unsentimental, will continue its march.

Govern well, if you can. The rest of us are watching.

Jamaat-e-Islami Provides Official Women's Charter

The Three Editorial Staff — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The full text reads as follows:

A Vision for Justice in the New Bangladesh: Women's Charter of the Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami for the 2026 National Election and Beyond

The Women's Charter of Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami affirms that gender equity, grounded in justice, human rights and moral responsibility, applies to the full range of human dignity, security and citizenship.

Founded upon the ethical teachings of Islam, the Maqasid al-Shari'ah (higher objectives of Islam to preserve life, intellect and dignity), constitutional principles and universally recognised standards of justice, women are affirmed in this charter as individuals possessing inherent legal and moral agency. Accordingly, as equal citizens within the nation, women are entitled to inherent rights, including, but not limited to:

Dignity
Safety
Education
Workforce participation
Economic independence, and
Unrestricted civic engagement

This Charter categorically forbids:

Forced and coerced marriage and any denial of a woman's right to choose her partner.
Physical, psychological and sexual abuse.
Violation of economic rights, including the right to inheritance and property ownership.
Harmful cultural practices and patriarchal interpretations to justify abuse.

It supports family life based on egalitarian principles, responsibility and compassion. It further affirms that none of its provisions may be used to deny women their rights based on custom, narrow ideological extremism or state overreach.

Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami affirms: the empowerment, happiness and success of women are not in conflict with the sanctity of religion, the strength of the family institution or the stability of society. On the contrary, the full realisation of a woman's potential is a moral necessity and a divine requirement of justice. We uphold that protecting the inherent dignity and agency of women and ensuring justice for them is not only a fundamental human right and a religious necessity, but an essential condition for the flourishing and well-being of the New Bangladesh.

Preamble

We affirm that the dignity, autonomy and security of women are central to justice, equity and national success. This Charter is founded on the following principles:

Human dignity is inherent, equal and inviolable.
Justice is a fundamental moral and civic obligation.
Social stability requires fairness, safety and the protection of individual liberties.
Women are not merely objects of charity, nor subjects of control, but equal participants in the democratic, religious, social and civic life of the nation.
Rejection of every form of exploitation, whether justified by culture, misused religion, or unregulated modern excess, is of paramount importance.

Article 1: Equal Human Dignity and Legal Equality

Women and men are equal in human dignity as creations of God and equal in citizenship before the law. The State shall guarantee:

Protection of equitable legal justice ('Adl) and the recognition of a woman's full legal capacity and competence (Ahliyyah) in all civil and criminal matters.
Access to justice without gender bias.
Equal application of laws without discrimination in accordance with fundamental human rights ensuring that they do not contravene individual's religious beliefs and laws.

Article 2: Right to Education and Knowledge

Women have the inherent right to all forms of beneficial education. The State shall work to remove obstacles, including poverty, insecurity, gender-based stereotypes and the misinterpretation of religion.

Education is recognised both as a personal right and a public investment that serves society.

Article 3: Economic Rights, Participation, and Fair Work

Women have the inherent right to independent ownership of property, including the full protection of their dower (Mahr) and inheritance (Mirath) according to their respective religious entitlements and the laws of the State. These rights are a matter of justice and financial security, which no authority or family member may infringe upon.

In exercise of these economic rights, women shall have the right to:

Engage in any lawful profession or economic activity of their choice
Independent access to financial credit and entrepreneurial resources
Receive equal pay for equal work
Safe work conditions

The State shall protect women from:

Workplace harassment
Economic injustice
Unsafe or degrading labour conditions

Recognition of Domestic Contribution: Care and domestic work, traditionally unpaid, shall be socially and formally recognised as a vital contribution to national well-being. The State shall promote policies that respect the dignity of the domestic sphere and support women in balancing their economic aspirations with their pivotal role in the family institution and larger society.

Article 4: Political and Civic Participation

Women have the right to participate in public life through:

Voting and standing for public office
Involvement in political and social organisations
Engagement in community, local and national governance

Such participation should serve the public good and uphold ethical responsibility.

Article 5: Marriage, Family and Justice

Marriage is a religious, moral and civil contract founded upon the free and informed consent of both spouses. In Islam, it is regarded as a sacred and solemn covenant (Mithaq). Within this framework:

Women have the right to enter marriage voluntarily at the legal age of maturity.
Women have the right to negotiate the terms of the marriage contract (Nikahnama) to protect their rights and protections.
Women possess the right to seek lawful dissolution of marriage where justice and their fundamental rights require.

Forced marriage and domestic abuse are categorical violations of both religious mandates and legal norms.

Article 6: Health, Safety and Protection from Abuse

Women have the right to:

Accessible and appropriate healthcare
Maternal and family health services
Protection from physical, psychological and sexual violence

The State shall pursue survivor-centred justice and rehabilitation where abuse has occurred.

Article 7: Belief, Conscience and Moral Integrity

Women have the right to hold their own beliefs, exercise their conscience and express their views as independent individuals. This includes the right to interpret their faith and identity without coercion from family, society or the state. No woman shall be oppressed through the instrumentalisation of religion.

Article 8: Social Justice and Protection of Vulnerable Women

Special protection shall be afforded to:

Widows and single mothers
Elderly women
Women with disabilities
Marginalised and minority women

State policies shall actively promote social security and inclusion for everyone, including women.

Article 9: Ethical Media and Cultural Representation

The State shall promote ethical standards that protect women from commercial objectification and exploitation, upholding the values of human decency (Haya) and respectful representation in society while upholding freedom of expression.

Freedom of expression must be exercised with social responsibility and respect for human dignity.

Article 10: Implementation and Review

This Charter shall guide legislative and policy initiatives.

The State will commit to:

Periodic review of all laws to ensure compliance with gender rights and equality
Periodic public consultation to ensure democratic participation and respect for traditional values
Evidence-informed reform
Strengthening institutions that support and protect women's rights

Concluding Declaration

Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami affirms that the dignity, security and freedom of women empower individuals in society, strengthen the family institution, and contribute to national advancement. Fear, coercion or exclusion will not help us as a nation. Rather, upholding women's rights as a matter of fundamental justice is a core prerequisite to rebuilding a justice-based new Bangladesh. Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami is willing to take on this challenge from a unique position of harmonising religious and social values with democratic and modern principles.