An Angry Young Country

Bangladesh’s political debate is finally conceding that the old maps no longer work. The familiar binaries secular versus Islamist, Awami League versus BNP, 1971 versus 2024, etc still dominate rhetoric, but they no longer organize political life in a decisive way.

Recent analyses have rightly pointed to new fault lines: Competing nationalisms, cultural identity wars, and rival visions of governance and reconstruction. These frameworks are useful.

But they remain incomplete, because they focus on what elites argue about, not on why large numbers of people are increasingly angry, volatile, and receptive to polarizing narratives.

The missing link is this: A system that is no longer delivering for an aspiring population, combined with rising inequality, has made identity politics easier, cheaper, faster, and more emotionally satisfying to spread, especially through social media.

When Aspiration Meets Friction

Bangladesh is not a stagnant society. It is an aspiring one.

Over the past three decades, a women-led economic and social transformation has quietly reshaped households, labour markets, and expectations. Girls outperform boys in education. Women drive micro-enterprise, manage remittances, stabilize families, and absorb shocks.

Alongside them has emerged a broad class of aspiring citizens -- small entrepreneurs, service providers, freelancers, migrant-linked households who want predictable rules, dignity, and upward mobility.

But aspiration has begun to collide with blockage.

Inequality has risen sharply. Wealth and income have concentrated at the top, while wages, job quality, and mobility for the many have lagged. Growth continues, but its distribution increasingly feels unfair and inaccessible. The promise of “work hard and move up” is weakening.

This gap between effort and reward is politically explosive.

The Gini Effect

When inequality reaches a certain level, it stops being an abstract statistic and becomes a lived experience of humiliation and exclusion. People do not need to read economic reports to know that the system is skewed; they see it in consumption patterns, elite impunity, and the distance between rules on paper and reality on the ground.

In such conditions, economic explanations feel complex, slow, and technocratic. Identity explanations are immediate, moral, and emotionally legible. They offer something powerful: a reason for frustration that does not require structural analysis.

This is where identity politics finds fertile ground; not because people suddenly become ideological, but because inequality strips patience from aspiration.

Social Media as Accelerant

Social media changes the political equation in two crucial ways.

First, it collapses complexity. Structural inequality, tax policy, labour markets, or institutional decay do not travel well in short-form content. Cultural grievance, outrage, and symbolic offence do.

Second, it rewards emotion over accuracy. Anger spreads faster than explanation. Humiliation spreads faster than data. Moral certainty spreads faster than nuance.

When a large, young, connected population feels blocked and unheard, social media becomes a perfect delivery system for identity politics. It allows anger to be named, targeted, and amplified, often without organization, leadership, or accountability.

The Age of Anger

This dynamic is not unique to Bangladesh. It fits squarely within the pattern described by Pankaj Mishra in The Age of Anger: Societies where modernization raises expectations faster than institutions can deliver, producing resentment rather than contentment.

In Mishra’s account, anger does not emerge from poverty alone, but from unfulfilled promise; from watching others succeed in systems that appear closed, captured, or rigged. That anger seeks meaning, dignity, and recognition. When economic systems fail to provide those, politics supplies substitutes.

Bangladesh today increasingly resembles this condition: Young, ambitious, connected, and frustrated. Identity politics offers a sense of belonging and moral clarity when economic mobility feels uncertain and slow.

Why Nationalism and Culture Dominate Conversation

Seen this way, the resurgence of competing nationalisms and culture wars is not the root problem, it is the symptom.

Identity politics becomes dominant when:

• Economic grievances are real but hard to articulate
• Institutions lack credibility
• Redistribution feels implausible, and
• Elites appear insulated from consequence.

Culture then becomes the arena where anger can be expressed without confronting structural power directly. It is safer to fight over symbols than over systems.

The Real Fault Line

Bangladesh today is shaped by four overlapping forces:

1. Competing nationalisms seeking moral ownership of the state

2. Cultural conflicts over identity and belonging

3. Elite disagreements over governance and reform

4. A blocked politics of aspiration operating under rising inequality

The deepest fault line is not between secular and religious, or even between rival nationalisms. It is between a society that aspires and a system that no longer feels responsive.

If this gap persists, identity politics will remain easier to mobilize than economic reform especially in a digital eco-system built to reward outrage.

The Risk Ahead

If this imbalance continues, three dangers loom.

First, anger will deepen, becoming more nihilistic and less tied to achievable reform.

Second, identity narratives will harden, crowding out pragmatic politics altogether.

Third, the women-led economic transformation and aspiring classes that sustain the economy will remain politically under-represented and socially scapegoated. Bangladesh’s challenge is not simply to manage nationalism or culture. It is to reconnect aspiration with credible pathways of mobility and dignity.

Until that happens, identity politics will continue to thrive, not because it is true, but because it is emotionally efficient in an unequal, angry, and digitally amplified society.

The real political test is whether Bangladesh can restore faith that effort matters again before anger becomes the only language left.

Asif Saleh is a Bangladeshi development professional and the current Executive Director of BRAC, Bangladesh.