The ordinances concerning the Human Rights Commission, the Anti-Corruption Commission, and the prevention of enforced disappearances, are all directly aimed at protecting citizens’ rights, and maintaining the separation of powers. Rendering them ineffective is deeply disappointing from the perspective of citizens.
Strengthening healthcare services means investing in frontline workers, improving facility readiness, ensuring reliable supplies of essential medicines, and better integrating services across the continuum of care.
Bangladesh is not short of clever people or workable ideas. What we are short of is institutional willingness to treat a crisis as something other than an inconvenience to be weathered.
Albert Camus wrote that we must imagine Sisyphus happy but for those caught in Bangladesh’s cycles of performative governance, happiness is not the point. Each new deadline, each “operation,” each raid is a boulder pushed up the hill. The problem rolls back down, and we begin again.
Justice must not only be done but must be seen to be done; impartially, consistently, and without fear or favor. For ordinary citizens to trust the system, they must believe that the law protects them equally, regardless of wealth, influence, or affiliation.
The logical way forward is for the government to ensure that all large producers of perishable agricultural commodities set up daily auctions. Then government agencies can ensure fair prices by auditing the records of the auctions.
In the end, the controversy is not about a mechanism. It is about a mindset. It reveals a society that remains deeply anxious about opportunity and deeply divided in access to it.
If the UN cannot prevent wars, cannot restrain powerful states, or even name the aggressors, then the world must confront an uncomfortable question: Is the United Nations still fulfilling its founding mission?
South Africa’s experience shows that legitimacy depends on perceived impartiality and transparency from day one. For a country at the crossroads, that is an invitation worth considering.
Frustration, when it has nowhere constructive to go, seeks a target. Too often, women become that target -- online through harassment and abuse, offline through control, intimidation, or violence.
Beyond food, water and shelter, refugees make it clear that safety, dignity, and purpose are also essential to a meaningful life. But cuts under the prioritization exercise jeopardize this holistic commitment to Rohingya well-being.
We need more than purple sarees; we need greater representation of women in Parliament to steer the budget toward safety and a localized commitment to the UN Security Council’s Women, Peace and Security agenda.
If unlawful killings by police are prosecuted while unlawful killings of police are ignored, the law becomes partisan. If mob killings are investigated while state killings are diluted, the law becomes cynical.
This government came to power with a democratic mandate. But it risks squandering it. City administrations must look neutral. International crimes prosecutions must feel independent. And the central bank must signal credibility beyond politics.
When it comes to the central bank governor, optics are everything. If he is perceived to be the government's man, then no one will have the necessary faith in him, and he will fail before he even starts.
If the BNP's goal had been to signal to the Bangladeshi people that everything their adversaries say about them is true, that nothing has changed from the time they were last in office 20 years ago, that they remain exactly the same party of cronyism, corruption, and contempt for public opinion, they could not have done a better job.
