What Bangladesh lacks is not culture, talent, or stories -- but the vision and infrastructure to translate them into sustained soft power
The authoritarian habits cultivated over a decade and a half did not disappear with the fall of a government; they seeped into the public bloodstream. When state violence takes a step back, social violence often steps forward.
The moment you raise your voice, people come rushing -- not to listen, but to remind you of your past silences. It doesn’t matter if the incident they cite happened months ago, years ago, or even decades ago.
As we move forward to build a new Bangladesh, we need to put minority protection and minority rights front and centre, not because of inflammatory accusations from across the border from those who frankly need to do better protecting the rights of their own minorities, but because it is the right thing to do.
Bangladesh faces simultaneous pressure from the IMF program and revenue reforms. Currently, effective PFM reform is not just a development strategy -- it is essential for economic stability.
That is the real horror. If one clearly innocent doctor required thirteen layers of influence to secure bail, how many other innocent people are still inside -- unseen, unheard, and unrescued?
The tragedy of Osman Hadi’s death should have been a moment for empathy and restraint. Instead, it is becoming a catalyst for deeper division. If India continues to allow its media and political discourse to inflame rather than inform, it risks locking the relationship with Bangladesh into a cycle of hostility that will endure far beyond the current crisis.
It is no longer an abstract fight over who controls the political clock. It is a concrete, urgent battle for the very foundations of public order, institutional integrity, and rational discourse.
When leaders fail to rise above personal impulses, nations suffer in ways that cannot be easily repaired. Economies falter, social bonds weaken, and the future becomes a battleground of unresolved grievances. History offers no shortage of warnings.
The timing could not be more appropriate. With election dates announced, the country has slipped into a familiar trance. What is striking is not what is being said, but what is being omitted. There is almost no sustained conversation about how Bangladesh will pay its bills, grow its industries, or persuade its own citizens to invest in their own country again.
Every Muslim knows the phrase Ar-Rahman Ar-Rahim -- the most Beneficent, the most Compassionate. Can we reorient our moral compass towards the politics of responsibility and compassion?
Hadi wanted elections. He believed in the electoral process. He believed in democracy. He was running for election in Dhaka-8. He believed in the slow, painstaking process of building a new Bangladesh and knew there could be no short-cuts.
One did not have to agree with everything that Hadi said to admire him and to believe that he would play an important role in building Bangladesh 2.0. The best way to honor his memory is to help realize his dream of a new Bangladesh.
We cannot build the Bangladesh we envision -- democratic, just, climate-resilient -- while accepting manufactured water scarcity as inevitable. The rivers that created Bengal sustain us still -- but only if we fight to reclaim them.
What happened in those few violent hours at Savar was not an isolated event; it was a revelation -- a rupture that exposed the bones of a much larger story, one about the decay of our collective empathy and the silence of power meant to safeguard our people and our institutions.
Our Liberation War was basically about human rights and dignity. It was a call to refuse to be oppressed, to fight on behalf of the right of self-government, and to struggle in support of the values that unite us as a people: freedom, justice and equality. We must take pride in this history on Victory Day, as it represents not only a past victory but also a promise for the future.
