The July Charter is quite clear: The proposed Upper Chamber will not have the power to block legislation, and the question of leading to a hung parliament does not even arise.
The real victory of any revolution lies not in the fall of an old regime but in the birth of a culture that resists repeating its mistakes. Bangladesh’s revolution will have meaning only if it leads to a politics that listens, includes, and endures.
The time is long over due to drop the fixation on inefficient net zero targets and double down on adaptation to drive green energy breakthroughs
November 1975 was one of those months when, to paraphrase Lenin, decades happen. Fifty years on from that month of coup and counter-coup, we can hope that the guns have been forever silenced in Bangladesh, and that we will never again see rule from the cantonment.
We stand today at a critical juncture. The authoritarian state has collapsed, but the authoritarian mind endures. The struggle for democracy, therefore, is no longer against a regime -- it is against ourselves.
If you attend these festivals, you owe it to yourself and to Dhaka to also step outside the gates. Don't be someone who celebrates local and artisanal only when it's packaged with a price tag and a velvet rope. Don't be someone who feels cultured because you paid for the privilege.
Bangladesh’s politics stands today at a critical crossroads. If a new political force grounded in liberal values does not emerge, the state will inevitably drift further into extremism, fanaticism, and division.
Until democracy regains its moral soul -- until citizens can question without fear and leaders can lose power without vengeance -- it will remain a performance, not a principle. And if this performance continues, one morning we will awaken to discover that democracy has quietly turned into its opposite.
As we chart our future as an innovating nation, we must ask ourselves: Will we continue to be a nation that tolerates and even encourages heresy, heterodoxy and esoterism, or will we ignore the lessons of history and become a closed society, one that is hostile to new ideas?
Call the vote. Step down from the balcony. And let an elected government answer, at last, to the only sovereign that matters. The antidote to our present malaise is not another announcement. It is an election.
While no model for increasing women's political representation is perfect, the crux of the matter is that the political desire for a workable solution is what is absent. This is what must change if women are to experience the fruits of Bangladesh 2.0.
Tonight, Mamdani’s victory isn’t just his. It belongs to every person ever told you’re too different, too foreign, too inconvenient to lead. It belongs to those who were silenced, sidelined, written out of the script by those who claim to define “electability.”
The conventional view of politics is an old-fashioned journey
The choice lies with us -- the collective will of the people across all sections of society. The coming months, leading up to the election, will determine which road Bangladesh takes.
A nation’s worth is not measured in kilometers of rail, but in how it values those who walk beneath them. When a government can proudly announce five lakh taka for a death it caused, it tells us not how poor the country is, but how impoverished its conscience has become.
