Turning water into a nationalist symbol may mobilize sentiment, but it has never produced water -- and it has often delayed the reordering of ties that scarcity now makes unavoidable.
Whether it is a party that markets itself as the sole heir of 1971, or a hardline movement that once mocked that struggle and now sanitizes its record, the exploitation is the same. Both seek to convert freedom into political capital. Both demand that citizens forget what they saw and felt. Both ask us to trade memory for myth.
Is tinkering with the formal rules of the game the triumph of hope over experience (this time politics will be different)? Or a more technocratic faith in the power of institutional architecture to push back against the potent political imperatives of rents and control (we can design our way to democracy)? Either way, fixing the rules seems a misplaced focus when history has shown that the amassing of political power rapidly renders such niceties ornamental.
India has not merely provoked a cyclical wave of anti-India sentiment; it has actively contributed to giving it a permanent, structural form. The alienation is no longer just about borders -- it is about sovereignty.
I’m not against using AI, I never was. I just want you to use it cautiously. Because the more you are replacing AI with your own mind, the more it will take space in your soul. If we keep asking AI solutions for every simple problem, our mind will become too fragile to face challenges.
The question for a republic is whether it can learn to look away from the dazzling, authoritarian image long enough to see -- and rebuild -- the dull, demanding, and essential foundations of a reality-based politics.
Rumour is part of politics and society but now it can be magnified and curated at speed in the age of the (un)smart phone. Compared to the digital control of the previous regime what we have now is the information bomb.
Given how rapidly an emerging narrative hardens in current discourse, we must start our critical evaluations of Hadi’s legacy as soon as possible: Hadi’s image must be snatched away from those who want to worship him.
The decision for Bangladesh is simply this: Either we recognize what is happening to our degree of liberty now, or we will soon read about it in the pages of history books as if it is a novel about something that was simply unavoidable.
Bangladesh’s current urban planning, development, and management systems are so fragmented, multi- layered, and institutionally weak that administrative restructuring alone will not be sufficient at the moment.
Concern about minority safety in Bangladesh is not illegitimate. But when that concern is amplified selectively, weaponized by domestic political actors, and accompanied by conspicuous silence on India’s own minority challenges, it acquires the flavour of moral exhibitionism.
The crown cat becomes a single blood cell in the circulatory system of the algorithmic beast. Nusrat doesn’t remember the cat meme today. Not consciously.
The country is no longer simply divided by class and by geography. It is now divided into four different kinds of society defined by education, language, migration, and access to power: expatriates, English-medium graduates, Bangla-medium graduates, and Madrasa-educated students.
Now, at any moment, a mob can be summoned and the state paralyzed. The potential that emerged after Hasina’s fall is now impossible. This country will become a playground for fallen Indians and Chinese.
In the past decade, a number of books have appeared on Bangladesh’s Liberation War. This essay covers three volumes focusing on the war from within the lens of conflict studies and great game manuevering -- by Gary J Bass, Srinath Raghavan, and Salil Tripathi.
