The French Connection

The afternoon sun hangs heavy over Gulshan. The air vibrates with the relentless percussion of a city rebuilding itself -- the hammering of iron, the growl of concrete mixers, the metallic shrieks of cranes pivoting against the sky.

Below, Ashfaq Chowdhury Piplu walked. He had just finished lunch. He was returning to his job at a multinational company. It is a simple, universal act. A man, walking.

Then, a whistle in the air. Not a warning, just physics. An iron rod, falling from the roof of a 25-storey building under construction, found its mark. The everyday symphony of the street halted, replaced by a stunned silence. A life, extinguished in the act of walking home.

Ashfaq, a son of Chittagong, an organizer of community football tournaments, was killed not in a warzone but on a street in the capital’s most affluent district. He had a train ticket booked for that night, meant to take him to a prize-giving ceremony. He returned to his village not alive, but as a body.

This is not an accident. It is an assassination by negligence. And it begs the most terrifying of civic questions: what does it mean when the simplest human act -- walking through your own city -- becomes a lethal gamble? Could it have been me? Could it have been your child? The horror lies in its democratic randomness. It is the logic of our urban future arriving with brutal, metallic clarity.

A World We Have Already Built

To call this a mere “accident” is to be willfully blind. It is, instead, a perfect symptom. Decades ago, the writer J.G. Ballard was diagnosing our urban sickness. In his novel High-Rise, he depicted a luxurious, self-contained tower block where residents, freed from the norms of the outside world, descend into violent tribal chaos. The building itself becomes an active agent, a “huge machine” that caters to individual isolation and unleashes repressed psychopathies.

Look at the site of Ashfaq’s death. Is it not a “denatured ecosystem”? A sealed zone of production, where the human calculus is reduced to progress and profit, utterly divorced from the vibrant human life flowing at its base.

Ballard’s fiction explores the “social and psychological entropy” generated by modern urban landscapes. On that Thursday afternoon, this was no metaphor. The city’s body -- its exposed steel skeleton -- violently merged with Ashfaq’s, making a grotesque mockery of the idea that we are separate from the worlds we build.

We have summoned this dystopia into being. The falling rod is not a plot point from High-Rise; it is our daily news. Ashfaq’s death reveals that our cities are no longer planned habitats for living; they have become engines of “exchange-value,” where the only thing that matters is the financial worth of the next square foot of air.

The Calculus of the Expendable Citizen

This brings us to the heart of the matter: A brutal political calculus. The philosopher Achille Mbembe theorizes necropolitics -- the power to decide who may live and who may die, and the social structures that expose certain populations to death. This is not the dramatic power of a sovereign with a sword; it is the mundane, bureaucratic power of a system that prioritizes.

It is the power evident when a major developer’s chairman and managing director are named in a negligence case, yet the company denies responsibility. It is the power embedded in a system where, according to a 2025 safety report, workplace deaths jumped to at least 1,190 in a single year, with more than eight out of ten reported accidents ending in death. When accidents are not exceptions but statistically inevitable outcomes, we have entered a necropolitical reality.

The randomness of Ashfaq’s death is its most political feature. He was not targeted. He was just there. In this calculus, anyone can be sacrificed at the altar of progress, which ultimately means no one’s life is sacred. The public footpath, the very space of civic life, is transformed into what Mbembe might call a “death-world” -- a zone where the citizen is reduced to a bystander in the path of falling debris.

The City of Exchange vs. The City of Life

This is the core fracture. Our urban model privileges exchange-value -- the price of a condo, the return on a developer’s investment -- over use-value. The use-value of a city is its utility for living: Safe passage, clean air, peaceful sidewalks, the simple assurance that you will return home unharmed.

The iron rod that killed Ashfaq was a component of the City of Exchange. Its purpose was to help complete another floor, another unit, another digit in a ledger. In this city, speed is king, safety nets are cost centers, and the pedestrian below is an externality -- a statistical risk, not a human life.

Ashfaq himself was a citizen of the City of Life. He was using the street for its most fundamental purpose: to connect two points of his existence. He was embedded in a network of care -- a job, a family, a community. His value was social, human, irreplaceable.

The criminal case filed after his death uses the correct legal term: “death by negligence” under Section 304A of the Penal Code. But this is systemic negligence. Bangladesh has a dense framework of construction laws, including the Bangladesh National Building Code 2020. The violence occurs in the gap between the law on the books and the law on the street, in the hollow space where enforcement should be.

Reclaiming the Right to the City

So, what would a city built for Ashfaq look like? It begins with reclaiming our right to the city -- not the right to just inhabit space, but to shape it, to demand it serves life first.

We need more than technical fixes. We need a political and moral reckoning that closes the gap between legislation and reality. We need transparent and terrifying deterrence: Developer safety records must be public, visible dashboards.

Fines for violations must be catastrophic to profit, not a manageable business expense. Liability must pierce the corporate veil, reaching those who sign the cheques.

We need militant urban citizenship: communities must have the legal standing and power to audit, report, and halt visibly dangerous sites. Public space must be defended by the public.

Finally, we must re-zone our imagination. Urban planning must mandate inviolable, protected perimeters for pedestrians. The “footpath” must be resurrected as a sacred, safe corridor for human life, not an afterthought or a parking annex.

Ashfaq Chowdhury Piplu’s death is a question thrown at our feet by the city we are building. The falling rod asks: What do you value more? The abstract future value of a building, or the concrete, present life of a person walking?

We answer that question every day through our silence, our acceptance, our hurry. Or we can answer it by finally seeing the street not as a conduit for commerce, but as a commons. By seeing the pedestrian not as an obstacle, but as the sovereign reason the city should exist at all. The city for living is waiting to be built. But first, we must stop building the one that kills.

There is a vital distinction between dissent and destruction. What Pinaki Bhattacharya practices is not principled criticism but a lucrative politics of distortion, one that feeds on contradiction, rewards instability, and erodes public trust.

In the cesspool of Bangladeshi political commentary, few figures embody hypocrisy and self-serving opportunism quite like Pinaki Bhattacharya.

In a recent YouTube outburst of rambling vitriol, Bhattacharya twisted Tarique Rahman’s homecoming, a moment of potential national reconciliation, into a conspiracy-laden screed that undermines Bangladesh’s stability.

At the heart of Bhattacharya’s outrage is Tarique Rahman’s repeated emphasis on building a “safe Bangladesh,” a vision in which citizens can leave home and return without fear, and where peace prevails over chaos.

Rahman invoked this as a mother’s dream: a nation free from the violence that has marked Bangladesh’s fifty-four years of existence and claimed hundreds of thousands of innocent lives. The call for safety is not sinister. It is the foundational requirement for justice. Courts cannot function, institutions cannot reform, and citizens cannot live with dignity in a climate of perpetual fear.

Yet Bhattacharya twists this basic necessity into a dark conspiracy, portraying a mother’s hope for safety as a covert plan to restore the old regime. This is not analysis. It is deliberate provocation.

It is not merely a video critique but a comparative autopsy of Bhattacharya’s career: A man who flips allegiances with alarming ease while positioning himself as the nation’s moral arbiter. 

Logic demands that his current rants be measured against his past reversals, revealing a pattern that is not just inconsistent but actively harmful to Bangladesh’s peace and prosperity.

The logical sequence is simple: peace enables reform, and reform enables accountability. Bhattacharya rejects this logic, instead stoking division and implying that prioritizing safety is equivalent to complicity with fascism.

Stability does not cancel accountability; it makes it possible. His argument collapses under its own weight because without order, justice devolves into mob vengeance and the state becomes spectacle.

By framing safety as surrender, he promotes a condition of perpetual crisis, a vacuum in which only demagogues and outrage-driven content creators thrive.

This is not an isolated lapse of judgment. It is the latest entry in Bhattacharya’s long record of hypocrisy.

In the 2010s, he was a vocal supporter of Sheikh Hasina’s government and an advocate of the Gonojagoron Moncho movement in 2013, which began as a call for justice against war criminals but later became a tool of Awami League suppression.

When political winds shifted, Bhattacharya reinvented himself as a dissident without ever reckoning with his past. His principles did not evolve; his incentives did.

This transformation coincided with mounting media scrutiny of the Popular Pharmaceuticals scandal, in which the company employing Bhattacharya was implicated by local authorities and later confirmed by the World Health Organization in producing counterfeit medicines.

Other incidents included contaminated injection ampoules and the distribution of unauthorized drugs with no marked price, a clear violation of Bangladeshi law. Major outlets such as The Daily Star and Prothom Alo raised serious questions about quality control failures and accountability.

Coincidentally, perhaps, it was then that Bhattacharya fled Bangladesh in 2019, reportedly crossing into India with assistance from Chatra Shibir, by his own admission. Compare this to his present persona as a self-styled justice crusader condemning fugitives.

He embodies the very evasion he denounces. His departure was not a lawful exit but an alleged clandestine escape, transforming him from a pharmaceutical executive into an exiled pundit. This hypocrisy is not merely personal; it damages Bangladesh by normalizing elite impunity and undermining trust in public health institutions.

The July 2024 uprising marked another peak in Bhattacharya’s opportunism. Initially, he dismissed the student-led protests as yet another manufactured Shahbag narrative, claiming they were orchestrated distractions. In early July videos, he mocked the movement as inauthentic and predicted its collapse under regime control.

Then, when the uprising reached a point of no return, Bhattacharya reversed course. He rebranded himself as a champion of the revolution, flooding his platform with content portraying it as a people’s victory and casting himself as its intellectual architect.

His claims of close coordination with opposition parties such as the BNP and Jamaat during his self-imposed exile, followed by insinuations of privileged access to the interim government led by Dr. Muhammad Yunus, are less about insight and more about inflating relevance.

He manufactures outrage, spins conspiracy narratives, and lies for engagement. His channel thrives on provocation, not truth. This is neither activism nor journalism. It is grift.

Bhattacharya’s worldview is actively harmful to Bangladesh’s national interests. He treats reconciliation as betrayal and stability as moral failure, amplifying fringe narratives while dismissing democratic processes, all while monetizing outrage. He elevates symbols such as Jamaat’s “dari palla” as revolutionary salvation, despite his own opportunistic ties to the very networks he selectively condemns.

In short, Pinaki Bhattacharya is not a commentator but a charlatan. His record includes praising and then denouncing Sheikh Hasina, fleeing major scandals through India, dismissing and later embracing popular uprisings, and attacking the very idea of a “safe Bangladesh” as a conspiracy.

These contradictions serve only his ego and advertising revenue. His assault on the concept of safety as a Hasina revival is logically bankrupt and dangerously destabilizing.

Bangladesh deserves better: leaders who build, not bloggers who burn. The most telling response to Bhattacharya’s performance has already come from those in power through institutional indifference. Neither the interim authorities nor the security establishment has engaged him, despite his repeated hints at insider influence. Their silence is not hostility. It is judgment.

Our future cannot be entrusted to outrage merchants on YouTube. It must rest with leaders and citizens who understand that justice is built through patience, responsibility, and steady labor, not performed for clicks and applause.