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.
How revolutionary aspiration transformed into an elite settlement
The Bhola cyclone is primarily described as a natural disaster. That is not wrong, but the description is incomplete. It was also a political event. It helped turn anger into a project, and a project into a nation.
This is the quiet evolution of empire -- from military enforcement to financial automation. The dollar isn’t dying, at least not anytime soon. It’s being privatized.
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
The truth is: the only path by which Islamists can succeed is exactly the path the League had chased them down. But will it be enough now that the League is history? Only time and the wisdom -- or lack thereof -- of the other political parties will tell.
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.
A deep dive into the July Charter, referendum debates, and NCP’s roadmap for the coming national election.
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.
It is all very well to chart out a pathway to reform, but it is in the implementation that the wheels hit the road, and it is here that the process lacks clarity and cohesion.
