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In an exclusive interview with Counterpoint, Sam Dalrymple talks about his book Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia. He reflects on forgotten geographies and the near-misses of the past, and how hastily drawn borders still unsettle lives, loyalties and conflicts across South Asia and beyond.
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.
He will be judged relentlessly -- by the standards set by his parents, both as leaders and as human beings. This is not merely the end of a prolonged absence abroad; it marks the closure of a painful chapter shaped more by political banishment than personal choice.
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.
Debate is one thing. Disinformation is quite another. Let us have an open, honest, nuanced conversation about the Liberation War, but let us always be guided by the truth.
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.
Freedom is not a reward for being good, nor is it something we can give exclusive rights to one group of people to first.
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.
I look at a black and white photo of our maternal grandmothers from the 60s, and wonder if they ever imagined their descendants would get together like this in the New World. We are continuing the journey of immigration, something that started thousands of years back for humankind.
