What Jamaat's 68 seats do is give the party institutional leverage to shape the answers to questions that matter far more than whether Bangladesh wakes up tomorrow under a theocracy.
You have to heal those it hurt, reassure those who hurt on its behalf, and do all of this under the watchful eye of a public that has very little forgiveness left in the tank. You are blamed for problems you inherited and applauded cautiously for small, unsexy fixes that don’t photograph well.
In the end, that is what happened to NCP. It let itself be persuaded that the bravest thing a youth party can do in its founding election is to make itself small.
One institution will carry three kinds of weight at once: The grief of a country that has buried its young; the fragile hope that it can still build rules stronger than instinct; and the scrutiny of a world deciding what kind of Bangladesh it must now learn to live with.