What India did for us is real. What India has done to us, and what it has told itself to justify that, is the projection.
The question is whether Bangladesh has the courage to apply the same scrutiny to every class of collaborators past and present, left and right, secular and religious and to build a republic where proximity to power is no longer the country's most valuable currency.
It begins, as so many things in modern Iran begin, with a woman and a song
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.