As the new representatives go about setting up a government (which, the way the cumbersome Nepali system is structured, might be two weeks away in mid-March), it is now time for reflections, analyses and speculation.
The purpose of this article is not to belittle BNP’s victory in the 2026 election. The purpose is to peel the layers of statistics to get to the ground truth and what we can infer from them with reasonable confidence.
The central question is no longer whether knowledge matters. It is who governs its movement, who benefits from its creation, and whether emerging economies will remain sites of extraction in a global knowledge marketplace or become sovereign producers within it.
Bangladesh’s higher education story is often told as one of expansion and access. It is time to tell the other half of the story, the one about relevance, rigor and responsibility. Degrees alone do not build nations. Skills do.
If states tighten control over digital spaces to prevent manipulation, how do democracies function? How do we distinguish between organic, bottom-up people’s movements and those that are partially orchestrated or externally influenced?
What does this Western-originated term truly reveal, and what profound realities does it obscure about the young people of the Global South?
