Osman Hadi’s murder has sent Bangladesh reeling at a time when the country is trying to balance precariously on a knife-edge between transition and turbulence. Young, unconnected, uncorrupted: these were his virtues and his vulnerabilities. Hadi was a politician who wasn’t really a politician, in the Bangladeshi sense. He had no dynastic surname, he ran no inherited machine, he did not flash around wealth. His potential was in the very lack of these. He talked the language of representation minus money, of politics without the enrichment and intimidation, of public service devoid of the arrogance that office has too often come to entail in Bangladesh. It was a promise, not grandiose in material terms but subversive in implication. It is that promise that made him visible. And it may have made him vulnerable.

Hadi’s thesis was disarmingly simple. Bangladeshi politics, he argued, had been appropriated by a self-reproducing class for which elections were an investment and office the return. In that calculus, winning became everything, accountability an afterthought. He wanted to puncture that logic by demonstrating that power could be contested without capital and that people could be mobilized without patronage. In a country where political office has become for many a shortcut to instant wealth, that was an idea approaching heresy. Hadi was not promising miracles. He was proffering an example. And examples, more than slogans, unsettle vested interests.

Bangladesh’s political history is strewn with leaders who have thundered against graft and eventually fallen to it. Hadi had not yet reached that point. He was still developing, still learning, still exposed. That incompleteness made him vulnerable to both the cynicism of the hardened and the aggression of the inexperienced. He was neither a hardened tactician nor a reckless agitator. In today’s Bangladesh, he was a political innocent with a clear moral compass and few shields.

His murder, therefore, cannot be disentangled from the general political climate. Bangladesh is only just emerging from a phase of hyper-polarization, institutional collapse, and widespread disillusionment. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of leaders of the deposed Awami League have been fleeing the country in the wake of Sheikh Hasina’s fall, many of them taking shelter in India. This is not speculation but a fact of public record. Nor is it controversial to suggest that India has wielded outsized influence over Bangladesh in the past, at times brazenly, at times covertly, often decisively. What is disputed, and should be disputed, is how that influence is being exercised today and to what end.

In this overheated context, talk began to emerge, including border-violation talk in Bangladesh, about pledges of funding and organizational support being made across the border to rebuild Awami League networks inside the country. Rumors and political chatter spoke of assurances of thousands of crores of funds intended to reorganize cadres, re-mobilize loyalists, and, if necessary, stoke trouble against the interim order. Whether this is entirely accurate or only partially exaggerated cannot be conclusively proven. What is undeniable, however, is the sense of posture: a sense among certain Bangladesh-based elites that time, pressure, and even anarchy might yet reverse the verdict against them.

Hadi inconveniently occupied space in the middle of this contest. He had not joined the old Awami League structure, and he was not of the traditional opposition’s patronage culture. He spoke openly and forcefully of foreign interference, in particular Indian overreach, at a time of rising nationalist sentiment and widespread suspicion of external manipulation. That stance, while endearing him to some, also made him a target. In Bangladesh, to speak against domestic power is imprudent; to speak against external power is often suicidal.

The failure to provide him sufficient protection is one of the most egregious aspects of this atrocity. Hadi had reportedly been receiving repeated threats. In a country where political violence is old and familiar, such warnings should have led to preventive action. The interim government’s failure or refusal to protect an individual who had warned of an imminent threat to his life raises serious questions. Was it incompetence? Was it underestimation? Or was it a judgment that Hadi, lacking formal status, did not warrant the deployment of resources that other, better-connected individuals would? Whatever the cause, the outcome was the same: a preventable death.

The identity of those who physically executed the operation will, one assumes, be revealed in due course. The more pressing question, however, is not only who fired the bullets but who thrived in the environment that made the shooting possible. Hadi’s death removed an ascendant voice that was a threat both to domestic vested interests and foreign backers. It also sent a signal to others who might have followed in his footsteps: idealism is futile, independence exacts a price. And finally, it introduced an element of fear and instability into a political transition that needs calm and credibility.

Narratives that wish to make Hadi’s murder part of a grand conspiracy between foreign intelligence services, armed Bangladeshis in exile, and a cynical strategy to internationalize Bangladesh as an extremist hotbed are finding their way to the fore with speed and ferocity. History gives these fears a veneer of plausibility. Bangladesh has been internationally stigmatized in the past through selective narrativization that highlighted militancy at the expense of social resilience and democratic aspirations. Framing Bangladesh as a home for “Islamic extremism” has been a handy leitmotif used by different international actors to legitimate pressure, intervention, and political engineering. To assume that such approaches have disappeared from foreign policy toolboxes would be naïve indeed.

But caution is necessary, too. Not all crimes are the products of a mastermind; not all tragedies are an affirmation of the most sensationalist theory. Conspiracies thrive where institutions collapse, and transparency is absent. The danger is to allow speculation to substitute for investigation and outrage to short-circuit accountability. Bangladesh has long been plagued by the politics of rumor, where truth is collateral damage in factional warfare.

Nonetheless, to willfully overlook the broader context would be irresponsible. Hadi was not killed in a vacuum. He was killed in a country where politics has been militarized, where money has determined access to power, where exile has become a political default, and where external actors have never been neutral spectators. The coming together of these variables created the conditions in which a young, unprotected reformer could be gunned down with relative ease.

Who benefits from this tragedy? Not the people Hadi wanted to serve. Not the interim government, whose own credibility has been sapped by its inability to protect a threatened citizen. Not Bangladesh’s international reputation, which is damaged every time political violence erupts. The beneficiaries are the cynics who argue that change is impossible, the extremists who prosper in chaos, the power brokers, domestic and foreign, who favor a cowed, fractured polity over an assertive, reformist one.

Hadi is gone. His political journey has ended before it really began. But the idea he represented: that politics can be wrested away from the talons of money, fear, and foreign dependency, has not perished with him. If anything, it has acquired a moral valence rare for living politicians. The question now is whether Bangladesh will honor that idea or entomb it with Hadi.

The way forward demands sobriety, not hysteria. An impartial, credible investigation into Hadi’s murder is the minimum requirement if public trust is to be restored. Protection of political players, particularly those not in entrenched power structures, must be a priority if elections are to have any meaning. The interim government must demonstrate, through action, that neutrality does not mean passivity, and that reformist voices will not be left exposed.

Equally important is the refusal to outsource Bangladesh’s political narrative to foreign capitals and international media frames. The country has to confront extremism, corruption, and violence on its own terms without allowing these issues to be instrumentalized by others. Finally, those who admired Hadi must channel grief into organization, discipline, and patience. Martyrdom by itself is not enough to change systems; civic engagement is.

Hadi wanted to show that one could enter politics without money and leave it without blood. Bangladesh now owes it to his memory to ensure that his death does not become another casualty of a long roll call of wasted promise.