When the river swallows its own banks

THERE is a particular grief that has no name in English but lives in the bones of every Bangladeshi who has watched someone they carried on their shoulders — whose photograph hung in their tea shop, whose name their children chanted — turn around and look at them as though they are a problem to be managed. This is not the grief of defeat. Defeat you can live with. This is the grief of betrayal. And Bangladesh, since the 1970s, has been made to live with it in abundance.

No nation in the modern world was born more purely from the will of its people than Bangladesh. The Liberation War of 1971 was not merely a military campaign; it was a moral earthquake. The people of East Pakistan, humiliated, massacred, stripped of their language and political mandate, rose up and, at an almost incomprehensible cost in blood, made themselves a country.

This is where the story should have found its natural ending. Instead, it became the opening chapter of something far more painful. By 1975, Sheikh Mujib, had dissolved multiparty democracy and installed himself as sole leader under a one-party state. The same man who had been imprisoned for demanding democratic rights began imprisoning those who demanded them from him. He had confused himself with Bangladesh itself.

It was one of the saddest and most human of political errors: the liberator who could not survive liberation. BAKSAL that abolished all other political parties and established a one-party system was not born from malice but from a mixture of genuine crisis and a grandiosity that made it impossible for Mujib to imagine Bangladesh governing itself without him at the centre. The people had once been his source of power. Now they were becoming his problem. He was assassinated in August 1975, along with most of his family. The nation that had bled for democracy was delivered, within four years of independence, into the hands of generals.

The story of Bangladesh between 1975 and 1990 is the story of a country being governed by men who were themselves scared of the people, afraid of each other, afraid of the accountability that democracy requires. General Ziaur Rahman, who consolidated power through the late 1970s, was in many ways a capable administrator and far more pragmatic than his mythology suggests. But he, too, ultimately could not resist the temptation to dress authoritarian rule in democratic clothing. He held referendums and elections, but these were performances or the kind of theatre where the audience is required to applaud.

General Ershad’s nine years in power became a masterclass in managed betrayal. He held elections. He allowed political parties. He permitted a degree of press freedom. But the elections were rigged, the parties were managed, and the press was reminded regularly of its limits. What Ershad understood is that you do not need to abolish the machinery of popular will to betray it. You simply need to ensure the machinery produces only what you want. The ballot box becomes a mirror reflecting back whatever the regime requires. The people are not silenced; they are performed back to themselves as loyal subjects.

When Ershad fell in 1990, swept away by a mass movement recalling the energy of 1971, Bangladesh entered what was hopefully called its ‘democratic era.’ Power alternated between Sheikh Hasina, daughter of Mujib, and Khaleda Zia, widow of Zia. Both were genuine mass leaders. Both carried the weight of martyrdom. Both, in opposition, spoke the language of democracy with real fluency.

And yet the ‘battle of the Begums’ produced a democracy structurally unable to trust itself. The party that lost an election refused to accept the result. Strikes and hartals paralysed the country with grotesque regularity, not in pursuit of policy goals, but purely to deny the governing party the appearance of normalcy.

Here is the most insidious betrayal: when political elites, having themselves experienced the theft of democratic mandates, respond by preparing to steal mandates in return rather than building the institutions that would make such theft impossible. The wounded person becomes the wound.

History does not always need decades to complete a cycle. Sometimes it moves with breathtaking speed. The students who brought down Hasina in the summer of 2024 did so with their bodies on the line. Around 1,400 people were killed. They had come out against a job quota system that had calcified into dynastic patronage, but the uprising quickly became something larger: a repudiation of fifteen years of managed democracy, rigged elections, courts that answered to the ruling party, and a press that had learned to be afraid.

Muhammad Yunus’s interim government took charge. The July National Charter of 2025, negotiated painstakingly between more than two dozen political parties, was that promise made concrete: prime ministerial term limits, an independent judiciary, a bicameral parliament, a neutral caretaker system for elections, genuine civil liberties. Signed in October 2025 by the National Consensus Commission and 24 parties, it was built on the stated foundation of the sovereign will expressed in blood.

The BNP signed. It campaigned on implementation. Its 2026 election manifesto explicitly pledged to implement the charter. The voters, worn down by fifteen years of Awami League authoritarianism, gave the BNP something extraordinary: a two-thirds parliamentary majority. In the referendum held alongside the election, the July Charter was approved by over 60 per cent of voters. The people had spoken, not once but twice, in the same breath.

What happened next is the kind of moment that makes old men fall silent and young people clench their fists.

At the oath-taking ceremony, BNP MPs were asked to take two oaths. The first was the standard pledge to uphold the Constitution. The second bound them to respect and implement the July Charter. The BNP MPs took the first oath. They refused the second.

Let that settle. A party that had signed the charter, campaigned on it, watched the people vote for it in a national referendum and then, on the day it finally held power, declined to commit to it. Since only MPs who take both oaths are eligible to serve on the Constitution Reform Council, and since more than two-thirds of lawmakers refused the second oath, the reform architecture was effectively hollowed out on the morning it was supposed to begin.

The people had not voted for a constitutional technicality. They had voted for a promise. The distinction between the two is, precisely, the definition of political betrayal.

The students who had formed the National Citizen Party, many of them the same young men and women who had stood in front of police water cannons two years earlier, found themselves in the position that every generation of Bangladeshi reformers eventually reaches: realising that the people they helped to power regard their revolution as a useful memory rather than a living obligation. Organisations like Students Against Discrimination had already labelled the handling of the charter ‘a betrayal of the blood of July.’

The BNP’s manoeuvre reveals the oldest and most cynical calculation in the politics of betrayal: that a mandate, once delivered, belongs to the winner. That the people who gave their votes have, in doing so, exhausted their leverage. The voters go home. The parliament stays. And the parliament, it turns out, has its own ideas. The new ruling party is employing procrastination strategies under the guise of constitutional adherence, despite the Charter’s vision for comprehensive constitutional reforms.

What unites these stories is not a single villain but a pattern: the systematic conversion of popular hope into popular exhaustion. Each cycle of betrayal — the liberation that becomes a dictatorship, the dictator who plays at democracy, the democracy that becomes a family business — deposits another layer of silt on the riverbed of civic trust.

Bangladesh’s current moment is this pattern in its freshest, most nakedly visible form. Within two years of one of the most morally charged popular uprisings in the country’s post-independence history, the party that rode its energy to a two-thirds majority is already protecting the structural advantages that reform was meant to dismantle. The BNP did not need decades to perform its reversal. It needed only the distance between the ballot box and the oath-taking podium.

This is what makes it so devastating for the young people who built this moment: it happened in public, in plain sight, in full knowledge that the world was watching. The oath was there. The microphone was ready. And the BNP MPs sat down.

To tell only the story of betrayal would be its own distortion. Because the same history also contains this: the extraordinary, recurrent refusal of the people to accept their betrayal as permanent. Bangladesh’s democratic story is not a tragedy with a fixed ending. It is something more demanding, an argument that has never been settled between those who believe that power belongs to the people and those who believe, whether through ideology, family entitlement, military tradition or simple greed, that it belongs to them.   

The article appeared in the newage