Two sharply different but deeply connected pieces published in late December capture Bangladesh at a moment of profound reckoning, where unresolved political legacies collide with renewed violence on the streets.
In a searing piece written in the aftermath of Bangladesh’s 18 December violence, Bangladeshi writer and political commentator Nafis Hasan asks a question many in the country are now confronting with dread: What remains of the July revolution’s promise that politics would no longer be written in blood?
Hasan’s piece, ‘Three Murders and a Truth,’ published by Jamhoor.org on 22 December, traces how the hopes raised by last year’s mass uprising against Sheikh Hasina’s regime have given way to a grim resurgence of mob violence, political assassinations, and communal vigilantism.
At its core lie three deaths that, taken together, reveal the breadth of Bangladesh’s current crisis.
Hasan traces three deaths that together map the breadth of the crisis: the assassination of Osman Hadi, a rising political figure and former July uprising coordinator; the lynching and burning of Dipu Chandra Das, a Hindu garment worker falsely accused of blasphemy; and the killing of Ayesha Akhtar, a seven-year-old girl burned to death when a mob torched her family home. Known for his fierce anti-India rhetoric framed in the language of sovereignty and cultural resistance, Hadi’s murder triggered violent reprisals that targeted secular and liberal institutions, including cultural organisations and media houses long vilified by Islamist and majoritarian forces.
Published in the aftermath of nationwide arson and mob attacks, Hasan’s piece situates these killings within Bangladesh’s long history of majoritarian violence, drawing disturbing parallels between Islamist vigilantism and fascist tactics seen elsewhere in Southasia. The article is significant for how it exposes the interim government’s moral and administrative paralysis, and how revolutionary rhetoric has failed to protect minorities, workers, and children when it matters most.
That collapse of promise sits uneasily alongside a longer political arc explored in Bharat Bhushan’s obituary and analysis of Begum Khaleda Zia, published by The Quint on 30 December. Bhushan, an independent journalist based in Delhi, reflects on Khaleda Zia’s paradoxical legacy as Bangladesh’s first female prime minister: an institutional architect of parliamentary democracy whose ideological compromises, particularly her alliance with Jamaat-e-Islami, deepened political polarisation and left enduring scars on democratic culture.
Read together, the two pieces illuminate a troubling continuity. The institutional gains Khaleda Zia helped secure coexist with structural failures that have normalised violence, impunity, and binary politics. Hasan’s account shows how those failures now manifest in their most brutal form, long after the slogans of reform and revolution have faded.
These articles matter because they offer critical background for understanding why regime change and mass uprisings across Southasia so often fail to dismantle the deeper architectures of violence. Bangladesh’s present crisis is not an aberration but a warning, one with regional resonance, about what happens when democratic transitions leave power, accountability, and minority protections fundamentally untouched.
Pragyan Srivastava / Sapan News
Lead Image: Created by Pragyan Srivastava
Note on Southasia as one word: Like Himal Southasian, we use ‘Southasia’ as one word, “seeking to restore some of the historical unity of our common living space, without wishing any violence on the existing nation states”.
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