New Delhi, May 5 -- Bangladeshis did not risk their lives in 2024 because they believed one old party would automatically become morally superior to another. They resisted because life under the previous regime had become politically suffocating. The July uprising, thus, was not simply an anti-Awami League event. It was a rebellion against fear, humiliation, impunity, and the everyday feeling that citizens had become subjects.

That is why the present moment feels so painful. The Bangladesh Nationalist Party returned to power after the February 2026 election, with Tarique Rahman sworn in as prime minister after the BNP's landslide victory. The election was widely understood as the first major political opening after Sheikh Hasina's fall, ...