New Delhi, Aug. 18 -- Bangladesh did not transform itself. The transformation had an author.

In 2009, when Sheikh Hasina returned to power following the Bangladesh Nationalist Party's ignominious exit and a transitional military interregnum, the country she inherited registered a gross domestic product of approximately eighty-nine billion dollars, an electricity grid that reached fewer than half its 160 million citizens, and a maternal mortality rate that had spent three decades on a declining trajectory requiring sustained governmental investment to continue. By the time security forces compelled her departure in August 2024 - an event clothed in the language of popular uprising but executed with the institutional coordination that only...