Political change is not new to Bangladesh. Protests, mass movements, and struggles for rights have long been part of the country’s democratic journey. What is new—and deeply alarming—is the method by which democratic authority is now being undermined. Instead of overt military coups or visible seizures of power, Bangladesh is witnessing a meticulously engineered process that seeks to render elected governments ineffective through law, institutions, and narrative control. This is not disruption; it is precision. Recent events have exposed the gravity of this transformation. Following the death of a political activist abroad, protests erupted in Dhaka, quickly escalating into attacks on major media
institutions. The headquarters of Prothom Alo, Bangladesh’s leading Bengali daily, and The Daily Star, the country’s most prominent English-language newspaper, were vandalized and set on fire.
Journalists were trapped inside their offices. These were not isolated acts of anger; they were attacks on the very infrastructure of free expression. Every death is tragic. Every family’s grief deserves respect. But violence against the press cannot be justified by grief. When newsrooms burn, democracy burns with them. Bangladesh today increasingly resembles what political scientists describe as a hybrid regime—a system where elections continue to be held, parliaments still function, but real political power is negotiated outside democratic accountability. Courts, bureaucracies, law enforcement agencies, and electoral institutions are no longer perceived as neutral referees. Instead, they are drawn into political engineering, eroding public trust in the democratic process itself. History offers a stark warning. Democracies in Pakistan, Turkey, Hungary, and elsewhere did not collapse overnight. They were hollowed out gradually—through legal instruments, selective enforcement, and narrative delegitimization. Bangladesh appears to be following a similar path of democratic backsliding, in which constitutional language is preserved while the constitutional spirit is undermined. The first and most consistent casualty of this process is freedom of expression. Journalists face lawsuits, harassment, and intimidation. Digital security laws are routinely used to criminalize dissent. Civil society actors operate under constant pressure. The result is a climate of fear in which self-censorship becomes a survival strategy. The irony is painful. Bangladesh’s police force—whose predecessors mounted the first armed resistance against the Pakistani military at Dhaka’s Rajarbagh Police Lines on March 25, 1971—now struggles with eroded morale and public mistrust. Those who once symbolized resistance against oppression are today caught between political pressure and public anger. Asking for accountability for killings committed in the line of duty is not subversion; it is the essence of democratic responsibility. The announcement of national elections scheduled for February 12, 2026, should have been an opportunity to restore public confidence. Instead, it has intensified suspicion. Many Bangladeshis now fear a familiar outcome: elections will be held, a parliament will convene, but the real locus of power will remain elsewhere. Democracy becomes procedural—ritual without substance. International observers often ask whether Bangladesh’s crisis is merely political turbulence. It is not. It is structural. When citizens lose faith in elections as instruments of change, political participation declines, polarization deepens, and extremism finds fertile ground. Development gains become fragile. Stability becomes performative. Bangladesh emerged from a liberation war that rejected authoritarianism and censorship. Its founding promise was not only territorial sovereignty, but moral sovereignty—the right to speak, dissent, and choose. That promise is now under threat, not from tanks on the streets, but from carefully designed erosion within the system itself. Democracy does not always die in darkness. Sometimes, it burns in plain sight—while the world debates whether the fire is real.