A British passport holder, absent from Bangladesh for nearly two decades, returns without a demonstrable popular mandate and emerges as Prime Minister commanding two-thirds of Parliament.
In any functioning democracy, such an outcome would demand rigorous scrutiny. In Bangladesh, it has been met with resignation, managed outrage, and diplomatic equivocation.
The deeper question is not merely electoral malpractice. It is whether the subaltern, the rural poor, the urban precariat, the migrant labourer, can meaningfully have a voice at all within the political architecture that has taken shape.
The Paradox of Independence: See No Evil, Hear No Evil
In World Order, Old and New, Noam Chomsky described Bangladesh and Haiti as among the earliest colonies of the modern world, territories integrated into global capitalism through extraction, now counted among the poorest per capita. The observation was not a rhetorical flourish but a structural analysis.
China had its it’s own experience of colonial subjugation, what it calls its “Century of Humiliation,” beginning with the Opium Wars fought in the interests of the East India Company and concluding in 1949 with the proclamation of the People’s Republic. By contrast, the people of Bengal, today’s Bangladesh, have endured not one but multiple centuries of subjugation. And with the disputed elections of 2026, some now fear that this long cycle of humiliation may be entering a third century rather than coming to an end.
Bengal in 1757 was comparable in prosperity to England. Nearly three centuries later, the income gap is measured not in percentages but in multiples. Chomsky cites British parliamentary records describing “bleached bones” in Bengal, testimony to famines exacerbated by imperial extraction, whose surplus fuelled Britain’s industrial ascent, prosperity from which the United Kingdom still benefits.
Yet in contemporary Bangladesh, there is little institutional memory of this devastation. The famine of 1770, which is estimated to have killed 10 million; the famine of 1873; the catastrophic Bengal famine of 1943 under the British Raj; the mass deaths following the 1970 Bola Cyclone under Pakistani military rule; and the famine of 1974, during which US policy under Henry Kissinger curtailed food shipments, these events remain marginal in public commemoration.
Contrast this with Ireland. The Great Famine of 1845–49 is woven into the national psyche. Monuments stand, annual commemorations take place, and political lessons are drawn about sovereignty and self-determination. Why, then, are Bangladesh’s millions of colonial and post-colonial dead so faintly remembered? Historical amnesia is not accidental. It seems to be a political choice. Do the ruling class of Bangladesh hold these victims to be their descendants, in contempt?
The (Post)-Colonial State (of Mind): Gharbzadegi
Formally, the British Raj ended in 1947. Pakistani military rule ended in 1971. But institutional psychology is more durable than flags.
The British governed through intermediaries, zamindars and comprador elites, who extracted locally and transferred outward. Today, the pattern persists with different sponsors. Replace the imperial metropole with Washington or London, and the mechanics of outward capital flows remain strikingly familiar. Wealth accumulates offshore, often in the London property market.
Bangladesh’s economic model reinforces this dependency. Remittances, official and unofficial, rival or exceed the revenues of the Ready-Made Garments sector so frequently celebrated as a national success story. Large numbers of young men from poorer families leave each year to work in the Middle East, often in harsh and precarious conditions. Many endure difficult living environments in remote labour camps, separated from their families for years at a time.
At the same time, sections of the educated middle class, finding limited professional opportunities at home, look to Europe for employment. There, too, many accept work well below their qualifications, menial jobs to secure economic stability and support relatives back home.
The social consequences are visible in parts of Sylhet, my ancestral district. In numerous villages, Friday prayers at the mosque are attended largely by the elderly and the very young, with relatively few men of working age present, a quiet but powerful reflection of lost opportunities in Bangladesh and its impact on community life
Meanwhile, the domestic elite export their children for education to Britain, North America, or Australia; hold wealth offshore; cultivate the King’s English; and return to govern a population they often regard with open condescension. The colonised, in this schema, do not reject the coloniser’s values. They aspire to replicate them.
In 1962, the Iranian intellectual Jalal Al-e-Ahmad published Gharbzadegi (“Westoxification”), analysing the psychological corrosion on Iranian society subordinated to Western power after the 1953 coup against Mohammad Mosaddegh. Influenced by Gramsci and Fanon, he argued for an indigenous modernity rooted in popular sovereignty rather than imported managerialism.
From Guided to Engineered Democracy
The protests of 2024, initially sparked by opposition to quota reservations in public sector employment, were widely interpreted as more than a sectoral grievance. They expressed a broader demand for dignity, accountability and inclusive growth. Many young Bangladeshis articulated a desire for popular sovereignty, participation in the economy through jobs, rather than factional rotation.
By February 2026, that moment appeared reversed. What emerged was not simply “guided democracy” of the sort associated with Field Marshal Ayub Khan, but something more sophisticated: engineered democracy. Representatives are effectively apportioned through administrative choreography rather than secured through competitive mandate.
First piloted by the new Field Marshal at GHQ Rawalpindi, Asim Munir, in the 2024 Pakistan General Elections, aided by compliant media and civil service. Where ballots are cast, but votes are not counted, instead, seats are apportioned.
In Bangladesh, Polling before the election suggested the possibility of a hung parliament. Lower-than-expected turnout in areas affected by opposition boycotts prompted the Election Commission to curtail transparency in reporting. The mechanics of counting continued; the declaration of results became selective. European and Anglo-American observers offered procedural endorsements, effectively legitimising the transition from one managerial elite to another.
The optics were democratic. The substance was managerial continuity.
The Retreat of the West and the Vacuum It Leaves
In The Collapse of Global Liberalism, British geopolitical analyst Philip Pilkington argues that Western states are retrenching from expansive global commitments and that emerging “civilisation states” will pursue indigenous modernities on their own terms. The war in Ukraine, he suggests, has accelerated the economisation of Western foreign policy.
If so, Bangladesh may find itself less supervised, allowing space for more indigenous forms of modernity, putting pressure on domestic elites for popular accountability. However, many people are not waiting for this new multi-polar world.
Diaspora Realism
Among members of the diaspora, conversations increasingly carry a tone of weary pragmatism. The strategy is not reform but exit: secure foreign passports, move capital abroad, and extract family members where possible. It is a rational response to a system perceived as closed and extractive.
Yet this logic perpetuates the cycle. Remittances sustain the economy; outward migration relieves political pressure; elites recycle capital offshore. The structure endures.
To describe Bangladesh as an “open-air prison” may be rhetorically charged, but it captures a sentiment shared across classes: that political agency is constrained, economic mobility externally dependent, and sovereignty performative.
The tragedy is not only electoral manipulation. It is the normalisation of diminished expectations. When citizens cease to expect meaningful choice, the question “Can the subaltern vote?” answers itself.
The ballot exists. The mandate does not. Unification is achieved with Pakistan after the separation of 1971.
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