In one of the many tales of Nasreddin Hodja, the beloved trickster and judge, a man approaches him with a complaint: his chicken laid an egg at his neighbor’s house, and now they’re fighting over who owns the egg.

The man claims the chicken is his, so the egg must be too. Hodja agrees. Then the neighbor argues that the chicken is always in his yard, eating his feed–so the egg belongs to him. Hodja agrees again.

His bewildered wife, overhearing this contradiction, protests: “They both can’t be right!” Hodja nods. “You’re right too.”

That joke, as absurd as it is, feels eerily familiar today.

Much like Hodja’s courtroom, Bangladesh’s interim government seems to be in the business of placating whoever shouts the loudest. It doesn’t lean right or left in any coherent ideological sense; instead, its decisions tilt toward whichever faction makes the most noise–be it in the streets or on social media.

And in today’s climate, it’s the far-right and religious hardliners who are better organized and louder. Naturally, the interim government appears to be leaning in their direction–not necessarily out of conviction, but convenience.

But blaming the interim government alone misses the point. What we’re witnessing is the downstream effect of decades of institutional rot.

For much of its post-independence existence, the Bangladeshi state has functioned less like a republic and more like a colonial outpost repurposed for domestic plunder.

Its core function has not been governance or development–but extraction. It squeezes labor dry to enrich a small class of global capital's local agents–mostly clustered in neighborhoods like Gulshan, Banani, and Kochukhet.

The state’s most refined skill is essentially not building systems, but maintaining repression. Governance is, effectively, a code word for looting.

The Awami League, after returning to power in 2008 with India's alleged backing, turbocharged this machinery. What was once slow-burn corruption became a full-scale system of economic predation.

Not content with exploiting current labor, they mortgaged the future–accumulating unsustainable debt and flooding the economy with phantom money. They extracted so much, so fast, that they even cannibalized their own legitimacy.

There’s a Bengali proverb: “Shashoner joggo shei, je bhalobashe”--Only those who love are fit to govern. But the Awami League’s rule had long ceased to be about love, or even loyalty. It became pure domination.

By the end, even the internal cohesion of their political apparatus had disintegrated. They no longer functioned like a party–more like a collapsing cartel.

So today, as the new interim authorities try to stabilize a failing state, they inherit a system built to suppress than to serve. And while the public may expect reform, the state’s muscle memory resists change.

In such a vacuum, those who can rally mobs–online or off–fill the space. The result is a political process driven by volume rather than by principle.

Much like Hodja, the state nods along to whoever speaks last.

A government without anchors

The harsh fact is, the current interim government, born from the upheaval of the July Revolution, has inherited more than a broken system–it has inherited the very operators who broke it.

The high-profile criminals of the Awami League era may have fled, but they didn’t vanish on their own. They were quietly ushered out by their lesser-known counterparts still embedded deep within the system–bureaucrats, and fixers now scrambling to cover their tracks and recreate the corrupt machinery of the past.

These actors are not reformers. They are survivors of a regime built on plunder. Expecting them to comply with any vision of accountability or institutional renewal is naive at best, dangerous at worst.

This is where the interim government’s failures begin to harden into long-term consequences. In the chaotic weeks after August 2024, the entire state apparatus was vulnerable.

The deep state was in a rare moment of confusion. That window–brief but pivotal–was the only real opportunity to hold the previous regime to account. Professor Yunus and the student-led coalition that helped stabilize the post-revolution transition held immense symbolic power.

Had they threatened a mass resignation or public withdrawal if Awami League accomplices were allowed to flee, they could have forced a reckoning.

Instead, they hesitated. And that hesitation has defined their rule.

They missed their political “golden hour.” Rather than pursuing justice, they distracted themselves with PR campaigns, ill-timed reforms, and internal vanity projects. Whether that failure was driven by short-term ambitions or a deeper lack of political clarity is a question future historians will answer.

But in the here and now, the outcome is clear: impunity.

In administrative law, vicarious liability means you're responsible for the actions of those you empower. The interim government may not have directly facilitated the escape of the Awami League’s criminal wing–but by failing to stop it, and worse, by retaining those very facilitators in the bureaucracy, they’ve inherited ownership of the crime.

Even if they did nothing else wrong, this single failure has rendered them vulnerable to endless blackmail by the very system they once opposed.

Now, the government operates like a marionette with too many puppeteers. Like Dr. Shashi from Putul Nacher Itikotha, it dances to the tune of whichever force is loudest, strongest, or most threatening.

It’s not killing protestors in the streets like the last regime, but it’s not governing either. It is surviving–barely.

In such a vacuum, perception becomes identity. Set up a UN Human Rights office? You're a puppet of the Western liberal order. Stay silent on attacks on shrines? You're a militant sympathizer.

Appoint a BNP nominee? You're labeled partisan. Bring in a leftist academic? You’re now a civilian Marxist government. The Hodja analogy applies once again: whoever speaks last seems to be the one you're listening to.

This is the danger of leadership without a moral or strategic center. Reforms without legitimacy don’t hold. Orders from a hollow government don’t stick.

Decrees lose force when there’s no belief they’ll be enforced fairly.

Inherited predicament and missed opportunities

For any real political progress, power must eventually shift to a party that is willing to face elections, to risk losing, and to be held accountable. Only then can the public begin to demand results from their leaders rather than read tea leaves about who’s pulling the strings this week.

But before we get there, we must brace for two looming crises that threaten to further destabilize this fragile moment…

One of the most immediate crises now looming is whether this interim government is even capable of organizing a credible election. The signs are not encouraging. With the same compromised administrative machinery still in place–much of it loyal to the previous regime–it’s hard to expect anything other than a repeat of past electoral farces.

If 2018 was any indication, we might again witness absurdities like 105% voter turnout, even in so-called "settled" constituencies. That would only deepen the country’s democratic disillusionment and erode any remaining legitimacy.

But the deeper crisis lies ahead. The message now embedded in the political psyche is clear: loot, and you will leave untouched. Sixteen years of systemic plunder by the Awami League ended not with reckoning, but with safe passage and impunity.

That’s the legacy the interim government has unwittingly cemented. The result is a generation of political aspirants who will see governance as opportunity for organized theft. The term “Awami desire” may soon become shorthand for a political culture defined entirely by extraction.

Once a sarcastic meme, the phrase “Yusuf’s government will have to pay for this” has now hardened into something grimly prophetic. Except it’s not just ‘Yusuf’ or any individual leader who will pay.

It’s the people–already crushed by inflation, surveillance, and institutional decay–who will bear the full cost of this government's failures. No amount of paper-bound reform or cosmetic legislation will shield them from what’s coming.

The last 16 years, and the interim government’s refusal or inability to hold anyone accountable, have confirmed an uncomfortable truth: in Bangladesh, "law and order" is a fiction.

It exists only when it suits those in power–and disappears when it might be inconvenient.

What’s needed now goes far beyond bureaucratic reform. It’s not a matter of drafting better laws; it’s about building a culture of civic resistance and public accountability.

As Dimple Kapadia's character says in Krantiveer, "The law is what flows in people's blood." That sentiment must be revived—not as a cinematic punchline but as a national ethos.

The only path forward is to internalize a deeper civic consciousness–one that treats democracy as something lived, not merely voted on. That means building a public that not only participates in elections but actively engages with the ideas of welfare, justice, and rights.

Constitutional tinkering can continue in the background, but the real battle will be cultural and social: can we reforge the idea of civil society in a country where institutions have failed?

Without that, this government–and the next–will remain nothing more than another version of Nasreddin Hodja: nodding along to whoever shouts loudest, while the state burns.

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Mikail Hossain is a writer and analyst