Earlier this month, a seemingly innocent photo posted on Facebook went viral.

In it, three familiar faces from Bangladeshi media–Abdun Noor Tushar, Masood Kamal, and Anis Alamgir–were seen sharing yogurt with wry smiles. The caption was disarmingly simple that they were having some “doi.”

The photo got widely shared, especially among young social media users who flooded timelines with outrage, dubbing the trio as “dalals”--cronies of the fallen Awami regime.

Many accused them of plotting “darker schemes” over a desert to restore Sheikh Hasina’s order under a new guise.

The fury didn’t emerge from nowhere. In recent months, the three men have appeared on national television in ways that suggest an attempt to rehabilitate the narrative around Hasina’s fallen fascist regime.

Their commentary, to many, feels like a soft campaign to reframe the autocratic past as misunderstood stability.

At the same time, these figures have turned their criticism toward the interim government, branding it a “Jamaat-backed entity” while attacking the student leaders of the July uprising for alleged lawlessness.

Paradoxically, they have also flirted with support for BNP, in seemingly not out of ideological conviction, but to advance the idea of a return to “true parliamentary democracy” from the current hybrid mess.

This rhetorical juggling act has riled up a lot of people. They’ve managed to inflame multiple camps that include Jamaat sympathizers, Shibir activists, NCP followers, and even large segments of BNP supporters who see through what they interpret as opportunistic punditry.

Yet, the labeling of these media personalities as “Awami dalals” misses a deeper point. The outrage, though understandable, risks oversimplifying a far more entrenched malaise.

And that is the moral and intellectual duplicity of Bangladesh’s semi-elite secular class.

These are the people who, despite professing liberal values, have long dominated the country’s discourse machinery by willingly or inadvertently supporting an active fascism.

They claim to speak for democracy, yet instinctively gravitate toward whichever power structure secures their relevance.

Yes, their hypocrisy deserves to be called out. But dismissing them as mere regime apologists absolves us of examining the deeper rot of the comfortable complicity of those who shape this wide-ranging narrative under seemingly honest pretense.

The calculated criticism

Let’s begin with one fact that none of the three personalities is, in all likelihood, on a mission to rehabilitate the Awami League anytime soon.

Whether that notion still lingers in some quiet corner of their minds is beside the point. Awami League’s return to power, in any foreseeable future, remains a political impossibility.

Even the most cynical observers–those who believe that the current tug-of-war among the BNP, the military, the interim government, Jamaat, and the NCP is the kind of chaos from which Awami League rise again–would admit one thing that the only real glue binding these competing forces is their shared hatred towards the Awami League.

Yes, the “we were better before” chorus is growing louder, and nostalgia for the relative order of Hasina’s days has begun to creep into the public mood. But that resurgence, even when paired with a loyal base of Awami supporters, cannot meaningfully reconstitute the party’s political future.

To bring the party back from this depth of public resentment would require something close to civil war.

Tushar, Kamal, and Alamgir understand this perfectly. Veterans of Bangladesh’s media trade, they possess a keen instinct for reading power’s shifting winds. They know when to hedge and where to invest their narratives.

In this new political climate, they appear to be betting on complexity–crafting critiques that seem to challenge the interim government, so that the public get used to their neutral veneer, knowing full well that this would not land them in any hard spot.

They also seem to believe they can outwit the passionate but inexperienced “young Turks” of the July uprising, whose moral anger often burns bright but misses the larger structures of manipulation.

Still, lumping these three men together does them partial injustice.

Tushar and Kamal, to their credit, have at times criticized Sheikh Hasina’s authoritarianism in public forums.

Alamgir, however, was a more active enabler of that regime–so much so that he later had to scrub large portions of his Facebook history to erase the record of his loyalty.

Yet even Tushar and Kamal’s “criticism” of the Awami League rarely cut deep. Their condemnations came wrapped in ritualistic reverence–always beginning with an ode to Bangabandhu, followed by soft-edged admonitions of Hasina’s excesses.

Their critiques carried the tone of a lover’s gentle protest rather than a dissident’s moral fury.

A meme by satirist Syed Faiz Ahmed captured this perfectly. A smiling Madhuri Dixit coyly restraining a grinning Anil Kapoor, captioned, “This is how leftist organizations criticize the Awami League.”

The image says it all–the performance of resistance without the risk of it.

That, ultimately, is the hallmark of Bangladesh’s semi-elite commentariat. They know how to criticize power without threatening it, how to sound progressive while staying comfortably complicit.

Faulty moral high ground

Alamgir, of course, never even bothered with the pretense of dissent.

He was an unabashed cheerleader of autocracy–amplifying the very propaganda that kept Hasina’s regime afloat, helping to build the narratives that justified its excesses.

But after the July uprising, a curious transformation took place. Alamgir, along with Tushar and Kamal, suddenly emerged as the new “moral voices” of the nation.

They are seen condemning the interim government with the kind of moral outrage they had once suppressed, perhaps willingly, during the Awami years.

There is nothing inherently wrong with such criticism. In fact, the interim government has offered more than enough material almost on a silver platter for genuine dissent.

But what rankles is the sanctimony–the performative righteousness of commentators who now pose as consistent defenders of truth, when in fact, they are only repositioning themselves in response to shifting winds of power.

These men are not genuinely speaking truth to power; they are bowing to it. They possess, through years of navigating authoritarian ecosystems, an instinctive sense of where power lies and how to serve it without appearing to.

Their antennae are exquisitely tuned to detect change in the political weather–always ready to bend, never to break. And they do so while clinging to a hollow sense of moral superiority.

Recent talk shows of all these people have made this more transparent than ever.

Their newfound insistence on holding elections and “restoring democracy” has little to do with democratic conviction and everything to do with aligning themselves with the likely victors–the BNP, or whatever configuration of forces emerges next.

To be fair, Kamal’s record is cleaner than Tushar’s, and both fare better than Alamgir’s. But ultimately, all three are playing the same game of knowing whom to challenge and whom to flatter, when to sound brave and when to stay safe.

Perhaps this is the inevitable consequence of living too long under fascism.

People develop what might be called a “bullshit detector.” We can sense deceit, and manipulation. But what we have failed to develop is the articulation to use that awareness to clean our own shed, to call out the rot not just in those who ruled, but also in those who narrated the rule.

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