Over the past 16 years, the Awami League's governance has left deep scars on Bangladesh, but understanding the true extent of these damages requires a deeper look at where the party has actually taken the nation.

The story is not just one of power and politics, but also of a fundamental shift in the social contract between rulers and the ruled.

In his book Injustice, sociologist Barrington Moore introduces a crucial concept: the Implicit Social Contract. This is a reinterpretation of the social contract theory initially proposed by Rousseau.

According to Moore, the social contract isn’t a static, immutable agreement, hovering above society like a Platonic ideal. Rather, it’s a dynamic, fluid negotiation between the rulers and the ruled, constantly tested and redefined.

Moore argues that this negotiation is a continual "probing" — both sides testing the limits of obedience and disobedience, constantly discovering what they can get away with.

It’s an ongoing process of mutual surveillance and the enforcement of sanctions, with the rulers and the ruled constantly assessing which rules apply, which can be broken, and which will incur punishment.

Now, let’s apply this to the Awami League’s rule. Since 2014, and especially after 2018, the party has seemed to be on a kind of "psychedelic acid trip" — systematically breaking laws, twisting realities, and pushing boundaries like peeling away layers of an onion.

In doing so, they have discovered what Moore would call the Great Vacuum: a space where there is no accountability, no legal barriers, and no opposition that can stop them.

Mass movements have been crushed, foreign pressures have bowed before them, and they have effectively created a reality in which they are untouchable.

This situation bears resemblance to the chaotic and surreal journeys seen in fiction. It echoes the “Apun Hi Bhagwan Hai” moment from Sacred Games, Colonel Kurtz’s descent into madness in Heart of Darkness, or the mind-bending experiences of characters like Luffy in One Piece and Neo in The Matrix, where reality itself distorts as their power grows.

It’s an existential drift, where, like these characters, the ruling elite begins to perceive themselves as beyond the limits of conventional morality and law.

The psychological and political consequences of this sense of invincibility have spread far beyond the highest echelons of the Awami League.

Lower-level officials and employees within the power structure have internalized this same belief — that the law is a tool to be manipulated for personal or political gain, rather than a system to be followed.

The results have been nothing short of extraordinary: from passing immunity bills for cronies to turning the central bank into an accomplice in money laundering, even to selling off historical books on the Liberation War for millions of dollars.

Breaching the gap of fantasy and reality 

In this warped reality, the laws of the land are not constraints, but instruments to serve the purposes of those in power.

What we are witnessing is not just corruption or mismanagement; it is a collapse of the social contract itself, a complete distortion of the principles that bind society together. The rulers, once tasked with upholding justice, now see themselves as above it.

The people, meanwhile, find themselves subjected to an ever-shifting set of rules, in a system that no longer functions for the collective good.

In order to rebuild, we must first confront the reality of where we are — and how we got here. The road to reform begins not with the establishment of new laws or policies, but with a fundamental reconnection to the ground realities that have been ignored for so long.

As the Awami League has shown, power is not merely about enforcing rules; it’s about manipulating the very framework that creates those rules.

The future of Bangladesh will depend on whether we can restore trust in the social contract, and whether we can bring the government — and its people — back into alignment with a shared vision of justice, fairness, and accountability. Without this, no true reform is possible.

This is because, for the past 16 years, the Awami League has taken Bangladesh down a dangerous path. While the party’s leaders floated in a surreal bubble of unchecked power, the people were subjected to a relentless, arbitrary rule.

From being jailed for something as innocuous as offering a flower with the left hand on a mural of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, to the pension funds being repurposed for political slogans, it was a government governed by whim, where the state’s laws were whatever the ruling party chose them to be.

In this environment, the job of citizens was not to engage with the system of governance but to constantly interpret and adjust their lives to the shifting desires of the Awami League’s leaders.

In many ways, the situation was like the opening line from Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times."

For the Awami League, it could be summed up in the popular meme fashion: "It was the fuck-aroundest of times, it was the find-outest of times."

Neither the Awami League, the country’s deep state, nor the international community could have predicted how far things would spiral. In fact, it’s likely that the Awami League always knew that their looting and unchecked power would eventually lead to the country’s collapse.

Their escape plan, as part of their worst-case scenario, envisioned their departure, leaving behind a chaotic vacuum. In this vacuum, they believed that Bangladesh’s so-called "jungle people" — a reference to the rural masses — would turn on each other, eliminating 300,000 to 400,000 lives.

This bloodshed would set the stage for an India-backed military rule to take over, allowing the Awami League to slowly return.

From the "great vacuum" to a nation’s reckoning

But the crisis did not play out as they expected. Despite the deep state’s help, the "jungle people" ran the country for 8 to 10 days, without a government in place.

During this time, they began to realize a fundamental truth: there is a difference between a government and a state.

While the country’s situation remains dire, the mess we are experiencing today is, in part, a result of the deep state’s deliberate failure, compounded by the need for external intervention to keep the system afloat.

Now, with the Awami League’s flight, those left behind — the bureaucrats, the power brokers, the enforcers of the system — are feeling the shock of reality.

These individuals, who had once floated along in a surreal state of privilege with the Awami League, are now coming to grips with their own limitations. Even their last-ditch "jungle anarchy" plan failed to manifest in its intended form.

Their predicament is reminiscent of Tom Cruise’s character in Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut. In the film, Cruise’s character, accustomed to a mundane domestic life, stumbles upon a world of endless pleasures and freedoms enjoyed by the elite.

Once exposed to this reality, he cannot return to his old life. Similarly, Nicole Kidman’s character finds herself trapped by the same desires, preventing her from reclaiming her previous existence.

The desires they witnessed and the fantasies they sought to fulfill left a permanent mark on them, just as a car’s steel body bears the impression of a heavy hit.

For Bangladesh’s power brokers, the belief that laws, ethics, and morality can be bent and reshaped at will, using power as a tool, has become deeply ingrained in their psyche. This belief has left a permanent scar on their collective conscience.

In the post-Awami period, they are now struggling to reassert their control, but they face significant obstacles. With partial changes to the old power structures, they find themselves unable to revert to their previous methods.

The mechanisms they once used, like bank looting or the activation of draconian laws like the Digital Security Act, are no longer as easily accessible. This inability to return to their old ways has resulted in a kind of Freudian hysteria.

In Freudian terms, when a person’s path toward fulfilling their desires is disrupted, they experience convulsions or spasms. Watching the current absurdity and contradictions from the deep state, it’s impossible not to draw parallels to a hysteric convulsion, as they flail in their attempts to regain control.

The deep state, once an unshakable pillar of power, is now confronting the consequences of its own excess. As they attempt to navigate a post-Awami world, they find themselves facing a reality they can no longer manipulate with the same ease.

And while they remain caught in a hysteric state of denial, the people of Bangladesh are left to grapple with the aftermath, trying to make sense of the country’s fractured and tumultuous future.

The urgent need for grounded reforms and social consensus

In my view, the first step toward reforming Bangladesh after years of Awami League governance must be to ground both the military and civilian administrations in basic realities.

Think of it as offering coffee or lemon to someone recovering from a hangover — a way to reintegrate them into the world around them. The damage done to the state’s institutions requires more than just the creation of formal laws or policies.

Simply writing new laws on paper is not enough, for as we've seen over the past decade, "laws or policies are just myths." This was perhaps the most debilitating pathology of the Awami League’s reign — a political culture where laws were bent or disregarded at will, leaving governance in disarray.

Without a broad social and political consensus, any new policies will remain dead letters.

The task at hand is urgent: we must begin by removing the deeply damaged minds within the state machinery from positions of power. This means engaging the remaining officials in profound conversations about what went wrong under the previous regime.

We need to make it unequivocally clear that the way the state was run during the Awami League's time — with its rampant corruption, lack of accountability, and disregard for rule of law — was an exceptional anomaly, one that cannot and will not be allowed to continue.

But this cannot be accomplished through words alone, nor by simply making empty promises. We must demonstrate through practice, across all levels of society, that such a governance model will never return.

This requires building a broad, national consensus, from the political elites to the ordinary citizens, about the exceptional nature of the past regime and its devastating consequences. These discussions need to take place at every level, from the halls of power to the grassroots, so that the collective will to rebuild can take root.

The structural integrity of the nation is in shambles, and it is crucial that we begin to rebuild the framework of the country’s political and social consequences. Without this foundational shift, we will find ourselves incapable of even beginning the work of nation-building.

The road ahead requires much more than just policy change; it requires a radical transformation in how we understand governance, justice, and the rule of law. Only then can we begin to imagine a future where Bangladesh thrives, free from the grip of the past’s failures.

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Mikail Hossain is a researcher and analyst