From the Awami League’s perspective, the years 2008 to 2024 represent nothing short of a triumphant national project.

What more, after all, could one ask for?

Come to power through the ballot, extract the country’s resources with the precision of a vacuum cleaner, move the spoils abroad through a network of bureaucrats and generals, watch 99 percent of your cohort slip away untouched, and finally recline–cocktail in hand–on the beaches of Amalfi or the marinas of Dubai.

The interim government has, by design or by default, played the role of facilitator in this grand escape. Its reluctance to investigate, prosecute, or even ask the most basic questions of accountability reveals complicity rather than weakness.

And now, nearly eighteen months after the great exodus, the same political ecosystem is celebrating the “discovery” that former Home Minister Mohammad Nasim’s son fled with 1,200 crore taka–as if someone had just stumbled upon Darwin’s notebooks from the Galápagos.

The performative shock underscores how unseriously the nation’s ruling class regards theft when the thieves are its own.

In such a climate, what lesson do Bangladesh’s political class draw? Every party, built on professional politicians whose livelihoods, children’s futures, and retirement plans depend on holding office, has only one logical aspiration of becoming the next Awami League.

To seize power, loot at scale, and then rely on a pliant the next interim authority to arrange a safe passage abroad once the tide turns.

If politics were my profession, I would probably want that too.

In a system where impunity is institutionalized, no “consensus,” “charter,” or “national reform” can take root. These exercises, drafted under air conditioning, over sandwiches from The Westin, are rituals of denial.

Tomorrow’s politicians will sermonize about artificial intelligence, the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the Blue Economy, and climate resilience. But deep down, they know their real crisis is moral.

Which includes their “tough” challenges of maintaining honor among thieves and the challenge of managing elite hyperinflation–a society where everyone with a title believes himself a king.

The underlying truth

To speak of unity or compromise presupposes something to share, and an agreed-upon measure of fairness.

But in a system built on infinite theft, there is no “share” left to negotiate, only the hollow rituals of those pretending there is still something left to divide.

You can divide one crore taka among ten men–ten lakh each, neatly distributed. But immense wealth and absolute power do not share so easily. They are indivisible by nature.

There is no such thing as “half immense” or “quarter infinite.” As Sheikh Saadi once wrote, “Ten dervishes can sleep beneath one blanket, but two kings cannot fit inside one kingdom.”

The Awami League perfected a system of plunder that operated on this logic of infinity–borrowing recklessly from foreign and domestic banks, printing money at will, conjuring currency as if playing Age of Empires on cheat mode.

That model, seductive in its audacity, has left the entire political class seething with envy. Every party now dreams of running the same operation, only with themselves at the controls.

The coming years will not bring restraint. Looting and violence will continue to orbit around power, though no successor regime will enjoy the same hegemony that the Awami League did–its narrative monopoly through cultural machinery and its seamless diplomatic corridor through India.

The next phase will be less organized, more chaotic–a competitive kleptocracy. The silver lining, if one can call it that, is that one thief may finally keep another pickpocket in check.

Yet the human mind recoils from chaos. It fears instability and fitna–mischief, upheaval–more than death itself. That fear will define the future.

As institutions hollow out, as courts, laws, election commissions, and newspapers lose all credibility, the realization will harden that nothing in Bangladesh truly functions–not as a system of justice, but as a system of extraction.

Fascist alternatives will rise naturally from this vacuum. When democracy turns into a marketplace for thieves, the people eventually seek a strongman to end the noise.

Bleak future or what?

I wrote the previous lines in the future tense out of habit–an optimism bias, perhaps. But let’s be honest: this is not tomorrow’s forecast.

It is today’s weather.

Still, despair is not destiny. History in this land moves in spirals, not straight lines. Every collapse has, sooner or later, given birth to resistance.

The people’s struggle for liberation–like trench warfare in World War I–is slow, muddy, and brutal, but it endures. And that endurance, however faint, remains Bangladesh’s last honest currency.

Our only real achievement lies in the scraps of ground we reclaim, inch by inch, day after day, by fighting the same weary battles our parents once fought. The victories are small, often invisible, but they are what keep us from vanishing altogether.

Our truest weapon is not the gun or the slogan, but memory, our accumulated experience of wars already fought, betrayals already endured. That memory, passed down through stories, is how we resist erasure.

Storytelling is not a luxury in this part of the world; it is a survival instinct. The history of human storytelling and the history of human resistance run side by side, feeding each other, refusing to die.

As long as these two streams flow together–one narrating, the other defying–the idea of freedom will continue to find its voice, even when everything else falls silent.

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Mikail Hossain is a writer and analyst