Sitting beside his mother’s body, Tarique Rahman said only two things. He spoke of a debt [to his mother] he could never fully repay. And he asked forgiveness from everyone for any mistakes she [Khaleda Zia] might have made.

He stopped there.

There were no theatrical lamentations, no sky-rending grief staged for the cameras. He did not lash out at rivals or curse enemies. Or tried to settle old scores. He did not even recount the long catalogue of Khaleda Zia’s political achievements, though history will do that work soon enough.

Most strikingly, he resisted the familiar temptation of Bangladeshi politics of turning a funeral into a partisan spectacle. Instead, he allowed it to remain what it ought to be—a moment of national mourning, shared and unclaimed.

Watch the scenes that followed. Tarique sat quietly beside his mother, reciting the Quran. His restrained meetings with foreign delegates.

The measured speech at the funeral, spare in language and narrow in purpose. Taken together, they suggested a political temperament long absent from the country’s public life.

Composure without calculation. Dignity without performance. The gestures recalled, unmistakably, the political culture associated with Ziaur Rahman and Begum Khaleda Zia.

This was the conduct of a person who has endured the loss of a father, a mother, and a brother, and who chose, even in grief, not to weaponize that loss.

In a political culture accustomed to grievance as currency—as was perfected by ousted dictator Sheikh Hasina, restraint itself became a statement.

After the funeral, a photograph circulated of Tarique with his wife and daughter. And it lingered in the public imagination for a reason.

Bangladesh has produced many politicians, but very few statesmen with a credible “family man” image. Tarique has, quietly and over time, cultivated one.

He lost one family to violence and persecution; he built another in exile. That family now stands as the living continuation of the Zia legacy.

The gravity of the funeral

The funeral probably marked a turning point.

Through it, Tarique Rahman emerged as a statesman-in-the-making. Many who spent the last year deriding him will soon rediscover his virtues.

Others, now quick to brand dissenters as “BNP agents,” will, after the election, find their way into the BNP’s orbit.

Just to clarify, this is the well-worn grammar of Bangladeshi politics, not cynicism.

What matters more is what Tarique has not done. He has shown no appetite for revenge, no urge to reopen wounds in public. That restraint—especially after everything—signals seriousness of purpose.

It suggests a desire to begin again by resetting tone instead of by settling scores

If this funeral was any indication, Tarique Rahman is attempting a fresh start. The country should take him at his word—and at his conduct.

Still, anyone in Tarique Rahman’s circle who imagines that this passage into statesmanship will be effortless is indulging in fantasy. Bangladesh is undergoing a complicated political mutation—part generational, part technological.

And part psychological.

The authority of the old political order is weakening, even as a restless youth imagines new systems without quite knowing how to build them.

At the same time, both young and old are now unprecedented producers and consumers of information and propaganda.

And ironically of political myth.

This has expanded awareness in parts of society long kept on the margins. It has also created new forms of frenzy and moral exhaustion. In this emerging culture, grace is often mistaken for weakness, restraint for irrelevance.

The moment is rich with possibility—and saturated with danger.

Out of this churn, a new kind of social “consciousness” is taking shape, along with a new struggle for hegemony. That struggle will only intensify as newcomers scramble for power and legitimacy.

Grammar of new politics

As the election approaches, Tarique Rahman will increasingly find himself the target of elaborate propaganda campaigns designed to define him before he can define himself.

Once caricatured as an anti-India firebrand, he will now be recast as its opposite: a leader “hostage” to India, or worse, one who has sold out to it.

This narrative will be advanced from all directions—by those who claim to favor India and by those who oppose it. Every decision he makes will be filtered through this prism, nudging him toward a familiar box.

Pro-India, elitist, anti-Islam, aggressively secular, narrowly Bengali nationalist, you name it. These are the very images long associated with the Awami League.

The BNP’s current embrace of what it calls civic or Bangladesh-centric nationalism complicates this picture. By foregrounding citizens’ rights, security, development, and even the legacy of the Liberation War, the party is attempting to broaden its appeal beyond grievance politics.

Its public rejection of revenge as a governing principle, and its talk—however tentative—of institutional reform, signal an effort to align itself with a post-authoritarian national mood.

Yet the paradox is unavoidable. Because the BNP remains, at heart, a party of the old guard, these positions are both expected and perilous.

In the volatile landscape that has emerged since August 5, the very language the party now uses to sound responsible and inclusive may also make it easier for critics to collapse it into the ideological shadow of the Awami League—and, by extension, into the gravitational pull of India.

Navigating that contradiction, without losing coherence or credibility, will be the real test of Tarique Rahman’s political adulthood.

Who will have the last laugh?

I do not pretend to know how Tarique Rahman will navigate what lies ahead.

But judging by his public bearing since his return—and most vividly at his mother’s funeral—it is already clear that forcing the BNP into a pale imitation of the Awami League will not be easy.

His posture suggests an instinctive resistance to that path. What he appears intent on preserving is the political inheritance of his parents.

A centrist, pro-Bangladesh orientation, recalibrated for a changed moment but not surrendered to it.

If he succeeds, the BNP will survive this political cycle intact. Those who have spent years anticipating the party’s disappearance will be disappointed.

More likely, the political space around it will continue to widen, especially for social democratic ideas that speak to equity, rights, and reform without collapsing into authoritarian reflexes.

But if the BNP is displaced—if it is pushed or maneuvered out of its historic position—Bangladesh will enter an altogether new and volatile phase.

In that scenario, vigilance will be essential, lest the country reproduce a new version of what it has already endured: a secular or social-democratic authoritarianism wearing progressive language while hollowing out democratic life.

The real test, then, extends beyond Tarique Rahman himself. What Bangladesh urgently needs is the emergence of a genuinely new social democratic force—one that can challenge power without calcifying into yet another “Old Guard.”

Without that renewal, the cycle of rise, dominance, and decay will simply repeat, under a different banner but with the same consequences.

—

Tuhin Khan is a writer and activist 

(Translated from Bangla by Faisal Mahmud)