“For the past two months, innocent children have been dying, and there has been no discussion about it in parliament. No one is taking responsibility. No one is admitting failure. All the blame is being placed on the mothers and the children. Why were these children born in this country? Why did the mothers give birth to them?” wrote Farzana Islam, who recently lost her eight-month-and-18-day-old child to measles, on Facebook.
According to the Directorate General of Health Services (DGHS), since March 15, confirmed and suspected measles deaths among children reached 424 as of May 12. Measles is neither unfamiliar nor uncontrollable; it is preventable with vaccines, and Bangladesh made significant progress in containing it through sustained immunisation programmes. So, its re-emergence at this scale signals a complete breakdown in systems that once functioned with relative stability.
Public health accounts link this deterioration, in part, to disruptions in vaccine procurement during the transitional period following the 2024 upheaval. Reports suggest that Bangladesh’s long-standing procurement system—previously supported through structured international partnerships, including with UNICEF—was modified in favour of a more open tender-based approach. Health experts warned that such a shift could disrupt supply chains, introduce delays, and undermine the predictability needed to sustain immunisation coverage. Over time, these structural vulnerabilities appear to have translated into declining vaccination rates in several regions, creating conditions for measles to resurge.
At the same time, the government’s own data reveals another painful reality: nearly half of the 60 children who died from confirmed measles were below nine months of age, meaning they had not yet become eligible for routine vaccination. Their deaths complicate attempts to reduce the crisis to a single explanation.
Yet even as the causes of the outbreak continue to unfold, it is the political response or the lack thereof that has revealed a different kind of fragility—not of capacity alone, but of framing, narrative, and responsibility.
The BNP, less than three months in office, is still operating in a sensitive phase of governance. It would be unrealistic to expect them to have the full systemic stabilisation or immediate repair of disrupted administrative and procurement structures. The legacy of transition, especially in health logistics and vaccine supply chains, has certainly constrained the government’s room for rapid manoeuvre. Still, the government seems to be playing an unnecessarily safe game. Its handling has remained largely procedural: emergency procurement, catch-up vaccination drives, and administrative adjustments. None of this translates the scale of child mortality into a forceful political assertion of urgency. There has been little effort to elevate the crisis into a defining national emergency that demands sustained political leadership beyond routine bureaucracy. It has also not launched any large-scale public awareness programme to encourage parents to bring their children for vaccination.
Equally significantly, even though an investigation has been launched recently, with plans to work with international agencies, the government appears to be engaging in a careful politics of distancing. Referring to the outbreak as an inherited consequence of the transitional period and Prime Minister Tarique Rahman addressing the issue less frequently than public expectations demand, the BNP government seems to be avoiding full political ownership of the present situation. But it cannot deny its own shortcomings either. In a surprising turn of events, the DGHS on May 10 increased the official death toll to 409 from a previously reported 352, indicating that a significant number of deaths were not captured in earlier counts. Whether these gaps stem from administrative inefficiency or systemic delays, they point to weaknesses that must be addressed immediately, as accurate data remains essential not only for public trust but also for effective outbreak response and planning.
The opposition—including the National Citizen Party (NCP) and Jamaat-e-Islami—has also struggled to generate sustained pressure around the issue. Criticism exists, but it remains strategically measured. This restraint is partly shaped by the crisis’s proximity to the transitional period: questions about procurement and administrative restructuring cannot be raised without inviting scrutiny of these opposition actors’ associations with that phase. As a result, their criticism tends to focus on immediate government performance rather than deeper systemic accountability.
Former interim government figures, meanwhile, have mostly kept mum, despite growing public discussion about decisions made during their tenure. Professor Sayedur Rahman, former special assistant to the chief adviser for the health ministry, provided a written response to The Daily Star’s queries amid the ongoing controversy, claiming “UNICEF message was not a measles outbreak warning.” But the former health adviser Nurjahan Begum is yet to say anything about it.
This whole pattern is best understood as a politics of convenient silence—not the absence of response, but a selective and strategically calibrated form of engagement, where responsibility is acknowledged only when politically useful and softened or displaced when it carries political cost.
Meanwhile, segments of the banned Awami League’s support base have responded, perhaps not surprisingly, with open mockery and partisan gloating. Across sections of social media and sympathetic digital spaces, they have cynically turned the deaths of children into material for political point-scoring, using the crisis to ridicule the current government. Through this grotesque politicisation, they have further weakened the possibility of a unified public response, even as hundreds of children continue to die.
Interestingly, leaders of the Communist Party of Bangladesh (CPB) have also been vocal, as they recently demanded punishment for former chief adviser Prof Muhammad Yunus and former health adviser Nurjahan Begum in connection with the measles outbreak. However, given the party’s limited political influence, the demand did not meet with serious attention.
Taken together, the responses from the country’s major political forces lay bare a grim reality about our political culture even in the face of major public crises. The 2024 uprising was widely seen as a moral rupture in Bangladesh’s political trajectory—a brief unsettling of an order long defined by power, control, and institutional survival over public welfare. In its aftermath, a cautious but real hope emerged: that governance might reorganise around a different ethic, one where public crises would no longer be absorbed into cycles of blame-shifting but would instead demand urgency, coordination, and shared responsibility.
That hope carried into the political transition that followed. When the February elections restored parliamentary democracy and brought the BNP to power, the country formally returned to a familiar framework of elected governments and opposition politics. In theory, such a system strengthens accountability: governments act, oppositions scrutinise, and institutions translate crisis into responsive policy. Democratic restoration, thus, is associated not only with legitimacy but also with better crisis governance.
Against this backdrop, the measles outbreak has emerged as the first major political and institutional test of Bangladesh’s post-transition order. Ironically, though, the response so far suggests that while the democratic form has returned, the underlying culture of crisis management has hardly changed. Even after hundreds of preventable child deaths, the country has failed to produce a unified political reckoning, with responsibility continuing to dissolve into institutional transitions, partisan calculation, and cautious deflection.
Until that balance shifts and public suffering is met with unified political urgency, the gap exposed by this outbreak will remain unresolved, and each crisis in the future will risk repeating the same pattern.
Jannatul Naym Pieal is a writer, researcher, and journalist. He can be reached at [email protected].
Views expressed in this article are the author's own.
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