On August 5, 2024, we were told that the old order had vanished into the Indian sunrise, and in its place stood a Nobel laureate, handed the impossible task of governing a country that had just been torn apart from within. Three days later, on August 8 at 2:15 pm, Professor Muhammad Yunus stepped onto the tarmac in Dhaka, not as the Hasina regime’s favourite villain but as the new interim leader of Bangladesh. When he said, “I am remembering Abu Sayeed,” and called this our “second victory day,” promising that the fruits of this freedom must reach every corner of the country, the words did not feel like rhetoric; they felt like a hand on the shoulder of an exhausted nation.
The monsoon revolution of those 36 days had washed away the fascist machinery of Awami League, and we were offered the terrifying privilege of getting it right. It was, in every sense, our “West Wing” moment, that fleeting instant when history cracks open just wide enough for ordinary people to slip their shoulders under its weight and try, however clumsily, to steer it somewhere kinder.
It has been over 550 days since that afternoon of impossible hope. It is now February 2026. For me, to serve as deputy press secretary in this fragile, in-between time was to live in a permanent state of becoming, never quite arriving, always translating chaos into sentences the country could bear to hear, even when our own voices shook.
We were told that Bangladesh was bankrupt, not only in its coffers but also in its very spirit, and for 18 months we lived with the stubborn resolve to prove that projection wrong. We inherited a currency collapsing under its own fear and food inflation that had soared to 14.10 percent in July 2024 during the fever pitch of the uprising. Our foreign exchange reserves, which had slid below $20 billion in 2024, now hover above $32 billion, no longer a freefall but a fragile plateau that buys us time to think instead of panicking.
We treated the economy as one treats a trauma patient—stabilise the pulse, stop the bleeding, whisper encouragement in the dark. The vitals are steadier now, but the country still lies in a ward, not yet discharged, surrounded by monitors that beep like small, insistent questions about what comes next. To work in those rooms was to learn a new kind of faith: that small, stubborn adjustments in policy could translate into one more child eating eggs twice a week instead of once.
In that same ward, we saw the birth of the July National Charter, a constitutional promise, fragile but real, crafted to ensure that never again will one pair of hands be allowed to clutch the entire state by the throat. Signed in October 2025 after months of arguments, walkouts, and exhausted compromises, the charter gathers more than 80 reform proposals, nearly 50 of them constitutional, and binds them to a now-held referendum that asked the country, in one breathless “Yes” or ““No,” whether it truly wanted to restrain its rulers. It is, at the very least, a guardrail we did not have before, a line scratched into the road by people who have seen where the cliff begins.
We also witnessed something deeply human: the return of faith from afar. In 2025, remittances reached an all-time high of around $32.8 billion, the largest annual inflow in our history, and in the first seven months of the 2025-26 fiscal year alone, more than $19.4 billion already came home through formal channels. These numbers live in spreadsheets, but in truth, they are love letters from millions of Bangladeshis scattered across the world, each transaction a whisper: “I believe in you again; I am willing to risk my hard-earned wages on the possibility that this time will be different.”
We turned our gaze outward differently, too, refusing to lean on a single neighbour as if geography were destiny. Instead, we walked towards a more balanced, multipolar reality, securing support from the IMF and World Bank not as trophies but as lifelines woven into a broader strategy, even as published reserve data showed a slow climb back from the low twenties to the low thirties in billions of dollars. We negotiated with the United States and other partners to ease pressures on our exports, knowing that a “technical adjustment” in tariffs could mean the difference between shuttered gates and a factory’s lights staying on for another year, between a pink slip and a renewed work ID, between a family slipping back into hunger and daring, quietly, to plan for a daughter’s college admission.
And yet, revolution is never clean. It leaves fingerprints and fractures on everything it touches, and we would betray our own commitment to transparency if we pretended the porcelain did not crack in our hands. When the old police state vanished almost overnight in August 2024, it did not leave behind a ready-made rulebook; it left behind a gaping vacuum that reforms could not fill quickly enough. The official record of “mob justice” cases may read as a smaller number, but it obscures a larger catastrophe unfolding in the spaces between policing and justice, in the streets where some people became judge and executioner because the law had not yet learned to write itself in a new, credible voice.
Awami League remains banned from contesting. The streets demanded this, and many of the wounded and grieving saw it as the only way to keep the old nightmares from slamming the door open again. I get it, and I agree with it. But the historian in me cannot quiet the unease: did we build an essential firebreak, or did we plant a future grievance that will one day return as flame? Was this our necessary safeguard or our greatest misstep? Only time, and the people living in it, will be able to say.
We came here knowing we were meant to be a parenthesis in the long, complicated sentence of Bangladesh’s history, a brief interruption rather than the final clause. That parenthesis now closes. The files are packed, the nameplates taken down, the rooms we briefly filled with arguments, laughter, and midnight drafting sessions return to their old, indifferent neutrality. The idea of “New Bangladesh” that we dared to speak of in headlines and speeches is no longer ours to hold, or to protect, or to disappoint; it passes, trembling and unfinished, into other hands.
It has been a privilege to speak for a government that understood from the beginning that its highest duty was to steward a transition, and then step aside. To those who won the election, good luck. You will need every ounce of courage, humility, and imagination you can find, because the ghosts of July are still here—watching, whispering, and waiting to see what you do with the house we are leaving behind, its walls still smelling of smoke and fresh paint, its doors finally, mercifully, unlocked.
Apurba Jahangir is deputy press secretary to the chief adviser of the departing interim government.
Views expressed in this article are the author's own.
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