There are moments in a nation’s life when victory does not feel like triumph at all. It feels like an inventory. One counts the broken things. The bent institutions. The exhausted treasury. The roads that still exist but no longer promise movement. The schoolrooms in which children are present but learning is absent. The offices where authority survived but purpose did not. The new government of Bangladesh came to power not into comfort, but into consequence.
For those of us who spent more than a decade in agitation, argument, assembly, resistance, and the often-lonely labour of democratic politics, government is not a coronation. It is an audition before history. One has marched for the vote; now one must justify it. One has denounced arbitrariness; now one must build order without becoming arbitrary oneself. One has spoken for the people in the long season of opposition; now one must answer to them in the morning glare of office.
That is why the election manifesto placed before the nation by BNP Chairman Tarique Rahman on February 6 mattered profoundly. It was not simply a shopping list of promises, nor the usual carnival literature of South Asian politics. At its core was a pledge to restore the dignity of the vote, rebuild accountable government, undertake constitutional and electoral reform, and pursue a Bangladesh that is both economically stronger and politically more answerable. It set down 51 priority points, grouped around nine major commitments, and spoke openly of a state that would be “directly answerable to the people.” It also tied this democratic language to an ambitious agenda: the aspiration of a trillion-dollar economy by 2034. In a country long blighted by the inflation of slogans and the shrinkage of institutions, the interesting thing was not the scale of the promise, but the attempt to bind prosperity to legitimacy.
Yet manifestos do not govern in the abstract. They govern in the debris of what they inherit. And what this government inherited was no small matter. The World Bank estimates Bangladesh’s real GDP growth fell to four percent in FY2025, down from 4.2 percent in FY2024, marking a third consecutive annual slowdown. Development expenditure contracted by 25.5 percent in FY2025. Gas shortages were undermining power generation, industry, and wider economic activity. The IMF, meanwhile, identified the banking sector as the country’s most pressing vulnerability. Reporting on that assessment noted tax revenue at only 6.9 percent of GDP in FY2025 and system-wide non-performing loans surging to 34 percent by June 2025. These numbers are symptoms of a republic that has been living off of institutional depletion.
This is the economic prose of our inheritance: slower growth, weaker investment, constrained energy supply, a fiscally frail state, and a banking system that too often served influence before prudence. To this, one must add the visible wear of public life itself: overburdened cities, distorted incentives, degraded service delivery, and a generation of young people whose ambition exceeded the opportunities arranged for them. One may speak grandly of national destiny. But destiny, in a developing country, often comes down to whether the lights stay on, whether credit is honestly priced, whether the school teaches, whether the road connects, whether the permit is given by rule rather than favour.
And now history, in its malicious humour, has added a further burden. The new government must govern not only amid inherited fragility, but amid a turbulent world. The war in the Middle East has already begun to trouble Bangladesh’s energy arithmetic. With shipping through the Strait of Hormuz disrupted and fuel supply threatened, what was once a distant war is impacting our fuel and fertiliser chains, and our calculations of price and supply. Fertiliser production has already been curtailed and every delay at sea threatens to reappear on land as costlier energy, tighter transport, industrial disruption, and fresh inflationary unease.
Our region, too, is not a meadow of stability. South Asia remains prey to strategic suspicion, unsettled borders, uneven growth, migration pressures, and the permanent temptation of political simplification. In such a neighbourhood, a government cannot afford either romanticism or vanity. It must be serious and must be plain in its priorities. It must understand that sovereignty in our age is not about chest-thumping rhetoric but about competence to ensure food, energy, education, order, and credibility.
In this setting, the prime minister’s preferred idiom of leadership matters. Much of public life today involves theatre: sirens, entourages, waste, and upholstered ego. Against that vulgar pageantry, he has tried to project something else: restraint, sobriety, a notion of office as trusteeship rather than spectacle. In a poor country, personal frugality in leadership is pedagogic. It tells the political class that the age of indulgent government must end.
As for the cabinet, one should resist both cynicism and flattery. It is neither a gathering of miracle workers nor a council of mediocrities. It appears, factually, to be a mixed formation: senior political veterans, recognised party figures, some technocratic appointments, and a few first-time parliamentarians shaped by the upheavals of recent years. Outside observers have already noted both the weight of the old guard and the inclusion, at junior levels, of newer protest-era voices. That seems a fair description. A cabinet in a recovering democracy need not be glamorous; it must be competent, cohesive, and capable of learning in public. On that count, cautious optimism is a legitimate stance.
For my own part, serving now in government after years in democratic struggle, I feel most sharply the moral urgency of education. If politics is to mean anything beyond the capture of office, it must alter the life chances of children. In primary and mass education, we are working under the prime minister’s instructions to remake the primary school into something more than a holding pen of attendance and certificates. It must become a vault of learning: the place where language is formed, numeracy secured, curiosity dignified, discipline humanised, and the future made less accidental.
This is especially urgent because our present literacy claims, though often repeated with bureaucratic satisfaction, still conceal a harsher truth. Bangladesh’s literacy rate for those aged seven and above was reported at 74 percent in 2022, and functional literacy at 77.9 percent in 2023. But literacy that means little more than name-writing, form-filling, or ritual survival in the paper economy is not enough. A nation cannot modernise on signature-literacy alone. It requires reading with comprehension, writing with clarity, and reasoning with confidence. The target must be nothing less than genuine literacy for all, because only from that foundation can secondary schooling succeed, technical education deepen, and higher education cease to be a bottleneck of disappointment.
So the burden before this government is immense. It must repair the economy without cruelty, reform the state without chaos, govern firmly without forgetting why democracy was demanded in the first place. It must keep faith with the manifesto without becoming enslaved to rhetoric. It must confront a broken inheritance and a hostile world at the same time.
But there is also, beneath the burden, an austere kind of hope. Not the sentimental hope of campaign music and flags. Not the hallucination that one election redeems a nation. Rather, the sterner hope that comes when public office is inhabited by people who know what it took to get there, and therefore know what it would mean to fail. A government born after democratic struggle carries a special obligation: to prove that sacrifice was not merely dramatic, but useful.
That is the work now. Less trumpeting, more toil. Less pageantry, more repair. The republic, after all its bruising, asks not for ecstasy, but for seriousness.
Bobby Hajjaj, MP, is the state minister for primary and mass education. He writes in his personal capacity and can be reached at [email protected].
Views expressed in this article are the author's own.
Follow The Daily Star Opinion on Facebook for the latest opinions, commentaries, and analyses by experts and professionals. To contribute your article or letter to The Daily Star Opinion, see our guidelines for submission.
