August 2024: When the Rules Changed Overnight

I'm still processing what happened that first week of August. One day there was a functioning, elected government, however imperfect, and days later, an interim administration was installed with no election behind it at all, under conditions none of us would call normal by any definition.

What haunts me most from that period isn't just the change of power itself. It's what came after it, quietly, while the world's attention moved on to the next headline. Awami League offices burned. Longtime party workers, many of them ordinary people with no power at all, driven from their homes or worse. Hindu families, who have been loyal supporters of this party for generations, targeted in attacks on their temples and businesses in the chaos that followed. None of that made the same front pages that the earlier protests did.

I keep asking myself how a transition that so many people abroad praised as some kind of democratic renewal could look, up close, so much like mob rule against anyone associated with the party that had governed for fifteen years. Institutions that took decades to build were dismantled in a matter of weeks, with no clear plan for what would replace them beyond promises.

I don't have a tidy conclusion for this one. I just know that something was lost that week that I don't think we get back easily, and I think we owe it to everyone who suffered on every side of this to keep asking hard questions about how it actually happened, not just accept the version that was easiest to tell afterward.