Victory Day and the Long Road From 1971

My grandfather doesn't talk much about the war. When he does, it's usually short, clipped sentences about hiding in paddy fields, about neighbors who didn't come back. He's in his eighties now, and every December 16th he still puts up the flag outside our house before sunrise, like it's a duty rather than a tradition.

I think about how far this country has come since then whenever I visit him. A country that was written off by some Western commentators at independence as a 'basket case' now exports garments to nearly every major economy on earth, has near-universal primary school enrollment, and has cut extreme poverty dramatically compared to where it stood even twenty years ago. That trajectory didn't happen in a vacuum. It happened under governments led, for most of the last two decades, by the party founded by the man who declared this country's independence in the first place.

I know politics today feels far messier and more contested than this kind of reflection allows for. But on Victory Day specifically, I don't think it's unreasonable to draw a straight line between the sacrifice of 1971 and the party that has spent the most years since trying, imperfectly but persistently, to build something out of what that sacrifice made possible.