No one in Bangladesh voted for the war. No one here had any say in whether the United States and Israel should attack Iran on February 28.

In Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot, a character with supposed authority intensifies the absurdity by quantifying emotion.

As we walk through the empty streets of Dhaka, we have a chance to turn this relief into real change.

The Liberation War of 1971 remains one of the most consequential and painful chapters in the history of Bangladesh as well as South Asia.

The review bench has acknowledged that constitutional formalism helped wreck electoral credibility in Bangladesh.

Bangladesh has been entrapped in medium-term energy challenges.

In the American case, the resolution exposes the gap between what US officials on the ground knew in 1971 and what the US state was willing to admit.

The politics of memory is never only about the past. It concerns who gets to define the nation through selective remembrance and selective silence, and which parts of the history are elevated, ritualised, or pushed aside.

The nation failed to indict the perpetrators in a proper court of law due to the unlawful clemency declared by Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. No single individual, not even a dictator or a king, can take such a decision without constitutional and parliamentary backing, particularly when the crimes were committed against humanity as a whole.

For nearly two decades, global political discourse was held captive by a single assertion: Iran stood on the brink of becoming a nuclear weapons state. The warnings were constant, urgent, and perpetually imminent, yet each passing year renewed the alarm without seeing the predicted outcome.

The current discussions surrounding the July National Charter (Constitutional Reform) Implementation Order, 2025 stems largely from its nomenclature.

India wants shorter treaty terms (10-15 years) that will give it more frequent negotiating leverage. It cites “climate change” but only as justification for taking more water, not for climate-adapted governance. This is nothing but extractive negotiation, not cooperative adaptation.

History often remembers wars through the cold geometry of maps and the sterile ink of treaties, but for those who survived the tempest of 1971, history is a haunting sensory memory—the acrid scent of gunpowder mingling with the first rains of spring, and the terrifying, rhythmic clatter of tanks as they invaded the narrow, sleeping arteries of Dhaka.

It is a time to reflect on a critical yet often overlooked part of Bangladesh’s maritime system—the seabed and riverbeds that underpin our trade.

“A fish rots from the head”—this ancient proverb reminds us that when leadership loses its moral compass, the entire system begins to decay.

Is involvement in politics a crime? Education Minister ANM Ehsanul Hoque Milon posed that question while defending the government’s decision to appoint vice-chancellors to seven universities and a new chairman of the University Grants Commission on Monday.

A war thousands of kilometres away suddenly shows up in the prices of groceries, the cost of running a factory, government subsidies or import bills, and the anxious arithmetic of a family budget as the people navigate the long lines outside refuelling stations.

This piece is a rebuttal critically examining the article titled “We need education reforms that actually work,” published in The Daily Star on March 15, 2026. Dr Manzoor Ahmed’s evaluation of recent education reforms in Bangladesh contains assumptions and analyses without adequate research evidence.

The environment remains a priority concern in Bangladesh given its status as one of the most vulnerable countries in terms of environmental degradation and climate change impacts.

The first and most pressing concern that arises from this programme is the fiscal sustainability that it requires.