The chalk dust hasn’t settled. It hangs, suspended in the memory of a Dhaka afternoon, mixed with the sharper, more final scent of burning metal and fuel. July 21, 2025. Milestone College. The roar, the sickening lurch, the impact that vibrated through concrete bones and human souls. Numerous lives. Snuffed out. Students, teachers, dreams interrupted mid-sentence, futures erased before the bell could ring.
We mourned. We still mourn. We will lay flowers. We shed tears. We declared a day of national grief. We performed the rituals of shock and sorrow.
But beneath the wreaths and the headlines screaming tragedylurks a colder, more insidious truth, one we are being trained to accept: This is not an aberration; it is a pattern. This is governance by fait accompli -- the presentation of preventable horror as an unavoidable, irreversible fact.
Look at the faces lost in Uttara. Really look. See the youth, the potential, the ordinary, beautiful humanity. Those were my children. Those were our children. Not statistics in a distant report, but the kids who sat in classrooms, who walked streets choked with the same smog we breathe, whose laughter echoed in homes straining under the same pressures as ours.
Their deaths are not merely an accident; they are the bloody punctuation mark on a decades-long sentence written in negligence and political cowardice. We weep, yes. But then the news cycle spins, the public’s gaze shifts, the urgency fades, and the structures that manufactured this disaster remain untouched, primed to kill again.
Why? Because confronting those structures is hard. Because accountability is messy. Because it’s easier to manage grief than to dismantle a system built on presenting catastrophe as destiny.The fait accompli playbook is chillingly familiar.
First comes the catastrophe itself -- spectacular, horrifying, undeniable. The jet plunging into the school. The factory collapsing on hundreds. The ferry capsizing in the monsoon-swollen river. The chemical explosion consuming a neighbourhood. The fire trapping workers behind locked gates. Each one unique in its horror, identical in its preventable core.
Then arrives the outpouring and obfuscation -- immediate shock, expressions of profound sorrow from the highest offices, emergency meetings, vows of “investigation” and “stern action”. Initial, often contradictory, explanations surface: “Technical fault,” “pilot error,” “building code violations,” “overcrowding,”“unforeseen weather.” The focus narrows intensely, but conveniently, onto the immediate trigger, obscuring the deep rot that allowed it.
Next follows the ritual investigation -- an inquiry announced, sometimes internal, sometimes judicial, beginning with fanfare, then descending into silence, confusing leaks, or findings so narrow they exonerate systemic responsibility. Time stretches, public attention wanes, and the complexities of procurement, maintenance, regulation, urban planning, and accountability are buried under bureaucratic sludge. Remember Rana Plaza? Remember the Nimtali inferno? Remember the countless ferry disasters? Where are the transformative outcomes? Where are the powerful figures held truly accountable?
Finally, we reach the normalization and forgetting --compensation paid, often inadequate, always belated; temporary fixes might be implemented; the specific machinery involved might be briefly grounded or inspected. But the system -- the aging jets flying over schools, the rickety ferries sailing overloaded, the factories built on corruption, the training conducted over megacities. It all grinds back into motion. The disaster becomes a sad historical footnote, a “lesson learned”that fundamentally changes nothing. The fait accompli is complete: The horror happened, we mourned, we “investigated,” and we moved on. The structures of risk remain intact, awaiting the next spark.
Why Uttara? Why now? Because it crystallizes the grotesque absurdity.
Consider the jets: Flying coffins from the 1980s, relics older than the pilots strapping into them. We know they are obsolete. We know they are prone to failure. Yet, they roar over the densest parts of Dhaka, a city gasping for breath beneath 23 million souls. Why? Cost? Inertia? A procurement system mired in delays, indecision, or worse? The fait accompli whispers: “Modernisation is complex, expensive. These planes are here. We must use them. What can we do?”
Consider the location: Training fighter pilots -- inherently risky, demanding manoeuvres -- above a teeming metropolis. Kurmitola Air Base, nestled beside the international airport, surrounded by homes, markets, schools. It’s urban planning as Russian roulette. The argument? “It's the established base. Relocation is difficult, costly.” The fait accompli shrugs: “It's always been there. Where else would we go?” The risk to millions becomes an accepted, unspoken tax of city life.
Consider Tejgaon: The ghost airport haunting the city's heart. 300 acres of prime land, a potential lung for a suffocating populace, a canvas for parks, housing, innovation. Yet, it remains largely idle, a decaying symbol of VIP convenience and institutional inertia. Why? The fait accompli murmurs: “It's strategic... sometimes. Changing it is complicated. It’s there.”The potential for public good is sacrificed on the altar of bureaucratic stasis and unexamined privilege.
This isn't just about aviation. It’s about the ferries we board, trusting flimsy hulls and overloaded decks because “that's how it's done.”
It’s about the factories where workers enter, knowing exits might be locked, fire extinguishers absent, because enforcement is lax and profit is king.
It’s about buildings that sway ominously, erected on sand and bribes, because regulations are for the weak and regulatory inspections are negotiable.
It’s about rivers poisoned, air choked, because environmental concerns lose to the relentless engine of “development” and impunity.
Each disaster is presented as an isolated “tragedy,” a bolt from the blue. But connect the dots, and a map of systemic failure emerges -- a map where risk is calculated, not against human life, but against political cost and bureaucratic ease.
The fait accompli strategy works because it banks on our exhaustion, our sense of helplessness, the overwhelming nature of the problems, and the deliberate cultivation of collective amnesia.
It relies on the news cycle shifting, on the next crisis distracting us. It relies on grief, however deep, eventually becoming passive acceptance. “What can we do?” becomes the national sigh.
But those were our children in Uttara. They weren't faceless casualties of fate. They were embodiments of stolen potential, sacrifices on the altar of a governance model that has long prioritized managing the aftermath of disaster over preventing it. Their blood and burned flesh demands more than fading wreaths and hollow promises. It demands we reject the fait accompli.
It demands we ask, relentlessly, publicly, and with unified fury: Why are we still gambling with 40-year-old warplanes over schools? Where is the transparent, funded, urgent plan for fleet modernization and relocation of hazardous training? Who profits from the paralysis at Tejgaon? When will this land be reclaimed for the people gasping for space and breath?
Where are the real consequences for systemic failure? Not just low-level scapegoats, but accountability that reaches the decision-makers who prioritize convenience over safety, inertia over innovation? How many more “tragedies” constitute a policy? When does a pattern of preventable death become state-sanctioned negligence?
Mourning is necessary. But mourning without demanding systemic change is complicity. It is accepting the fait accompli --accepting that our children’s lives are the inevitable cost of doing business in a broken system.
The next roar over Dhaka shouldn’t be the death rattle of an antique jet. It should be the roar of a public that has finally said: Enough. Enough of the preventable funerals. Enough of the vanished investigations. Enough of the land wasted. Enough of the governance by disaster.
We owe it to those we have lost. We owe it to the thousands lost in Rana Plaza, in Nimtali, in the rivers, in the fires. We owe it to the children sitting in classrooms right now, looking up at the shadow of the next potential catastrophe. We owe it to ourselves.
Let the tears flow, but let them water the seeds of relentless, unforgiving demand. Let our grief be the fuel that finally burns down the rotten structures of fait accompli governance. Anything less betrays the children we buried, and the future we are stealing from the children still breathing. The time for accepting tragedy as policy is over. The time for building a state that protects its people – truly, fiercely, systematically – is now. Anything less is unforgivable.
Zakir Kibria is a writer. Entrepreneur | Chronicler of Entropy | Cognitive Dissident. Chasing next caffeine fix, immersive auditory haze, free falls. Collector of glances. “Some desires defy gravity.” Email: zk@krishikaaj.com.