A government can lose an election long before it loses power. It can also lose the public long before the opposition wins an election. In Bangladesh’s current political reality, this distinction matters.
The greatest threat to any government may not come from the border, the airport or a returning political leader. It may come from the everyday experience of citizens who begin to compare the present with the past, not through political theory, but through the most basic calculations of household life: Electricity, food, gas, and security.
This is where the discussion about Sheikh Hasina’s possible political comeback, whether literal or psychological, deserves a more serious reading.
The argument that she could “return through the border or airport” is perhaps too simplistic. A former ruler does not necessarily need to physically return to influence politics.
Political memory can return on its own. It returns when people begin to say: “At least things were better then.” That sentence, however uncomfortable it may be, can become politically more dangerous than any speech delivered from abroad.
For the ordinary citizen, politics is ultimately experienced through the household. A university professor may discuss constitutional reform, a political activist may debate the July Charter, and a historian may argue over the legacy of 1971. These questions matter deeply to the future of the country.
But the family sitting in a dark room during a power cut experiences politics differently. A mother trying to put a child to sleep does not experience the state through its constitutional language. She experiences it through the fan that has stopped moving, the heat that has become unbearable, and the anxiety of another night without sleep.
This does not mean that political rights, disappearances, extrajudicial killings, corruption, or democratic accountability are unimportant. Quite the opposite. They are fundamental. But political legitimacy cannot survive on historical justification alone.
A government has to translate political change into improvements that ordinary people can actually feel. Otherwise, the great promises of political transformation gradually become abstract while the price of rice, electricity bills, and household expenses become painfully concrete.
There is an uncomfortable lesson here for the current political order. The fall of the Awami League government created political space for forces that had previously been suppressed or marginalized. BNP and Jamaat have gained greater political room, while newer political actors have emerged.
People who once feared arrest, disappearance, or political violence can now participate more openly in political life. That is an important democratic achievement. Yet political freedom by itself does not automatically produce political satisfaction.
The ordinary citizen does not pay an electricity bill with democratic credentials. He does not feed his children with political promises. He cannot take the July Charter to the grocery shop and ask the shopkeeper to reduce the price of essentials. At the end of the month, what reaches his household is not a political manifesto but a bill.
This is why electricity has become more than an infrastructure issue. It is becoming a test of the state’s relationship with its citizens. Load shedding is not merely an inconvenience when it becomes prolonged. It affects sleep, work, education, health, and family life.
A student cannot study properly in extreme heat without electricity. A worker cannot rest properly after a long day. Elderly people and children suffer disproportionately. When this happens repeatedly, frustration stops being an individual experience and becomes a collective political memory.
The same is true of the market. Inflation does not require a political vocabulary. People understand it instinctively. They know when the same amount of money buys less food. They know when a monthly salary disappears before the month ends. They know when extortion at different levels eventually reaches the price of the product they purchase. They may not know which ministry is responsible, but they know that something is wrong.
This creates a dangerous political equation. When people become exhausted by the present, they begin to romanticize the past. Memory becomes selective. The political violence of the previous regime may remain historically undeniable, yet a family struggling through unbearable living costs may temporarily push those memories into the background. This is not necessarily ideological rehabilitation. It can simply be the psychology of survival.
That is why saying “Hasina cannot return” may be politically naive. She may not need to return in person.
The comparison itself can return. If citizens repeatedly experience power cuts, rising prices, extortion, and administrative incompetence, the previous government can acquire a strange new political currency. Its failures may remain, but some of its perceived successes will be remembered more vividly.
This is how political nostalgia works. It rarely begins with admiration. It begins with comparison.
The greater danger, therefore, is not that people suddenly forget what happened under the Awami League. It is that they become so disappointed with the present that they begin to minimize what happened in the past.
A government that wants to prevent such nostalgia cannot do so through slogans, border controls, or political rhetoric. It has to outperform the past in the daily lives of citizens.
That is a much harder task.
It requires reliable electricity, affordable essentials, functioning public services, effective law enforcement, and an administration that is capable rather than merely politically loyal.
It requires confronting extortion not as a slogan but as an economic problem that directly affects consumers. It requires ministers and bureaucrats to understand that incompetence is not politically neutral. Every failure eventually reaches someone’s kitchen table.
The government also needs to understand the difference between political legitimacy and public patience. People may support a government because they believe it represents a historic transition. But historic patience has limits.
A citizen who cannot sleep night after night will eventually stop thinking about the historical significance of the government and start thinking about whether the government can govern.
That is the real test before Bangladesh today.
The question is not simply who occupies the presidency, who leads which political party, or which faction controls which institution. Nor is it enough to ask who defeated whom in the political struggle.
The more consequential question is whether the citizen feels that his life has become more secure, affordable, and dignified after the political transformation.
If the answer is no, then the political transition remains incomplete.
There is an even deeper irony here. The very people who fought for political change may eventually become its harshest critics if that change does not improve everyday life.
Revolutions and mass movements create enormous expectations because they promise not merely a change of rulers but a change in the conditions under which people live.
When those expectations collide with darkness, inflation, and insecurity, disappointment becomes especially intense.
Bangladesh’s political class should therefore stop treating electricity, the market and extortion as ordinary administrative problems. They are political problems because they determine how citizens experience the state.
The government’s strongest defense against political nostalgia is not a speech about the past. It is a functioning present.
No government can permanently prevent people from comparing yesterday with today. It can only make the comparison unnecessary.
If today’s government can provide electricity more reliably, keep essential goods within the reach of ordinary families, curb extortion, and make public institutions work, then the past will gradually lose its political attraction. But if the present becomes a daily struggle, the past will inevitably begin to look better than it actually was.
If the government wants to prevent the politics of the past from returning, it must first make the present worth defending.
HM Nazmul Alam is an academic, journalist, and political analyst based in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Currently he teaches at IUBAT.
