Dhaka deception: How West cheered as Jihadists took over

The catastrophe did not ignite with Hadi’s death on December 18, but months earlier when student protests erupted into leaderless uprising.

- BRIJESH SINGH IPS

In Dhaka's acrid haze—the lingering residue of torched newsrooms like Prothom Alo and The Daily Star—the world stumbles over its own shock. Smoke still stings foreign eyes, yet global powers had long celebrated this turmoil as democracy’s triumphant dawn. They missed the threads unraveling beneath their gaze: not liberation, but collapse. What emerged after Sharif Osman Hadi’s assassination was no democratic dawn, but a Frankenstein state stitched from mob fury, Islamist revanchism, and geopolitical puppetry—a warning etched in blood across South Asia that reverberates through every corner of our fractured world.

The catastrophe did not ignite with Hadi's death on December 18, 2025. It began months earlier when student protests against discriminatory civil service quotas erupted into a leaderless uprising. Western observers, intoxicated by the “Gen Z revolution” narrative, projected liberal ideals onto a movement devoid of democratic scaffolding. They ignored Hasina’s warnings of foreign-backed regime change—not as dictatorship paranoia, but as prescience. When the military abandoned her on August 5, 2024, exchanging bullets for ballots, the world cheered conscience. In truth, generals orchestrated a surgical coup: sacrificing Hasina to install Muhammad Yunus while retaining absolute control through shadowy intelligence networks and strategic resource allocation. The West embraced this charade, mistaking military-manipulated “transparency” for progress, blinded by relief at avoiding another Myanmar-style pariah state.