🇧🇩 Nearly Half of Bangladesh’s Households Are Trapped in Debt! According to the BBS Living Standard Survey 2025, 47.42% of households are in debt as rising living costs outpace incomes. With rural households facing an even heavier burden, borrowing is increasingly becoming a means of survival, not a choice. How long can ordinary Bangladeshis sustain this widening gap between income and the cost of living?⁩ #CostOfLiving #PriceHike #Bangladesh

Why Do the BNP and Jamaat Regard Pakistan as Their Qibla? —— Why has no one ever answered the question of why certain political parties in Bangladesh feel such deep affection for a country whose army, even after signing the Instrument of Surrender on 16 December 1971, refused to use the word “surrender” in its official statement? The ISPR said that day that hostilities had ceased following an arrangement between local commanders. That was it. The document of defeat was signed at Dhaka’s Racecourse Ground, while the people of Pakistan were told that an “arrangement” had been made. This legacy of lies has never ended. Husain Haqqani, who later became Pakistan’s ambassador to Washington, wrote that he was fifteen at the time. His father returned home after hearing the news of the surrender on the BBC, but young Haqqani shouted that it was all foreign propaganda against Pakistan. Just four days earlier, Radio Pakistan had announced that there was no question of surrender. An entire nation was kept in the dark as it was led to defeat. An inquiry commission was subsequently established: the Hamoodur Rahman Commission. It heard testimony from more than two hundred witnesses. It called for the public trial of six generals, including Yahya Khan. It demanded courts-martial for six officers, including Niazi. It also recommended the establishment of a separate tribunal to investigate atrocities committed in East Pakistan. And what was the outcome? Nothing. The accused retired with full pensions and even received military salutes after their deaths. Eleven of the report’s twelve copies were destroyed. The remaining copy was buried for nearly three decades. So how did the report finally reach the people of Pakistan? Not through their own government. In August 2000, India’s India Today published excerpts from it. Four months later, embarrassed by the disclosure, the Pakistani government released the report. It took twenty-nine years for a country to read its own investigation into its defeat—and even then, had a newspaper in an enemy country not exposed it, the wait might have been even longer. It is also worth examining who helped cover up this entire affair. In 1971, two men served as the army’s public faces: Brigadier A. R. Siddiqi in Rawalpindi and Major Siddiq Salik in Dhaka. The morning after the operation on the night of 25 March, Siddiqi was sitting in Dhaka Cantonment, eating oranges handed to him by Tikka Khan. Tikka told him they had just arrived fresh from West Pakistan. This scene appears in Siddiqi’s own diary. Neither man was ever held accountable. On the contrary, both later wrote books about 1971, and one of them even received an award from Zia-ul-Haq in 1985 before becoming head of public relations for the three armed services. In Pakistani school textbooks, the chapter on 1971 is titled “The Fall of East Pakistan.” The causes listed include an Indian conspiracy and espionage by Hindus. The number of civilians who died does not appear in any textbook. Not even a single figure is given. In 2019, ISPR chief Asif Ghafoor declared at a press conference that Pakistan would not have been divided in 1971 if today’s media had existed back then. Journalists sitting before him brought up the name of Anthony Mascarenhas. The army itself had taken that journalist on a tour of East Pakistan. Realising that what he had witnessed could never be published in Pakistan, he fled to London and wrote an article titled “Genocide,” published in The Sunday Times on 13 June. The media existed in 1971, too. It simply was not allowed to do its job. In 2022, outgoing army chief Bajwa announced that he would correct the historical record, claiming that the fall of East Pakistan was not a military failure but a political one. According to his figures, 34,000 Pakistani troops faced 250,000 Indian soldiers and 200,000 members of the Mukti Bahini. In other words, he was unwilling even to count the 92,000 who surrendered as soldiers, yet had no qualms about inflating the numbers of those who defeated them. Within a week, Pakistan’s own foreign minister declared that the fall of Dhaka had been a military failure. Two different versions of history from the same state in the same week. Last year, following a four-day conflict with India, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif stood before soldiers in Sialkot and declared, “You have avenged the war of 1971.” He repeated the same statement in Muzaffarabad and Quetta. Taking a jab at Modi, he also asked who had trained the Mukti Bahini in 1971. According to this logic, 1971 was a defeat at the hands of India, and striking Indian bases is enough to avenge that defeat. The people of East Pakistan do not exist in this calculation. Neither do our mothers, sisters, brothers, or our people. Our country itself has disappeared from the narrative. All that remains is “India’s conspiracy.” On 5 December, the current ISPR chief, Lieutenant General Ahmed Sharif Chaudhry, sat at a press conference and called Sheikh Mujibur Rahman a “traitor.” Even in 2025, the spokesperson of the Pakistani army was still calling a man whose call gave birth to an independent country a traitor. The occasion was an attack on imprisoned Imran Khan. Here, the man who gave birth to Bangladesh was reduced to a convenient pretext for smearing a jailed politician. Now, let us look at our own house. What explains this fawning attitude in Bangladesh’s power politics towards an army that does not tell the truth even to its own people, whose inquiry report remained hidden for twenty-nine years, and whose chief still calls the Father of our Nation a traitor? Whenever the names of Pakistan and the BNP, currently in power, and Jamaat-e-Islami, which shares power in Parliament, appear in the same conversation, the tone of both parties softens. Their eyes seem to light up whenever they look towards Islamabad and Rawalpindi. Every time an insult comes from across the border, they remain silent—or else explain it away as “diplomacy.” When we see such desperate yearning for Pakistan from these two parties, we cannot help but ask one question about the very country that sat down to breakfast, eating oranges, on the morning after 25 March 1971. Is this relationship purely diplomatic, or is it a bond in which the greater the humiliation, the deeper the allegiance? The ISPR does not even allow the truth to reach the people of its own country. Why, then, do these two parties in Bangladesh look so eagerly towards that very narrative? They may refuse to say it openly, but the people understand perfectly well: this is the desperate longing of an illegitimate child without a recognised father for an illegitimate father.⁩