KC Writes

22 August 2025.       (My Heroes of Bangladesh) I name them in the order history placed them, but in my heart they stand equal — three voices who kept our ship from sinking when storms raged.  • Tajuddin Ahmad — in 1971, when we had no sails, no anchor, no flag, he became the helmsman, building a government in exile and steering a cause that could have easily drowned.  • Ziaur Rahman — the soldier whose voice declared our freedom and later kept a battered vessel afloat, refusing to let Bangladesh capsize when despair and division threatened to pull it under.  • Professor Muhammad Yunus — for the past year, when atrocity and corruption threatened to choke the nation’s spirit, he became the voice of conscience. He showed that Bangladesh could rise above its tormentors and still chart a course toward dignity and hope. But he will leave in February. Between their steady hands, the ship was too often left rudderless — suffocated by BAKSAL’s one-party cage, seize...

20 August 2025 Propaganda has a short memory. Corpses do not. Fifty-four years on, some voices whisper that 1971 was no genocide at all. That only a few thousand perished. That the refugee columns were fabricated. That the mass rapes were fantasy. They want to sandblast the blood off the marble, to reduce a nation’s birth to a border skirmish. But the graves refuse to cooperate. The numbers refuse to shrink. And the scars on this land will not fade into a polite footnote. Chuknagar: A River Port of Corpses On 20 May 1971, tens of thousands gathered at Chuknagar, a river port in Khulna, hoping to cross into India. Pakistani troops arrived with machine guns and turned a crowd of refugees into a swamp of death. Survivors recall boats sinking under bodies, the river choking on flesh. The toll? 10,000–12,000 in a single day . One massacre — already larger than the entire “few thousand” fantasy. Chuknagar alone buries denialism. Counting the Dead The killings stretched from Dhaka University ...

15 August 2025 Sheikh Mujibur Rahman should be honoured for what he was — the  torchbearer  of our independence movement. He carried the banner, united the people, and became the face of our struggle. But history must be honest. After the war ended in December 1971, Mujib was freed from prison, flown to London, then to New Delhi, and finally returned to Dhaka on  10 January 1972 . Two days later, he was sworn in as Prime Minister. It was then, according to an interview given by Tajuddin Ahmad’s daughter Sharmin Ahmad, that Mujib whispered to her father the moment he arrived in Dhaka that he intended to take the premiership. While still in London, Mujib met international reporters at Claridge’s Hotel on  8 January 1972  and declared that “millions” had been killed in the war. Soon after, in a televised interview with David Frost, he repeated the figure of  three million . As  The Guardian  later reported, Serajur Rahman — then deputy head of BBC Ba...

12 August 2025 A government that fears its citizens will always find a way to watch them. Under the Awami League, Bangladesh perfected that fear—transforming the state into a machine that didn’t just listen to the people, but disappeared them. What began with imported Israeli-linked spyware ended, for many, in the pitch-black hell of the Aynaghars—backed by a law that gave legal cover to digital repression: the Digital Security Act. Step One: Spying Like a Police State While loudly proclaiming democratic credentials, the Awami League quietly assembled one of the most intrusive surveillance arsenals in South Asia. No formal ties with Israel? No problem—shell companies and intermediaries were used to acquire the hardware of repression. • 2018 – DGFI bought a P6 Intercept IMSI-catcher—capable of hijacking and altering hundreds of phone calls—just one day after Gen. Aziz Ahmed became Army Chief. The deal was routed through Bangkok fixer James Moloney. • 2019 – NSI spent $3 million ...

10 August 2025  I do not support scrapping our constitution or declaring a “Second Republic.” The problem in Bangladesh has never been the parchment — it’s the politicians who trample it. What we need are surgical amendments: stronger checks and balances, judicial independence, and bulletproof protections for free and fair elections. Not a reckless constitutional reboot. I was reminded of this at the 100th birth centenary of Tajuddin Ahmad, where I met several decorated Birs — the real liberators of Bangladesh. These men once stared down the Pakistani war machine in 1971. Every one of them told me the same thing: they did not fight for Sheikh Mujibur Rahman or the Awami League. They fought to end the massacres, the language suppression, and the daily humiliation of West Pakistani rule. They fought for Bangladesh — not for a party flag. And they are not stuck in nostalgia. In fact, they were happy and proud to see Gen Z achieve the 2024 revolution, viewing it as a continuation of th...

 3 August 2025 This is the second installment in a series probing Bangladesh’s defense posture. Here, we dissect how grandiose plans like Forces Goal 2030 have failed to translate into real deterrence or air dominance. If Part One was a wake-up call, this is the autopsy of complacency. I. The Fiscal Mirage: Sizeable Budgets, Tiny Outcomes Defence spending in Bangladesh has surged—from $774 million in 2005 to nearly $4.3 billion in 2025. Projections for FY2025–26 suggest ৳50,000–55,000 crore (approximately $5.3–5.8 billion), the largest ever. Yet only about 20% of that—৳8,000–10,000 crore ($800 million–$1 billion)—is allocated to procurement of tangible assets. Contrast that with $5.2 billion spent between 2012 and 2017 under Forces Goal 2030, and yet Myanmar has outpaced us with new Su‑30SME fighters, delivery of which concluded in December 2024   . Personnel and maintenance swallow half our defense allocation. Flying time still hovers at career-day levels. New equipment remai...