Every morning in Dhaka, I get into my car and immediately begin losing faith in my country.
I am not speaking metaphorically. I mean the literal, grinding experience of trying to move from one point to another, horns blaring around you, in a city that has collectively decided that rules are for other people. The CNG cuts across three lanes without signalling. The rickshaw puller drifts into the centre of the road and stops. He is not confused. He has decided that stopping there is as valid an option as any other. A bus reverses against traffic on a flyover. Somewhere behind me, a car climbs the pavement because the pavement is, apparently, also a road. Nobody is surprised. Nobody yields.
I used to get angry. Tears would roll down my face. Now I just watch. And what I see, every single morning, is Bangladesh.
The metaphor is precise. Dhaka’s roads and Bangladesh’s politics operate on identical logic: the strong claim the right of way, the weak absorb the cost, rules exist on paper and are violated in practice, and no one is ever seriously accountable. We have built a city where movement itself has been defeated.
What defeated it? Not a lack of roads, not a lack of laws. A culture defeated it: a culture that has never genuinely internalised the idea that your right to move ends where someone else’s begins.
This is the foundational deficit. And it shows up, with remarkable consistency, in every arena of Bangladeshi public life.
Political scientists have a word for this condition: anomie. The breakdown of social norms that govern a community. The state where rules are formally present but functionally meaningless because no one enforces them and no one believes others will follow them. Drive through Farmgate at rush hour and you will understand anomie better than any textbook can explain it.
Bangladesh’s political culture has been described in academic literature as “parochial, low and destructive,” characterised by an absence of patience, camaraderie, and respect for opposing views. I have spent years reading about politics, and I would not quarrel with that description. What strikes me is how perfectly it also describes the intersection at Bijoy Sarani on a weekday morning.
We are not, in other words, dealing with two separate problems. We are dealing with the same problem wearing two different outfits.
But one observation has stayed with me, and it tells me the disease is not terminal: it is untreated.
For three days in August 2024, after Sheikh Hasina fled the country on the afternoon of the 5th, Bangladesh had no functioning government, no police on the streets, and no traffic officers at any intersection in Dhaka. By every conventional logic, this should have been the city’s worst traffic moment. A megalopolis of twenty million people, no law enforcement, no authority, no one in charge.
Instead, it was the best traffic Dhaka has seen in living memory.
At Bijoy Sarani, one of the most reliably chaotic intersections in the country, a junction I have navigated in varying states of despair for years, young men were directing cars with bamboo poles and cricket bats. At Mirpur-2, Mirpur-10, Agargaon, Mohakhali, and Bangla Motor, student volunteers fanned out across the city and did something the entire apparatus of the state had failed to do: they enforced the lanes. They stopped vehicles going the wrong way. They would not let rickshaws mount the pavement. They waved through traffic in orderly alternation, one direction at a time, the way it is theoretically supposed to work. One volunteer at Bijoy Sarani, when asked why he was standing in the August heat directing strangers, grinned and said: “There are no police: shob bhagse.” They’ve all run away.
And somehow, without the police, without the traffic wardens, without the politicians or the VIP convoys or the party flags on the bonnets, the traffic flowed. Dhaka moved.
I have thought about those three days more than almost anything else that happened in 2024. They were extraordinary because of what kind of order emerged, and why. It was not enforced. It was chosen. Young people with no institutional authority, no uniforms, no threat of a fine or an arrest, stood at the city’s most contested intersections and asked the simplest of questions: will you yield? And, for three days, the answer was yes.
Why? Because the social contract had been momentarily reset. The usual hierarchy (the VIP, the party man, the transport union boss, the constable with his hand out) had dissolved overnight. In its absence, something older and more fundamental surfaced: the basic recognition that the person in the next lane is also a person, with somewhere to be, and that the road belongs to both of you. Civil etiquette, it turns out, does not require a government. It requires only the genuine belief that rules are for everyone, including yourself.
The traffic returned to its normal dysfunction within two weeks. By mid August, the protests and rallies had resumed, human chains were blocking Farmgate and Shahbagh, and the metro was down. Volunteers put the bamboo poles away and went back to their campuses. The CNG drivers remembered that lane markings are merely a suggestion.
But those three days happened. They are evidence, irrefutable and witnessed by the whole country, that the problem is not who we are. It is who we have become under decades of a political culture that modelled, rewarded, and normalised the refusal to yield.
The CNG driver who cuts into oncoming traffic endangers the people around him. He knows this. He does it anyway, because his destination matters more to him than anyone else’s safety. Scale that logic up to the level of national politics, arm it with petrol bombs, and you have the blockades.
Consider what happened on 14 July 2024. Tens of thousands of university students, the same young people who would, three weeks later, stand in the August heat directing traffic with bamboo poles, were on the streets protesting a quota system that reserved government jobs on the basis of family lineage rather than merit. They were asking a straightforward question: in a republic, should a man’s grandfather’s military service determine his grandchild’s career prospects?
Sheikh Hasina, then prime minister, delivered her answer at a press conference. She called them Razakars.
In Bangladesh, there is no word heavier with historical violence than Razakar. It is not an insult: it is an accusation of genocide collaboration. To call a student who is asking about exam quotas a Razakar is to refuse engagement with his argument. It is to declare him an enemy of the nation, unworthy of basic civic regard, someone to be broken rather than answered.
The remark did not come from ignorance. It came from the same instinct that drives the bus driver who, finding a pedestrian in his lane, honks and accelerates rather than slows. The student is an inconvenience. The solution, in both cases, is to run them over.
We know how that story ended.
Bangladesh’s parliament has, over the years, produced its own version of road rage. In 2013, a ruling party MP used language on the floor of the National Assembly so abusive that the entire opposition walked out. Days later, those same MPs admitted they were “embarrassed in social and family circles” by what they had said. They knew they had crossed a line. They crossed it anyway. And then, nothing. No sanction. No consequence. No institutional memory.
This is the traffic signal that no one respects because no one has been fined in living memory for running it.
What does all of this have in common? What connects the CNG driver who goes the wrong way down Mirpur Road and the politician who burns a bus, calls a student a traitor, or arrests a journalist before dawn?
Both have internalised the same proposition: I am the most important actor in this space, and the space exists to serve my purpose.
The CNG driver does not think he is a bad person. He thinks he is a practical one. The road is there to get him where he needs to go, and if the rules prevent that, the rules are the problem. The political leader who deploys a hartal (a general strike called to shut down public life and economic activity), a security law, or a slur operates on the same logic. The republic is there to produce outcomes favourable to him; if its institutions and citizens prevent that, those institutions and citizens are the problem.
Civil etiquette is more than the surface politeness of keeping your voice down in a restaurant. It is the recognition that your right of way ends at the point where it intersects with someone else’s. It is the willingness to yield. You do not yield because you are weak. You do not yield because the other person is stronger. You yield because you have genuinely accepted that they have a right to be there too.
Bangladesh, in its politics and on its roads, has chronically refused this acceptance. We signal but do not turn. We pledge but do not comply. We write the laws and run the lights.
But those three days remind me that we are not incapable of it. We knew how to yield. We did it, spontaneously, in the absence of anyone forcing us to. The students at Bijoy Sarani with their bamboo poles did not need a ministry of transport or a traffic sergeant. They needed only the conviction that the road was shared, and the willingness to act on that conviction.
Every evening, I make the same drive home that I made in the morning. The same intersections. The same near misses. The same resigned rage on everyone’s faces. But I think now of those three days and I cannot fully despair.
The disease is not in our nature. It is in our politics: in decades of leaders who modelled the opposite of yielding, who taught an entire country by example that the strong take the road and the weak get out of the way. Fix the politics, and you may, over time, fix the road. They are, as I have argued, the same problem.
Until then, I will keep driving. And watching. And remembering August.