GEORGE Shultz once said, ‘Trust is the coin of the realm.’ For Bangladesh, emerging from the shock and release of the 2024 mass uprising, this phrase is not a metaphor; it is a budget line. If the post-uprising government cannot rebuild public trust quickly, visibly, and fairly, the energy of 2024 will curdle into precisely what it revolted against: suspicion, factionalism, and a politics of permanent emergency. Research on leadership and trust is clear: trust is hard to earn, easy to lose, and essential for governing well. It improves performance, increases voluntary compliance, and unlocks the ‘extra’ acts of citizenship that institutions depend on but cannot compel by force. Trust never appears automatically. It must be built psychologically, socially, and institutionally through consistent behaviour and credible design.
The uprising created a new moral vocabulary, the ‘July spirit’, layered over the older and deeper memory of 1971. Some now treat the two as interchangeable, but they are not. The events of 1971 delivered statehood and the constitutional promise of a homeland for Bengalis and other communities. The events of 2024 were a civic revolt against the degradation of that promise, against disappearances, impunity, and the monopolisation of patriotism. Conflating the two risks two errors at once — trivialising 1971’s existential stakes and inflating 2024 into a blank cheque for whoever claims it most loudly. The better reading is complementary. The July spirit is a demand to restore the dignity of 1971’s covenant, and the means to do so is not charisma or vengeance but trust.
Trust, as scholars have shown, is a psychological state in which we accept vulnerability because we believe others will act competently and in good faith. As Kimberly Elsbach and Steven Currall observe, people judge leaders on two broad axes: morality-based trust, which asks whether leaders will do the right thing, and competence-based trust, which asks whether they can do the job. Beneath these sit integrity, benevolence, competence, fairness, and compassion. When citizens see these qualities consistently, they accept decisions without constant resistance, comply even when unobserved, and contribute beyond what the rulebook requires. A high-trust polity is cheaper to run and better to live in.
Bangladesh now faces a paradox. The new leaders must deliver quick results to sustain legitimacy. Yet the very speed the public demands can tempt shortcuts that destroy trust. Opaque deals, partisan purges, and ‘the ends justify the means’ rhetoric all risk undermining the fragile faith of citizens. As Roderick Kramer and Kimberly Elsbach have argued, the way forward is to operationalise the foundations of trust: interpersonal, social, role-based, and rule-based.
Trust grows out of histories of interaction. Reciprocity kept, promises honoured, competence demonstrated, and mistakes owned all matter. Leaders should treat their first hundred days as a trust ledger rather than a victory lap. They must do small, visible things right and in ways ordinary citizens can verify. Pay stipends when promised. Publish recruitment calendars. If a deadline is missed, explain why, correct the error, and set a new date. This is not public relations; it is how citizens update their internal models of your trustworthiness. Trust breeds trust, and distrust breeds more distrust.
People are also more inclined to trust those they regard as ‘one of us’. In Bangladesh, markers such as region, language, religion, class, and campus affiliation can unify or divide. Leaders should resist the temptation to declare that only those who marched are the real citizens and instead cultivate a broader, more inclusive ‘we’. If the July spirit becomes the property of one party, one generation, or one profession, trust will shrink to the borders of that club. Leaders can counter this by widening participation. When citizens see a teacher from Jashore, a nurse from Mymensingh, a garment worker from Savar, a religious scholar from Comilla, and a young engineer from Chittagong shaping policy together, it performs a kind of nation-building that no slogan can replicate.
Trust also relies on confidence in the systems that produce competent, accountable role holders. Bangladesh must restore the credibility of its roles: police officer, civil servant, election commissioner, and judge. That requires credible entry barriers, proper training, and reliable accountability. When citizens believe that a superintendent of police is a professional with a career incentive to uphold the law, not a partisan enforcer, trust revives. When magistrates are shielded from political pressure, integrity becomes a feature of the system, not an accident of individuals.
Rule-based trust is strengthened when procedures are known, consistent, and fair. Leaders should prioritise procedural justice: fair, transparent, and respectful processes, especially when outcomes are painful. People are more likely to accept unfavourable decisions when they perceive the process as fair and neutral. Were the rules published? Was the hearing genuine? Were reasons explained in plain language? Did the decision-maker treat each citizen as a full member of the polity? If so, trust survives disappointment.
From these principles flow urgent steps that can thicken trust. The government should publish a short ‘Government in 20 Promises’ list with measurable, time-bound commitments that citizens can verify, accompanied by a public dashboard online and posted locally. Every sensitive decision should include a plain-language explanation under a ‘Reasons, Not Rulings’ approach. Discretionary appointments to sensitive roles should be frozen, and recruitment exams and interviews made transparent, with anonymised score sheets and criteria published. The weaponisation of 1971 as a loyalty test should end, and 2024 should not be turned into its mirror image. A national day to honour victims of enforced disappearances, supported across parties and communities, would show moral seriousness without sectarian scorekeeping. Leaders should default to open data, pilot open office hours for MPs, and publish meeting minutes unless there is a narrow reason not to. A credible, judge-led fact-finding commission should be created to address past abuses, separate from vengeance or impunity, with prosecutions handled by regular courts under due process. Procurement sessions could be live-streamed, journalists invited to random inspections, and top civil servants encouraged to explain their work publicly as a form of ‘competence theatre’. When denying permits or enforcing painful orders, officials should overinvest in courtesy, explanation, and alternatives. Leadership teams should be visibly cross-regional and cross-generational, sharing responsibility for policy and trade-offs. Finally, leaders should resist over-curated image management. Let the cameras record the long meetings, the admitted mistakes, and the corrections. Authenticity is itself a signal of competence.
Trust also depends on how leaders handle opponents. The temptation after a revolution is to treat opponents as existential enemies. Resist it. Voluntary deference, the willingness of citizens to accept decisions without coercion, arises when they believe the other side will be fair if power changes hands. That belief must be enacted, not merely preached. Minority parties should be included on oversight committees with real authority. Campus organisations across the spectrum must be protected from retaliatory deregistration. Politically sensitive cases should be assigned by blind rotation, not through special benches. Today’s majority is tomorrow’s minority. Institutionalising fairness lowers the stakes of every election and cools the temperature of every street.
Universities are crucial because they shape the habits of trust or cynicism that students carry into public life. If a proctor’s office functions as a partisan tool, students will graduate with procedural cynicism. Conversely, transparent grading, impartial discipline, and open student union elections will send graduates into society with habits of fairness.
Police reform is equally central. Trust in law enforcement is the keystone of rule-based trust. Repairing it requires clear public commitments such as use-of-force rules and body camera policies, career incentives that reward de-escalation and complaint-free service, and an independent complaints authority with the power to recommend prosecution. Backing the police must mean backing professionalism, not impunity.
Journalism has a place in this architecture of trust. A newspaper that investigates abuses of power but also highlights when institutions work well performs a public service beyond information: it stabilises expectations. When citizens see wrongdoing exposed, they learn that accountability is possible. When they see competence recognised, they learn that excellence is valued. An anniversary issue is therefore not only a celebration of a publication’s history but also a reminder that the press is one of the guardians of trust itself.
Language matters too. Decisions wrapped in technical jargon are read as obfuscation. Leaders should use plain, specific language and be honest about trade-offs. Adults recognise scarcity. They mistrust fairy tales.
No institutional design can guarantee trust in a polarised society. There will be bad actors and mistakes. But research offers two consolations: people are more forgiving of bad outcomes when the process was fair, and trust, once thickened by repeated fair interactions, becomes resilient. The work of institutions is to make trust routine so that it does not depend on any one leader’s personality or mood.
The July spirit will die if it becomes a contest over who shouted loudest in 2024. It will live if it matures into a quiet norm: we treat one another as citizens even in disagreement, we govern by procedures we would accept from our opponents, and we keep our promises in ways anyone can verify. Moral decisiveness is essential, but so is restraint. Morality-based trust is built not by grand declarations but by fidelity to principles under pressure: no torture, no disappearances, no collective punishment, no partisan policing. Competence-based trust is built not by spreadsheets but by delivery: stipends credited when due, medicines in stock, and flood relief distributed fairly. When both moral and competence-based trust align, a society feels governed rather than merely managed.
Bangladesh is again at a founding moment, though of a different kind than 1971. The task now is not to create a state but to make citizenship credible inside it. This is quiet work: minutes uploaded, panels televised, complaints answered, and procurement open to audit. Do this long enough and something remarkable happens. Citizens begin to give leaders the benefit of the doubt. They comply without surveillance, bring ideas unasked, take responsibility, and trust. That, more than any speech about the July spirit, would honour 1971. It would show that the independence won then can still generate a politics worthy of it today, a politics that treats trust not as a trophy of victory but as the coin of a realm we are finally ready to govern well.
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ÌýKazi ASM Nurul Huda is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Dhaka and the Cmelikova Visiting International Scholar in leadership and ethics at the University of Richmond.
