A shadow play of obedience and authority
I WORE the uniform for more than three decades. Now, whispers turn to shouts, and I hear the derogatory term, ‘Kochukheti,’ hurled at my peers, as if we alone are to blame for every grand failure born of their ineptitude. With this new combat, this so-called ‘War Against Terror,’ they dragged us onto the streets, twisting our very purpose. They played their own merciless game of thrones, setting rules like some cruel, twisted Squid Game. They corrupted our mission for their own bloated profits, tearing the very fabric of the state, only to then point a finger, blame us, and demand we remain ‘professional.’ They challenged our ethics, our very honour, pushing us into the rubble, yet still demanding we remain faithful, as the constitution, they insist, demands.
The uniform, they say, exists for the state — a bulwark against external threats, a disciplined servant under civilian thumb. This isn’t merely a quaint notion, a polite nod in the grand theatre of democracy; it is, or so we are told, the very spine of a constitutional order. Decades ago, Samuel P Huntington, a voice from the academy, distilled this ethos into neat phrases: professional militaries, he declared, are tethered by loyalty, by obedience. But let us not be so naive as to mistake these terms for a blank cheque for servility. No, these are, or should be, a summons to uphold the intricate architecture of command within a constitutional framework. When the military stays meticulously within the lines drawn by lawful authority — and when those who posture as elected leaders grant the military its professional breathing room — then, perhaps, republics merely endure. But let either side forget its assigned choreography, let the lines blur, and the cracks appear. And sometimes, through those very fissures, nations simply plummet.
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Bangladesh: a nation adrift in fissures
SINCE that tumultuous birth in 1971, Bangladesh has walked — perhaps stumbled — along perpetual fissures. Our national journey has never been a seamless narrative of progress, but a jagged scar tissue of ruptures and uneasy reconciliations. Although the armed forces emerged from the crucible of liberation — born of resistance to state atrocities, tempered in the fires of war and consecrated in victory — they deliberately kept themselves, at least initially, apart from the vulgar theatre of political power. The military hierarchy, forged in discipline and bound by the ethic of service, sought to remain aloof from partisan intrigue even as the new republic lurched from one storm to another.
And yet, the gravitational pull of politics proved relentless. Over time, the military was drawn — sometimes reluctantly, sometimes inevitably — into the vortex of power struggles. Except for the seismic rupture of 1982, no episode of direct interference was ever truly premeditated; rather, these were responses to systemic breakdown, to the implosion of civilian authority under the weight of its own overreach. Even when the khaki assumed the throne — under Ziaur Rahman first, and later Hussain Muhammad Ershad — it did so cloaked in the language of constitutionalism, striving to civilianise power and insulate the rank and file from the sordid bargains of politics. Both leaders, despite their origins in epaulets, crafted civilian-dominated administrations, seeking — however imperfectly — to maintain the fiction, and perhaps the aspiration, of democratic legitimacy.
Our history, then, is not merely the story of soldiers seizing power, but of a state repeatedly failing its own promises, leaving a vacuum that others felt compelled — often reluctantly, occasionally opportunistically — to fill. We have endured assassinations that silenced dissent, the insidious creep of coups that toppled elected authority and the ritualistic embrace of caretaker regimes that blurred the line between necessity and design. We have lived through the shocking tremor of a paramilitary mutiny and endured long, suffocating seasons when the ballot paper, frail and whispering, cowered before the merciless baton.
And then came the searing heart of July-August 2024. A generation born into broken promises and casual impunity snapped the spell of inevitability. They erupted into the streets, raw and unyielding, demanding a reckoning long deferred. What many of us, the weary older guard, had dismissed as a dream too fragile to survive the daylight, they made real — if only for a fleeting, incandescent moment. Students led with the ferocity of innocence unscarred by compromise; society stumbled after them, shaken from its long torpor. And a decade’s accumulated poison — the suffocating patronage, the arrogant impunity, the slow constriction of civic breath — burst into the white-hot glare of the street. It was a reckoning written in blood and hope, an unfinished chapter in the chronicle of a nation that has never ceased to wrestle with its own contradictions.
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Beyond the simple story
THE 2024 student-led quota reform movement began innocently enough — a cry for fairness, for a more equitable future. But in the suffocating air of suppressed grievances, that cry hardened into something far larger: a searing demand for accountability. By late July, the campuses of Dhaka, Rajshahi and Chattogram had become pressure valves for a nation suffocating under the relentless weight of arbitrary arrests, omnipresent surveillance and the brutal measures of crowd control.
Teachers, stunned by the unfolding tragedy, rallied to shield their students. The state, instead of listening, doubled down. And then came blood.
On August 5, 2024, after weeks of relentless upheaval and lethal crackdowns nationwide, prime minister Sheikh Hasina — seemingly untouchable just days earlier — resigned and fled the country. The human cost was staggering: hundreds killed, thousands injured, more than ten thousand arrested, according to human-rights monitors, their grim tallies amplified by anxious voices on the world stage.
When the tide of humanity poured into the streets, the military — long caricatured as Bangladesh’s ultimate ‘referee of last resort’ — chose a different path: neutrality. They stood within their constitutional limits even as the country burned. But then came the killings — unrestrained, brutal, indefensible. And in that darkest hour, the armed forces did what political power could not: they compelled Hasina to step down, forced her safe exit, and immediately took control — not to seize power, but to calm the nation. They disarmed rage before rage dismembered the state. They shepherded the beginnings of an interim government, not as rulers, but as reluctant custodians of order.
This was no coup in the old sense. It was, instead, a constitutional gambit — a military buying time for politics to rediscover its footing. But if Bangladesh’s history teaches anything, it is that such moments — when the barrel of the gun intersects with the ballot — are not epilogues. They are prologues. And they demand a question too often ducked: What, exactly, should the uniform do — and never do — when democracy falters?
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What the uniform should (and shouldn’t) do now
TO ANSWER this, we must strip away romantic illusions about armies as philosopher-kings or saviour elites. No military in a republic, however disciplined, is designed to govern. It is trained to win wars, not elections; to impose order, not negotiate legitimacy. Samuel Huntington, in his magisterial The Soldier and the State, warned that military professionalism thrives on one paradox: autonomy within the barracks, and obedience beyond them. A professional force guards the state by never becoming the state.
This is not merely academic dogma. It is a hard-won truth. Where armies forget this — think Egypt’s permanent praetorian grip, or Pakistan’s revolving barracks-to-parliament door — politics atrophies, civic institutions collapse and governance becomes a choreography of bayonets.
Bangladesh has walked that shadowed corridor before — 1975, 1982, 2007. Each time, the temporary balm of order masked a deeper wound: the militarisation of politics and the politicisation of the military. If 2024 is to avoid that fate, two imperatives are non-negotiable.
First, the interim dispensation must be exactly that — interim. Short, sharp, and unsentimental in purpose: to reset the electoral machinery, not to script the nation’s politics.
Second, the armed forces must guard themselves against the seductions of moral guardianship. The day they see themselves as custodians of national virtue is the day their professionalism begins to decay. And decay in uniform is not silent — it echoes for generations.
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Dissent, duty and the Don Snider test
DEBATES on military conduct — here or abroad — often begin with the wrong question: Is it legal? Important, yes. Sufficient? Absolutely not. Dr Don Snider, one of the sharpest observers of the US Army profession, proposes a far more demanding measure: judge actions by their effect on three trust relationships — the trust of the people, the trust of civilian leaders, and the trust within the profession itself. You can obey every letter of the law and still reduce trust to ash. And once trust turns to ash, once that sacred bond shatters, nobody truly wins.
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Trust: a wasting asset in Bangladesh
APPLY that lens to Bangladesh in 2024–25. The army’s studied neutrality in those tense days of August 2024 — its quiet refusal to seize power — renewed public confidence, however briefly. The interim administration’s initial overtures to students and civil society hinted at possibility, at a fragile promise whispered in the chaos. But trust, like any currency, depletes when left untended. Every day without visible justice for the killings; every day without a transparent roadmap to elections; every day of ambiguity about reprisals — each one is a withdrawal from that account. Rebuilding trust demands more than slogans. It requires hard choices: credible investigations, clear chains of accountability, and a state deaf to the manipulative whispers of party loyalty, yet vividly alive to its duty to citizens.
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Leaders who dared to dissent: the spirit of principled command
IN THE intricate tapestry of governance, the most profound lessons often emerge not from blind obedience, but from the audacity to dissent without destroying the system. When does loyalty to constitutional principles eclipse allegiance to temporary command — especially when that command veers towards peril?
History offers searing examples. General Jonathan Wainwright, gaunt and broken after surrendering Corregidor in 1942, made a choice that saved thousands of lives. He endured three brutal years as a POW, haunted by whispers of disgrace — until history, and the Medal of Honor, vindicated him. Leadership, his story reminds us, is sometimes about the courage to accept limits with grace, not the vanity of pyrrhic glory.
Then there is General Douglas MacArthur’s thunderous fall in 1951. His dismissal was not about ego alone; it was the democratic line drawn in blood and ink: generals advise, but elected leaders decide. Candour belongs in private, obedience in public. Civilian supremacy was the principle Truman salvaged that day — and it remains the spine of any republic.
The pattern runs wide. Major General Smedley Butler, a decorated US Marine, blew the whistle on an alleged corporate coup plot against a sitting president, proving that the highest loyalty is sometimes to a principle, not a patron. General Eric Shinseki’s lonely warning about troop levels for post-invasion Iraq cost him his career but earned him history’s vindication.
Bangladesh, too, has its exemplars. Lt. Col. Mohammad Ziauddin — the fiery idealist of 1972 — stood up against what he saw as a sovereignty-compromising treaty. For that act of candour, he risked dismissal, spurning silence when silence was safer. He refused the temptations of later coups, choosing the harder road of principle over ambition.
And then there is a story closer to home, one etched not in textbooks but in memory — the story of Lt. Saifuddin, my senior and roommate, whose life became a testament to the unspoken costs of duty.
It was January 1994. A misunderstanding between locals and naval personnel in Chattogram spiralled into chaos. Rumours flew; mobs gathered. At the gates of the naval base, tempers exploded. Officers and sailors, armed and angry, poured out, beating civilians, blank rounds cracking the air. Anarchy was at the door.
Into this maelstrom stepped Saifuddin — with no properly issued arms, no backup worth the name — tasked with an impossible order: restore discipline, drag his men back to the barracks, and somehow defuse a civilian-military tinderbox already aflame. He did it. Ruthlessly, decisively, against officers and sailors alike, against civilians who had crossed the line. The night ended with the base intact and a city spared from worse carnage.
But heroism in the field can be treason in the ledger of politics. The incident took on a political hue; accusations of arson and excesses followed. The navy needed a scapegoat. Saifuddin stood in the dock of a court-martial — not guilty, but guilty enough for a system that prizes quiet compliance over inconvenient courage. Offered salvation — a lucrative posting, foreign courses — in exchange for swallowing a token punishment, he refused. He chose dignity over deal-making. And for that, the navy broke him, forcing him into premature retirement. He struggled for years, dying this July of a massive stroke — a man forgotten by the institution he saved.
Men like Ziauddin and Saifuddin will never trend on social media. They leave behind no echo chambers, no monuments — only the quiet lesson that principle often exacts its price in loneliness, in penury, in unmarked graves. But a republic that forgets such men does so at its peril.
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The culture war that actually matters
BANGLADESH is no stranger to culture wars — over language, history and the monopoly on the sacred script of 1971. But here is the only culture war worth fighting: a war for institutional dignity. Let us make it socially grotesque to call a magistrate for a personal favour, laughable to phone a police station for a ‘soft adjustment,’ shameful to chase a posting for profit instead of principle. Let us make it fashionable — yes, fashionable — to be the officer who files by the book, the bureaucrat who says ‘no’ politely but immovably, the editor who prints the inconvenient truth, the judge who writes the boring but unassailable judgment.
Authoritarianism never storms the gates with banners; it seeps through the cracks of cynicism and systemic failure, persuading citizens that only the strongman can deliver order. The antidote is not rhetoric — it is quiet, relentless competence. The real guardians of the republic are rarely on balconies or in parades. They are the nameless clerk who refuses a bribe, the young corporal who declines an unlawful command. In those unseen acts of integrity, repeated across a thousand desks and checkpoints, a nation broken by betrayal begins to reclaim its soul.
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An enduring testament: duty, dissent, and the soul of a republic
THERE is one last, unyielding reason to cling to Huntington’s creed of ‘loyalty and obedience’ within a constitutional frame, and to hold Snider’s unforgiving trust-test as the profession’s moral compass. Strip these away, and even the purest dissent, born of noble intent, can sour into chaos; even the safest majorities, once guardians of liberty, can calcify into tyranny’s mask.
MacArthur’s fall in 1951 is not a dusty anecdote — it is a warning in letters of fire: generals may advise, they may protest, they may resign — but they do not rule. Look to Egypt, look to Pakistan — these are not distant deserts but cautionary mirrors, reflecting what happens when power outruns principle and the uniform devours the republic it swore to defend.
And yet — dissent does have a place. It lives in men like Wainwright, who limped out of captivity in 1945, gaunt but unbroken, teaching us that sometimes the greatest courage is not the charge but the concession, not blind valour but the grace to save what can still be saved. His Medal of Honor was for clarity, not conquest — the clarity to choose life over vanity, duty over hubris.
Bangladesh has its own Wainwrights. Lt. Col. Mohammad Ziauddin stood in 1972 and said, ‘No’ — no to an agreement he believed compromised the newborn republic’s sovereignty. He paid the price, but refused the poison chalice of conspiracy and coups, never turning his dissent into ambition. That is principle with a spine. And decades later, another name — quieter, absent from headlines, but no less searing: Lt. Saifuddin. January 1994, Chattogram: when anger and rumour breached the gates, when young officers and sailors spilled out, fists clenched, rifles raised, he walked decisively into chaos. He dragged his men back to the barracks — ruthlessly, decisively, against friends and subordinates alike — because discipline was the last fence before disaster. For this, he faced courts, career-ending offers, the slow grind of retaliation. He refused the bargain of silence for privilege. They broke his career, but not his creed. He died as he lived: stubborn, unbought, holding a line most never see and fewer remember.
These men — Ziauddin, Saifuddin — remind us that the test of the uniform is not in parades or podiums, but in moments of fracture, when the cost of principle is everything you own.
Bangladesh’s 2024 was a rupture, a tearing of the old cloth. 2025 must be the stitching — a careful mending of trust between people and the armed forces. The way we treat the uniform — and the way the uniform treats us, with humility, integrity and restraint — will decide whether we walk the road of Egypt, or carve our own, harder, nobler path.
If you demand a slogan for an age too cynical for slogans, let it be this: Duty with a spine. Dissent with a compass. Power with a leash. Everything else — the paperwork, the politics, the protocols — is drab, unglamorous, and precisely what keeps a republic breathing free.
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Abdul Monaiem Kudrot Ullah, a retired captain of the Bangladesh navy, is an informed voice on institutional reform, geo-strategy, strategic governance and supply chain management.
