Bangladesh Under BNP: Six Months of Gains, Grit — and a Grid in Crisis -Dr. Mohammad Imran Hossain (Ansary)
Six months ago, Tarique Rahman took the oath as Prime Minister of Bangladesh, closing out eighteen months of unelected interim rule and, before that, fifteen years of Awami League government. February’s election was Bangladesh’s first genuinely competitive national vote in nearly two decades, and expectations for the new government were correspondingly high: restore order, revive the economy, and prove that elected government could actually deliver where both the Hasina regime and the Yunus interim administration had struggled. Half a year in, the report card is mixed but instructive. On foreign policy, political stability, its handling of the opposition, agriculture, and the remittance economy, the government has real achievements to point to. On energy, it is failing badly — and a fragile broader economy threatens to erode whatever gains have been banked elsewhere.
A foreign policy finally free of a single patron
Start with diplomacy, where the government has outperformed expectations. In June, Foreign Minister Khalilur Rahman was elected President of the 81st UN General Assembly, narrowly defeating Cyprus’s candidate in a closely fought secret-ballot vote — only the second time a Bangladeshi has held that post since 1986. It is a genuine diplomatic achievement, won through an intensive campaign mounted in barely three months after his nomination, and it hands Dhaka a year of outsized visibility on the world stage, including a role in choosing the next UN Secretary-General.
More consequential than the UNGA seat, though, is the broader realignment underway. For fifteen years, Bangladeshi foreign policy revolved almost entirely around New Delhi. Since taking office, the BNP government has pursued something closer to a genuinely multi-directional posture — a “Bangladesh First” approach, as officials describe it, that treats no single power as an automatic patron. Tellingly, the Prime Minister’s first foreign trip was to Beijing rather than New Delhi, building on the interim period’s outreach to China and a warming relationship with Pakistan. Yet the government has been careful not to let that outreach read as an anti-Western tilt: even as it courts Beijing, it has hosted a string of senior US officials in Dhaka — including Special Presidential Envoy Sergio Gor, who has floated Bangladeshi participation in a US-led supply-chain security initiative and discussed fresh investment through Washington’s development finance arm — and it is reviewing rather than scrapping the sweeping trade and defence pact the interim government signed with the United States just before the election. India remains an unavoidable neighbor, and the government has not abandoned engagement with New Delhi — border, trade, and extradition disputes are being managed rather than escalated. But the reflexive deference of the Hasina years has clearly given way to something more transactional and more balanced. For a country that spent over a decade treating India as its indispensable ally, this is a structural shift, not merely rhetorical.
Stability, honestly graded
Political stability is a more contested claim, and it deserves an honest hedge before it is credited as a success. Rights monitors have documented dozens of politically linked killings since the government took office, and opposition groups accuse elements within the ruling party of tolerating factional violence. The Home Ministry disputes the framing, arguing that reporting has simply improved, but these are real problems a government elected on promises to end state-backed violence cannot wave away.
Set against the right baseline, however, the achievement is not trivial. Bangladesh held a national election that international observers judged largely free and fair — the actual end of the so-called “two Begums” era of personalized politics. A parliament is functioning. Power changed hands peacefully for the first time in two decades. The government has now completed a formal six-month performance review and is preparing a cabinet reshuffle, bringing in technocrats and younger lawmakers to accelerate implementation — the ordinary business of governance that was simply unavailable to Bangladesh for most of the past two years. That is a foundation, even if it falls short of the full restoration of order the government promised on the campaign trail.
An opposition that actually exists
A related and underappreciated success is how the government has handled the opposition itself. Bangladesh barely had a functioning opposition through three consecutive Awami League terms. That has changed: before he was even sworn in, Tarique Rahman paid courtesy visits to Jamaat-e-Islami’s Shafiqur Rahman and NCP’s Nahid Islam, and parliament now has a formally recognized Leader of the Opposition, with Jamaat pledging cooperation on matters of national interest while reserving the right to hold the government to account. That relationship has been tested. Ruling-party-aligned Chhatra Dal activists have clashed repeatedly with rival student groups on campuses from Rangpur to Dhaka, and local ruling-party cadres have reportedly attacked opposition-aligned activists. Where these flare-ups have occurred, however, Tarique Rahman has generally acted quickly and publicly to defuse them — ordering implicated party members expelled and instructing the Home and Law Ministries to act without regard to political affiliation. It is not a spotless record, but it marks a real departure from a decade in which the ruling party treated the opposition as an enemy to be jailed rather than a rival to be managed.
The onion that stopped humiliating Dhaka
Third, agriculture—and specifically onions, which sound like a trivial thing until one recall how largely they loomed in Bangladeshi political life for a decade. Every time India restricted onion exports, prices in Dhaka’s markets spiked overnight, and governments scrambled to find alternative suppliers. That dependency is now breaking down. Domestic production has climbed toward the country’s roughly two-million-tonne annual demand; Indian exporters now report Bangladesh as a market they can no longer count on, and officials are discussing export potential running into the millions of tonnes rather than debating how to manage the next shortage. Agriculture Minister Mohammed Amin Ur Rashid has told parliament that the real bottleneck was never production but storage—Bangladesh has long grown more onions than it consumes, only to lose a large share to spoilage and then import to cover the gap—and the government has rolled out electricity-free, airflow storage systems across dozens of onion-growing districts, with another 15,000 units announced this summer. As per the minister, for the first time since independence, Bangladesh has not imported any onions this year. The same minister has separately announced a push to convert the country’s diesel-powered deep tube wells and shallow irrigation pumps to solar power, which he says will gradually cut farmers’ fuel and electricity costs and ease the sector’s dependence on imported diesel. It is the kind of unglamorous, structural work that rarely makes international headlines but matters enormously to household budgets—and to Dhaka’s leverage with New Delhi on unrelated files.
The diaspora’s vote of confidence
A further, quieter success is the remittance boom. According to Bangladesh Bank data, Bangladeshi expatriates sent home a record $35.56 billion in the fiscal year ending June 2026, up more than 17 percent year-on-year, with March alone setting an all-time monthly high of $3.75 billion. Some of this reflects a shift away from informal hundi transfers that began under the interim government, but the trend accelerated rather than stalled once the BNP took office, as continued pressure on informal networks, a more competitive exchange rate, and basic political stability gave migrant workers more reason to trust formal banking channels. Remittances are now Bangladesh’s most reliable source of foreign currency, cushioning the current account even as exports and reserves face other pressures — in effect, a vote of confidence cast by millions of Bangladeshis working abroad.
The failure: a grid in the dark
Now the shortfall is serious. Six months in, Bangladesh is enduring what critics across the spectrum — including the opposition Awami League, hardly a neutral observer — are calling a systemic collapse in energy. Power cuts of six to twelve hours a day have returned to cities and villages alike. A floating LNG terminal ran dry in August; fire damage and rough seas have repeatedly disrupted supply since. Irrigation pumps have stopped in the northwest at the height of the growing season, and factories are burning costlier diesel to keep production lines running, adding to export costs at the worst possible moment.
The current government inherited much of this crisis rather than manufacturing it. Domestic gas output has declined for years amid neglected offshore exploration, and the country is saddled with an overbuilt fleet of private power plants locked into capacity-charge contracts that have cost the treasury roughly 1.5 trillion takas regardless of how much electricity they actually generate. Those contracts — and the politically connected business groups that won them — were built almost entirely during the Awami League’s fifteen years in power, when licensing, fuel-supply, and rental-plant deals were awarded overwhelmingly to businessmen aligned with the ruling party. Untangling that architecture through contract audits, renegotiated capacity payments, and open exploration tenders is slow, politically fraught work. But six months on, the public does not experience “inherited.” It experiences the dark, and it is now this government’s job to show visible progress rather than explain the history. On this file, that progress has not yet arrived, and opposition parties and street alliances alike are capitalizing on the anger. The government must destabilize the network and influence of Awami’s patron-oligarch in the power sector.
The economy is waiting to undo everything else
Layered on top of the energy crisis is a broader economic fragility that could erode the government’s other gains. Growth slowed to roughly 3 percent in the second quarter of the fiscal year, the weakest pace since the pandemic. Inflation remains stuck near 9 percent. Non-performing loans sit around 30 percent of the banking sector, crowding out credit to the private businesses that need it most. Reserves have recovered from their 2024 lows but remain exposed to external shocks — from Middle East conflict spilling into fuel and fertilizer prices, to the country’s looming graduation from Least Developed Country status, which will strip away trade preferences Bangladeshi exporters have relied on for a generation. None of this is the government’s creation, but all of it is now the government’s problem, and reform fatigue is a real risk if the pain of stabilization is not matched by visible relief at the household level.
The verdict
Six months is a short window to judge any government, and this one has genuine achievements to its name: a diplomatic coup at the UN, a foreign policy no longer hostage to a single neighbor, a real if imperfect working relationship with the opposition, an onion harvest that has quietly ended a decade-old irritant with India, and a diaspora sending home record sums on the strength of restored confidence. But governments are ultimately judged on whether the lights stay on, and the economy delivers, and on both counts the next six months matter more than the last. Bangladesh’s new government has shown it can win abroad and manage its rivals at home. It now has to prove it can govern the grid and the balance sheet — the tests on which most citizens will actually judge it.
The writer: Assistant Professor of State University of New York-Dutchess and Executive Director of Bangladesh Institute of Development and Security Studies
