The Daily Star Editor Mahfuz Anam's appeal to the ‘new generation leaders’
Democracy cannot operate as a simple majority steamroller, as we also saw in the early days of our independence.
The idea of dedicating a day to promote harmony and peaceful coexistence—a day that fosters diversity, justice, and understanding across borders, cultures, and beliefs—seems promising in theory.
Dissent in Bangladesh has been met with hostility, with individuals being labelled as traitors or enemies of the state for expressing opposing views.
The euphoria of August 5, and the momentous days leading up to it, especially since July 15, are now being overshadowed by a cloud of uncertainty.
There is much to learn from both Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, two South Asian countries, as they navigate their shifting landscapes.
Young people have been at the centre of a major political transition.
Sri Lank's neighbours have to come to terms with the fact that AKD was the democratic choice of the mass people.
More than half a century after its independence, Bangladesh still finds itself at the crossroads of crafting a state built on durable democratic foundations.
It is one of the biggest paradoxes of present time — the contradiction of having the most remarkable advancements in technology with the most regressive developments in human civilisation.
Democracy is, by far, the most acclaimed historical form of government. It not only allows representation of all groups, but also permits every adult to exercise complete sovereignty at the polling booth. There might be nuances and variances here or there, particularly in the preceding campaigns and subsequent outcomes, but we have, by and large, managed to live with our differences, converse with adversaries, and bite the bullet so democracy strengthens itself.
When we are told by our leaders that democracy is in firm ground, maybe a dispassionate look at the matter is in order. The best that one can describe the prevailing democracy is by labelling it as a command democracy displaying monocratic tendencies. It would be hard also to disagree with anyone who chooses to define the present system as one run by a single party.
EM Forster, almost a lone-wolf democracy crusader between the two world wars, confronted as unpalatable a European playground as many African, Asian, and Latin American countries striving to convince others of their democratic claims face today: an uphill battle in which the institutionalised forces against democracy, such as extreme rightists/leftists and militarism, were usually at least as strong as those
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The BNP yesterday presented a “grim picture of the country's democracy” before around a dozen foreign diplomats in Dhaka.
The above quote is a strong and clear manifestation of the Indian Supreme Court's endeavour to protect rights of the media as it recently announced that freedom of speech and expression of the media must be allowed to the fullest and the press may not be hauled up for defamation for “some errors” in its reporting.
A dichotomy can be defined as the presence of two alternatives that are jointly exhaustive (only these two alternatives, and no more than these two, exist) and mutually exclusive (the existence of each alternative excludes the other).
