This afternoon, when Prime Minister Tarique Rahman rises to the rostrum of the United Nations General Assembly and speaks to the world in our mother tongue, Bangla, he will not be standing alone.
Beside him will stand the memory of a Father cut down by assassins' bullets. Beside him will stand a Mother who was imprisoned, humiliated and denied the dignity of proper care in her final years. Beside him will stand a younger brother who died far from home, in exile, without his family's embrace. And behind him will stand millions of ordinary Bangladeshis who waited seventeen long, bitter years for the simple right to cast a free vote.
Few leaders have ever walked to that podium carrying such a weight. Fewer still have paid such a price to get there.
In 1980, Shaheed President Ziaur Rahman stood in that same hall and spoke of the widening gulf between rich and poor nations, of hunger, and of a proud people's determination to stand on their own feet. In 1993, Begum Khaleda Zia took her place there as Bangladesh's first woman Prime Minister, carrying the hopes of a nation reborn into democracy.
Today their son becomes the third member of one family to carry Bangladesh's voice to the world. Let no one call this a dynasty's inheritance. It was earned three times over — not by decree, not by force, but at the ballot box, by the will of the people.
And yet — it could have come so much sooner, and at so much less cost.
In 2007, under an army-backed caretaker regime, Tarique Rahman was arrested. He was broken in body in custody. In 2008 he left for London, needing treatment for injuries he carried from that ordeal. He would not set foot on his own soil again for seventeen years.
In those years he was convicted in absentia in case after case — verdicts later overturned, verdicts he always called what they were: political persecution. His name was scrubbed from the airwaves. Even his speeches were banned from broadcast in the land of his birth. A son of Bangladesh was made a stranger to Bangladesh.
Think of what was lost. A leader in the prime of his life was denied the most basic freedom a democracy can offer: to stand before his people, to campaign among them, to look them in the eye and ask for their vote. His mother — three times Prime Minister — was thrown into prison in 2018. His brother, Arafat Rahman Koko, died in exile. Millions of party workers endured false cases, enforced disappearances, torture and killings. Not one of them was allowed simply to practise politics.
Had they been allowed to compete freely, Bangladesh might have known a fairer politics, a cleaner economy and a more prosperous people years ago.
Had Tarique Rahman, Begum Khaleda Zia and the BNP been permitted a fair contest, who can say how much fairer our political culture, how much cleaner our economy, how much richer our people might have become? Instead, the nation was handed fifteen years of one-sided rule.
In 2014, when a free vote was impossible, Tarique Rahman refused to lend his name to a fixed election. In 2018, the BNP gave the process one last chance — walking into the challenge with Begum Zia behind bars — only for the nation to witness ballot boxes allegedly stuffed in the dead of the night before polling. In 2024, he again refused to take part in the performance.
The world criticised him. Commentators called the boycotts blunders. But Tarique Rahman kept a cool head and a calm heart. From thousands of miles away, he held his party together, kept its workers close, and never once bargained away the principle. He understood what his critics did not: you cannot restore democracy by joining in its counterfeit.
As the opposition was silenced, the country was being emptied. A government white paper estimates that about USD 234 billion was siphoned out of Bangladesh between 2009 and 2023 — roughly USD 16 billion every single year.
That was not an abstraction. It was the sweat of our farmers, the stitches of our garment workers, the remittances our migrant labourers sent home from the deserts of the Gulf. It became mansions in Dubai, London and Toronto, while our banks were hollowed out and our reserves drained dry. By the time Sheikh Hasina boarded a helicopter for India on 5 August 2024, the damage had been done — and hundreds of young Bangladeshis had given their lives in the streets to end it.
On Christmas Day 2025, after seventeen years, Tarique Rahman came home.
He stepped off the aircraft, removed his shoes, and walked barefoot onto the soil of Bangladesh. He bent down and lifted a handful of its earth — the earth he had been denied for half his adult life. A million people greeted him as he stepped out of the airport. Then he went straight to his ailing mother's bedside.
Five days later, Begum Khaleda Zia was gone.
After everything she had endured, she lived just long enough to see her son come home.
He buried his mother. He carried his grief in silence. And he led his party to a landslide victory. On 17 February 2026 he took the oath of office — and in his very first address, he declared that those who voted for the BNP, those who did not, and those who did not vote at all, all have equal rights to this government. It was a promise of healing, not of revenge.
Seven months on, the fruits of a clear-eyed strategy are visible. Bangladesh's Foreign Minister, Dr. Khalilur Rahman, now presides over the 81st session of the UN General Assembly after winning a hard-fought vote — only the second Bangladeshi in history to hold that office. On the sidelines of this very session, Biman Bangladesh Airlines has signed for eleven more Boeing aircraft, building on this year's USD 3.7 billion order and deepening our partnership with the United States — even as we return from a successful visit to China and see our relationship with India steadily improving.
The United States remains our largest single export market, buying more than USD 7.74 billion of Bangladeshi garments last fiscal year — up from USD 7.54 billion the year before. After a difficult first half of 2026, shipments surged by more than 25 percent in August alone, and exporters now speak of a path toward USD 9 billion.
This is a Singapore-style balancing act: friends with all, dependent on none, and always Bangladesh First. And it is being attempted amid a gas and fuel crisis, with reserves drained by years of plunder, while the government works to keep the local Taka steady and our people's daily bread within reach.
Today's speech is not one man's triumph. It belongs to every party worker who spent nights in a jail cell. It belongs to every mother who waited at the window for a son who never came home. It belongs to every young man and woman who fell on the streets in July 2024 so that Bangladesh could vote again.
When Tarique Rahman speaks in New York this afternoon, the world will hear a Prime Minister.
Bangladesh will hear something more: the voice of a people silenced for far too long — at last, and with dignity, being heard.
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Anis Ahmed is the Founder and Group CEO of MGH Group.