On 19 May, an eight-year-old girl named Ramisa Akter was raped and murdered in Dhaka’s Pallabi neighbourhood. The case broke through the noise in a way that crime stories rarely do anymore — perhaps because Ramisa was eight, perhaps because the details were so brutal, or perhaps because people were already primed.
People are already asking whether something had gone wrong with the promise this government came in on.
Tarique Rahman, as the Prime Minister of Bangladesh, took office in February 2026 with expectations that were, by any reasonable measure, unusually high. The collapse of the previous Hasina-led AL government in August 2024 had battered institutions, demoralised police, and left a population exhausted by years of authoritarian governance looking for something that simply worked.
Security and stability became the BNP’s defining mandate — not just a campaign pledge but almost a contract.
A hundred days in, Bangladesh is not in crisis in any single dramatic sense. But it is accumulating problems: crime that will not subside, a border dispute requiring diplomatic delicacy, a measles outbreak that has killed nearly seven hundred children, and roads that are, once again, killing people at scale.
None of these is entirely the BNP’s creation. Not all of them are its fault. But all of them are now its responsibility.
A security problem that keeps compounding
The government’s most visible struggle is law and order. Police Headquarters statistics show murders in March and April 2026 ran higher than in the same months of either 2024 or 2025.
The Human Rights Support Society (HRSS) counted at least 71 deaths from mob violence in the year’s first four months. In May, it added dozens more. Extortion of transport hubs, garment factories, roadside vendors — the complaints come in daily, and local papers run them without much surprise anymore.
Government officials say things are improving. Police point to mass arrests, intensified intelligence work, and the army’s gradual withdrawal from street-level duty. Home Minister Salahuddin Ahmed recently told reporters the police force has become “active and effective” within two and a half months of the government taking office.
But videos on social media tell a parallel story. Footage of robberies in broad daylight in Kawran Bazar and other parts of Dhaka circulates widely. People are making fewer arguments about whether arrests are happening — they are — and more about whether any of it is sticking.
Beneath the operational picture is something structural. When police stations were attacked and looted in the chaos following August 2024, over a thousand firearms vanished, along with around 250,000 rounds of ammunition. As of April, most of it is still missing.
The prime minister has given police two months to recover it. That deadline is almost at an end.
Then there is the political dimension, which officers will discuss only without attribution. Pursuing extortion complaints against individuals with ruling-party connections is, one station OC put it plainly, “difficult.”
The DMP Commissioner has told officers to disregard political affiliation when making arrests. Whether that instruction reaches into the mechanics of individual cases is a different question.
The opposition has been careful. Jamaat’s parliamentary deputy leader, Dr Syed Abdullah Mohammad Taher, stopped well short of calling the government a failure — “we don’t want to say that so quickly” — but the implication in his remarks was clear enough: if this continues, people will draw their own conclusions.
The border talks and a diplomatic misstep
On 8 June, in New Delhi, the director generals of BGB and BSF will sit down for their annual bilateral summit. Routine, in theory. This year, it carries more significance.
BSF killings along the Bangladesh-India border have been a running grievance for years. Ain o Salish Kendra recorded 34 Bangladeshis killed by BSF in 2025 — 24 shot, ten tortured to death. At least four more names had been added to that list by April 2026.
BGB’s deputy director general has said border killings will be the primary agenda item. The delegation will also push back against reports of groups being informally pushed across the border from West Bengal without identity verification.
What made things complicated was something the home minister said six days before the talks. Asked about border deaths at the Secretariat on 2 June, Salahuddin Ahmed offered a distinction: if a BSF soldier crosses into Bangladesh and kills someone, that is a border killing. But if a Bangladeshi crosses illegally into India, commits an offence, and is shot — that is India applying its own law, not our category.
India’s officials have been making roughly that argument for a decade.
Critics at home, including a pointed analysis in a Bangladeshi English daily, noted that the minister had essentially adopted the other side’s framing ahead of a negotiation where Bangladesh needed leverage, not concessions.
Whether there was a diplomatic logic behind it — a conciliatory gesture toward Delhi as relations warm after the BNP’s return — is possible.
It does not make the optics any easier.
The families of 34 people killed last year are not especially interested in diplomatic logic.
Six hundred children
The measles outbreak in Bangladesh is the story that should be generating international headlines and mostly is not.
Since mid-March, more than 600 children have died — 90 confirmed measles deaths and over 500 from measles-like symptoms — according to the DGHS, which began its count on 15 March.
Suspected cases have passed 73,000 across 58 of the country’s 64 districts. WHO was formally notified on 4 April. By that point, hospitals in Dhaka were already overwhelmed.
Most victims were under two years old. Many arrived already critically ill.
Bangladesh had a measles success story once. Mass vaccination campaigns between 2014 and 2015 covered over 50 million children. Mortality dropped sharply.
Then the programme became irregular, coverage slipped, and — as former disease control director Professor Be-Nazir Ahmed put it bluntly — the government took too long to treat the outbreak as the emergency it was.
“They can no longer say they were new and could not properly assess the situation,” he told an English daily in Bangladesh in late May.
The BNP came to power in February, already inheriting a building wave. UNICEF and WHO are now involved in emergency vaccination. But no national public health emergency has been declared.
Children are still dying.
The Ad-Din Hospital case added another layer to the strain. Six newborns died there on 27 May.
The subsequent government investigation found the building itself was structurally unsuitable for a hospital.
Ad-Din opened in 1997 and operated under five different governments — Awami League, BNP, the caretaker government, Awami League again, Yunus’s interim administration, and now BNP again — without anyone shutting it down.
An estimated 95 percent of Bangladesh’s private clinics operate without proper licensing, according to reporting from this period. The sector handles roughly 70 percent of the country’s healthcare.
The oversight framework is, charitably, notional.
The roads, again
The Eid-ul-Adha holiday killed 281 people across 13 days, according to the Road Safety Foundation. Thirty-four were women. Forty-eight were children.
Motorcycles accounted for nearly half of all fatalities — 141 accidents and 124 deaths.
BUET’s Professor Hadiuzzaman, who has studied this pattern for years, does not hedge: “Safety is not something you impose for one week and then walk away from for twelve months.”
The Eid road toll is, at this point, a forecast. It was forecast this year too. The gap between the forecast and any structural response to it is its own indictment.
The emergency services line — 999 — took over 10,000 calls during the Eid week. The largest single category was assault: nearly 2,000 calls.
Not theft. Not accidents. People hitting each other.
What this government can and cannot claim
The BNP administration has a defensible argument, and it makes it often: it inherited wreckage.
The police force was shattered. Institutional trust had collapsed. Expecting rebuilt normalcy in a hundred days is not realistic.
That argument has limits. It is convincing on structural matters — rebuilding a demoralised police force, recovering looted weapons, restoring administrative systems.
It is much less convincing when nearly 700 children die of a vaccine-preventable disease and the government debates the appropriate response for weeks without declaring an emergency.
Or when extortion networks with party connections operate in plain sight while officers quietly flag that accountability stops at certain doors.
What Bangladesh’s spring of 2026 reveals is not a government that has failed — not yet, not clearly.
It reveals a government that is still calibrating how much political will it is prepared to spend on the problems it promised to solve. Some of those problems are legacies. Some are accumulating on its own watch.
The public is still extending patience. That much is clear.
But patience, in a country that has been through what Bangladesh has been through, comes with a shorter shelf life than politicians tend to assume.
