Burn a Building, Lose the Battle

If breaking buildings could liberate a nation, history would have been far kinder to the oppressed. It has not been. Empires have survived the fall of palaces, and tyrannies have outlived the ruins of their own monuments. What has consistently undone them is something far less dramatic and far more dangerous: the slow, disciplined collapse of their ideas.
Bangladesh today is not engaged in a war of bricks and mortar. It is engaged in a cultural and ideological struggle, one that cannot be won through fire, rage or spectacle. Every act of reckless destruction, however emotionally satisfying it may feel in the moment, only strengthens those it claims to oppose. It hands them the narrative, the moral high ground, and – most dangerously – the justification for repression.
History does not reward impatience. It punishes it.
There is a temptation, particularly among young and angry populations, to believe that visible destruction equals meaningful resistance. It does not. Setting a building on fire or demolishing it does not weaken power; rather, it simplifies the whole situation. It allows entrenched interests to portray legitimate dissent as chaos, to delegitimise genuine grievances and to portray patriotic citizens as threats to public order and legitimise even their killings.
Bangladesh has experienced this phenomenon in the past. The incident of Shapla Chattar in 2013 still hurts and reminds us of how easily the control of the narrative could turn a protest into a pretext. Once a movement is successfully branded as violent or anarchic, the space for justice narrows dramatically.
Such systems of oppression use this kind of miscalculation to their advantage. They are not terrified of the people’s wrath; they are terrified of the scenario being clear-cut.
No ruling order survives on force alone. Force is expensive, unstable and ultimately unsustainable. What endures is ideological consent – manufactured through education, culture, selective history and controlled morality.
Colonial Bengal offers a textbook example. British rule did not depend solely on soldiers and guns. In 1835, Thomas Babington Macaulay, in his “Minute on Indian Education”, openly proposed creating a class of intermediaries who would be Indian by birth but colonial in thought. The goal was not destruction, but intellectual capture.
That model was later replicated, with different symbols, by post-colonial elites who learnt that controlling the story of a nation is more effective than ruling it openly.
The Pakistani state attempted to erase Bangla language and culture, not first through tanks, but through denial and ideological hierarchy. The response that defeated that project was not violence, but the Language Movement of 1952 – a movement rooted in consciousness, dignity and cultural self-assertion.
Even the Liberation War of 1971, while ultimately fought with arms, was made inevitable by years of cultural and intellectual resistance. Poets, journalists and thinkers gave shape to a collective consciousness long before the battlefield appeared. Wars may be decided by arms, but nations are shaped first in the mind.
Those who have plundered Bangladesh are not brought to their knees by shattered buildings. Wealth has never been their weak point. They amassed it through compromised sovereignty, captured institutions and calculated alignment with foreign power.
Their real strength lies elsewhere – in histories rewritten to appear legitimate, in religion stripped of ethics and repackaged for politics, in loud displays of patriotism hollowed of meaning, and in long-held dominance over culture and education.
When fury displaces thought, these pillars remain intact.
Worse, indiscriminate acts only help brand Bangladesh abroad as volatile or extreme – an image that has repeatedly been used to justify pressure and intervention across the Muslim world, from Palestine to Iraq. Such portrayals are not misunderstandings. They are openings, eagerly exploited.
Islam cautions against change driven by impulse rather than purpose.

The Qur’an states, “Indeed, Allah will not change the condition of a people until they change what is within themselves.” (Surah Ar-Ra‘d, 13:11)
This is not a call for passivity. It is a summons for spiritual renewal prior to the battle of the exterior. The classical scholars from Imam Al-Ghazali to modern thinkers have deemed this verse as a hallmark of societal renovation: political change without moral and intellectual backing is empty.
The life of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) further underlines this teaching. For many years in Makkah, he built up the religiously moral clarity in the face of the persecutions without turning to violent spectacles, and the main point here is that he was peacefully confronting his enemies.
He also warned, “The strong person is not the one who overcomes others by force, but the one who controls himself when angry.” (Sahih al-Bukhari; Sahih Muslim)
Anger unmanaged is not resistance. It is vulnerability.
The first word revealed in the Qur’an was not “fight”, but “read”.
That instruction remains profoundly political.
Bangladesh’s future will not be secured by the volume of its anger but by the depth of its understanding. Today, genuine resistance means recovering history from distortion, approaching religion with knowledge rather than slogans, mastering economics, law, media and governance, and building independent cultural and intellectual institutions.
Authoritarian systems fear this more than any street fire. Knowledge dismantles legitimacy. Culture reshapes loyalty. Institutions outlast individuals.
Building minds is slower than breaking walls. It demands patience, discipline and humility. It offers no instant adrenaline, no viral images, no illusion of immediate victory.
But it is the only path that has ever worked.
Bangladesh does not need more spectacle. It needs a generation capable of thinking clearly under pressure, resisting manipulation and refusing to hand its enemies the narrative.
History will not remember who burnt brightest in anger. It will remember who built steadily, argued honestly and endured.
That choice lies before us now.
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The writer is Deputy Editor of the Daily Sun. Email: [email protected]