BANGLADESH

A strongwoman who ruled for 15 years flees in a helicopter, toppled by the students she tried to crush

Sheikh Hasina had won rigged elections, jailed her rivals, and seemed immovable. Weeks of student protest, and a massacre of the protesters, ended her in an afternoon. She fled to India as crowds stormed her palace.

Sheikh Hasina, who had governed Bangladesh with an increasingly iron hand for 15 years, fled the country by helicopter on August 5 as hundreds of thousands of protesters converged on the capital, Dhaka, and stormed her official residence, ending one of South Asia's most entrenched governments in a single dramatic afternoon. What began in July as a student movement against a quota system reserving government jobs metastasised, after the security forces answered it with bullets and killed hundreds of young people, into a nationwide uprising against Hasina herself, against the rigged elections, the jailed opponents, the disappearances, the whole apparatus of a rule that had curdled from developmental success into authoritarianism. When the army finally declined to keep firing on the students, it was over. Hasina flew to India; the crowds poured into her palace, carrying out furniture, swimming in her pool, marvelling that the untouchable had, in the end, run.

An interim government was formed within days, led by the Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus, the microfinance pioneer whom Hasina had spent years persecuting, now asked to steer a shattered country back toward elections. The euphoria was real and so was the danger: revolutionary moments are fragile, the settling of scores had already begun, minorities feared reprisals, and the same army that stepped aside remained the ultimate power. But this fortnight belonged to the students, who had looked at a government that ruled by fear and decided, at the cost of hundreds of their lives, to stop being afraid, and had brought down in weeks what had seemed built to last for decades. For a neighbour watching from India, it was a bracing reminder of a truth that entrenched power always forgets: that it rests, in the end, on the consent of the frightened, and that fear, once broken, breaks fast.

MARKETS

A day of panic sweeps the world's exchanges, and the recession ghost returns

Global stock markets convulsed on August 5 in a day of genuine panic, as a weak American jobs report, fears the Federal Reserve had waited too long to cut rates, and the sudden unwinding of a vast bet involving the Japanese yen combined into a rout. Japan's Nikkei index fell more than 12 percent, its worst day since 1987; the fear gauge on Wall Street spiked to levels last seen in the depths of the pandemic. The panic proved short-lived, markets recovering much of the loss within days, and the feared recession did not materialise. But the episode was a jolt after months of soft-landing calm, a reminder that the machinery of global finance, wound tight with leverage and interconnection, can still seize without much warning.

IN BRIEF

The Games close; a running mate; a monopoly ruled; the Middle East smoulders

The Paris Olympics closed on August 11 after a fortnight that reminded a divided world what it looks like to compete rather than fight, with performances from the gymnast Simone Biles's redemption to the sprinter Noah Lyles's photo finish. Kamala Harris named Tim Walz, the plain-spoken governor of Minnesota, as her running mate on August 6, completing a Democratic ticket transformed in three weeks from despair to momentum. A US federal judge ruled on August 5 that Google is an illegal monopoly in search, the most significant antitrust decision against a technology company in decades. And the Middle East braced for Iran's promised revenge after Israel assassinated a Hamas leader on Iranian soil, the region holding its breath once more.

The Column

Fear is the cheapest thing to rule with, and the most expensive to lose

A government that seemed permanent fell in an afternoon this fortnight. I have watched enough entrenched power up close to know why the fall, when it comes, is always so much faster than anyone expected.

By Meera Anand

I watched Bangladesh this fortnight with the particular attention of someone who lives next door, in a country whose own democracy is under its own pressures, and the thing that struck me was not that Hasina fell but the speed of it. Fifteen years of accumulated power, an intelligence apparatus, a captured judiciary, rigged elections, a machine built meticulously to be immovable, and it came apart in a matter of weeks once the students stopped being afraid. That pattern, slow to build, sudden to collapse, is so common in the fall of entrenched regimes that it deserves to be understood, because it teaches something about how power that rests on fear actually works, and it is not what the powerful believe.

A government that rules by fear looks, from the outside and to itself, incredibly strong. It has the guns, the prisons, the surveillance, the machinery of intimidation, and every day that machinery works, that the people stay home, that the dissidents stay quiet, that the elections are accepted, reinforces the belief that the strength is real and solid. But it is not solid. It is a confidence trick of a specific and fragile kind: it works only as long as everyone believes it works, only as long as each frightened person assumes that everyone else is also too frightened to act. The power is not in the guns; there are never enough guns to shoot everyone. The power is in the belief, held by each individual, that resistance is futile because no one else will join them. And that belief, unlike guns, can evaporate in an instant, all at once, the moment enough people see enough other people in the street and realise the thing they were all afraid of was mostly each other's fear.

That is why these falls are so sudden. The regime is not gradually weakened; the belief that sustained it simply flips, in a cascade, the way a supercooled liquid turns to ice the instant something disturbs it. For fifteen years the calculation of every Bangladeshi was "I am afraid, and I am alone in it, so I will stay home." And then the students died in the streets, in numbers too large to hide, and enough people saw enough others willing to risk everything that the calculation flipped, in days, to "we are many, and we are not alone, and the fear was the only thing holding us." Once that flips, the guns are useless, because the soldiers holding them are also part of the cascade, also recalculating whether to keep firing for a regime that suddenly looks finished. Hasina did not lose because she ran out of force. She lost because the belief that her force was insurmountable dissolved, and fear, which had been her cheapest and most reliable instrument, became, overnight, worthless.

I draw no comfortable lesson from this, because the aftermath of these moments is so often ugly, the revolution devouring itself, the new fear replacing the old. But I take one durable observation into how I look at any power that rules by making people afraid, whether a government or, in smaller ways, an institution or a boss. It is always more fragile than it appears, to itself most of all, because it has mistaken the silence of the frightened for consent and strength, when it is only fear, and fear is a belief, and beliefs can flip. The strongest-looking regimes are often the most brittle, because they have hollowed out every other source of legitimacy and kept only the one that can vanish in an afternoon. Hasina thought she had built something permanent. She had built something that worked perfectly right up until the moment enough people stopped being afraid, and then it was gone by helicopter, and the students were swimming in her pool.

The Ledger

Google's loss in the search monopoly case is the fortnight's quiet landmark: the first major antitrust defeat for a big-tech company in decades, and a marker that the era of the platforms operating beyond the reach of the law is closing, with implications for how the AI giants will be treated.

Data centers & power

Quiet against the geopolitics; the build-out continues, the power question deferred to the next earnings.

Rates

The August 5 panic was partly a market tantrum that the Fed had waited too long to cut. A September cut now looks near-certain; the debate is only about its size.

Real estate

US 30-year mortgage 6.47 percent (August 8), falling meaningfully on the market turmoil and cut expectations. The thaw, at last, gathers pace.

India tech

Bangladesh's upheaval sits on India's doorstep, a reminder to the region that entrenched power is more fragile than it looks. For India's own democracy, freshly reminded in June that voters can still surprise, the lesson lands close to home.

What we called wrong

Nothing to retract. The Bangladesh column extends this paper's long meditation on power and letting go: Hasina is the opposite of the Biden story from last issue, the leader who would not let go, and was made to, the hardest way.

The Back Page

On the Seine, and afterward

The Paris Olympics closed this fortnight, and for all the cynicism available about the Games, the cost, the corporate sheen, the geopolitics that intrude on everything, they did the thing they still, improbably, do: they gave a fractured world a fortnight of watching people compete instead of kill each other. The images will last. Simone Biles, who four years ago withdrew from the Tokyo Games under the weight of the pressure and the fear, returning to Paris to win again, her body and nerve reclaimed, a public redemption of the most human kind. The sprinter Noah Lyles winning the 100 metres by five-thousandths of a second, a margin invisible to the eye. The refugee team, athletes with no country to march behind, marching anyway. Novak Djokovic, who has won everything, weeping at last for the one thing he had never won, an Olympic gold, at 37. It is easy to be above the Olympics, and there are good reasons to be. But there is something in the spectacle of the whole quarrelsome species agreeing, for two weeks, to settle its rivalries by running and jumping and swimming, by rules everyone accepts, with the losers shaking hands, that this paper, which spends most of its life documenting the failure to do exactly that, cannot quite bring itself to sneer at. They lit the cauldron over the Seine, and for a fortnight the news was, mostly, about people being magnificent. We could do worse, more often, than that.