There’s a peculiar irony in watching revolutionaries (self-styled or otherwise) commit the very sins they ostensibly rose to combat. Throughout history, from the French Terror to the Bolshevik purges, we’ve witnessed how the intoxication of power transforms liberators into vandals, and vengeance into vandalism. Bangladesh, it seems, is learning this lesson anew, and the wreckage of Gono Bhaban (official residence of the prime minister of Bangladesh) stands as a monument not to justice but to pettiness masquerading as principle.

Let me be clear: to desecrate public property in pursuit of personal vendetta isn’t merely bad governance—it’s civilizational regression. When Muhammad Yunus and his interim administration transformed Gono Bhaban into what amounts to a revenge exhibition, they weren’t striking a blow against authoritarianism. They were indulging in the cheapest form of political theater, the kind that plays well to angry mobs but corrodes the foundations of statehood itself.

Let us examine what actually transpired. Following the political transition, Muhammad Yunus made the highly contentious decision to convert the Ganabhaban—the official residence of the Prime Minister—into a public museum. Whatever one might think of Sheikh Hasina’s tenure, with its acknowledged failures and authoritarian tendencies, the decision to transform her former residence into a museum was a strikingly unusual and provocative act. Was it an extravagant misuse of state property? Almost certainly. Did it carry an air of performative vanity? Quite likely.

But Yunus’s response wasn’t to restore dignity to the institution. Instead, he weaponized it, turning the residence into a kind of political mortuary, a space designed less to educate than to humiliate. The result? He’s managed to make himself perhaps the most reviled figure in contemporary........

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