The government is moving away from the openness and moderation of the past 50 years“Won’t you give some bread to get the starving fed? We’ve got to relieve Bangladesh,” sang George Harrison, a former Beatle, in 1971. His pleading was warranted. No sooner had local politicians declared the independence of the eastern half of Pakistan (as Bangladesh had previously been) on March 26th of that year than the Pakistani army initiated a brutal war to crush the separatists, at a cost of somewhere between 500,000 and 3m lives. The fighting, along with devastating floods and cyclones, had turned the new country into one of the most destitute spots on Earth.Fifty years on, the improvement in the lives of ordinary Bangladeshis has been remarkable. In 1972 gdp per person was almost 40% lower in Bangladesh than in Pakistan. Now it is more than 40% higher. The economy was growing by around 8% a year before the pandemic struck—...