If you listen closely to the winds blowing across the Ganges Delta, you can hear the distinct, wet slap of history hitting humanity in the face. Again. Bangladesh, a nation that seems determined to treat political stability like a virulent pathogen to be eradicated at all costs, is currently in the throes of a fascinating experiment: swapping out a secular autocrat for a party that views the 7th century as a aspirational policy roadmap. Sheikh Hasina has fled, the students have cheered, and in the gaping, sucking chest wound of a power vacuum left behind, Jamaat-e-Islami is stretching its legs, cracking its knuckles, and preparing to save the country from the terrible burden of modernity.

The headlines, in their infinite capacity for euphemism, describe Jamaat-e-Islami as having a "chequered history." This is a delightful phrase. It’s the sort of British understatement one uses when describing a drunk uncle who ruins Christmas, not a political entity with a historical CV that reads like a frantic distress signal. To say Jamaat has a chequered history is like saying the Titanic had a minor buoyancy dispute with an iceberg. We are talking about a party that, during the 1971 war of independence, looked at the Pakistani army committing atrocities and thought, "You know what? Those guys have the right idea." Yet, here we are. The wheel turns, the memory fades, and the butchers of yesteryear are rebranded as the statesmen of tomorrow.

It is the oldest grift in the book, played out with exhausting predictability. The populace, tired of the suffocating grip of the Awami League—who, let’s be honest, governed with all the subtle grace of a sledgehammer wrapped in a velvet flag—screamed for change. They wanted the boot off their neck. And they shall have it. But what the idealistic students and the weary garment workers fail to realize, in their adorable naïveté, is that when you remove one boot, another one is usually descending from the ceiling, and this one has spikes. The current narrative suggests that Jamaat-e-Islami, leading a ruling alliance, is the "natural" alternative. This is only true if you consider gangrene a natural alternative to a gunshot wound.

The cynicism required to view this transition as "progress" is enough to drown a continent. The party has been banned, unbanned, executed, rehabilitated, and courted by every side of the political spectrum whenever the math required a few extra seats. They are the cockroaches of South Asian politics: nuclear-resistant, unkillable, and always scuttling out from under the fridge when the lights go out. Now, with the ruling alliance looking for a spine, Jamaat is offering theirs—a rigid, calcified structure built on religious fundamentalism that makes the previous regime's corruption look almost quaint by comparison.

And let us not forget the international community, that gallery of feckless voyeurs. The West, in its desperate need for a binary narrative of "Good Democrats" vs. "Bad Dictators," cheered the ousting of Hasina. They love a good toppling. It makes for great television. But now, as the dust settles and the shape of the new beast emerges from the smoke, the State Department and the EU are likely staring at their shoes, whistling nervously. They wanted a liberal democracy to spontaneously generate out of the chaos; instead, they are getting a potential theocracy that views Western values with the same affection a vampire holds for garlic. The ineptitude of global diplomacy is matched only by the amnesia of the local electorate.

The tragedy, of course, is the inevitability of it all. There is no third option in the scorched earth of polarized politics. You either eat the poison on the left plate or the poison on the right plate. The result is the same: the slow, agonizing death of hope. The people of Bangladesh, who work harder before breakfast than most Western pundits do in a lifetime, deserve better. They deserve a government that treats them as citizens, not as tithes or serfs. But they won’t get it. They will get slogans. They will get religious fervor masking administrative incompetence. They will get the same corruption, just with a different dress code and a longer beard.

So, raise a glass of tepid water to the "new" Bangladesh, which looks suspiciously like the old Bangladesh, but with more moral policing and less joy. The autocrat is gone; long live the zealot. The faces change, the rhetoric shifts from nationalism to piety, but the grift remains eternal. The party with the "chequered history" is about to pick up the pen, and rest assured, they aren't going to use it to write poetry.