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In July and August 2024, Bangladesh’s young people accomplished the seemingly impossible. They forced Sheikh Hasina, one of the world’s longest-serving prime ministers, to flee the country in a military helicopter to neighbouring India.

A brutal state-led crackdown on the uprising left as many as 1,400 people dead.

For more than 15 years, Bangladesh had lived under a government that perfected the art of performative democracy: elections without competition, courts without independence and media without dissent. Yet during one extraordinary monsoon, students armed with little more than smartphones took to the streets and transformed a protest against a discriminatory quota system for government jobs into a revolt against authoritarian rule.

For a brief moment, their actions appeared to vindicate the dictum attributed to Abraham Lincoln: “You cannot fool all the people all the time.”

But revolutions are not judged by the courage that sparked them. They are judged by what survives after the smoke clears.

Two years later, Bangladesh is again led by a popularly elected government. The students who led the uprising have entered parliament, an ambitious reform charter has been endorsed by voters and the country has held its freest election in decades. Yet the optimism of 2024 has given way to a more unsettling question: How much did the uprising actually change?

The uprising unfolded with astonishing speed. Students, garment workers, teachers, rickshaw pullers and ordinary citizens united around demands for accountability, dignity and political freedom. Within weeks, the rickety scaffolding of the old political order collapsed.

The interim administration led by Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus inherited an opportunity that few post-autocratic reformers enjoy: overwhelming public support for systemic change.

Its response was ambitious. A new social contract of sorts, the July National Charter, proposed sweeping constitutional changes designed to prevent another concentration of executive power.........

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