And nowhere is this clearer than in our obsession with branding everyone an “agent.” Speak up against the ruling party? You’re an Indian agent. Criticize the opposition? Then you must be working for ISI. Question US policy? A Russia or China agent, no doubt. Support human rights? Clearly CIA funded. There may be kernels of truth about foreign influence, but when everyone is labeled an agent, we achieve two things at once: we silence dissent and we lose sight of the real danger.

Because the real danger isn’t always Pakistan, India, the US or Russia. The danger is the extremist mindset that is eating away at our political culture, the refusal to listen, the comfort of black-and-white thinking. Tagging people as agents blinds us to this deeper disease and leaves us unprepared when extremism mutates into violence.

This is not uniquely Bangladeshi. Around the world, extremism shows the same mental habits, just with different labels. In the United States, conspiracy thinking around a “stolen election” drove the 6 January Capitol attack. In Germany, the Reichsbürger movement denies the legitimacy of the modern state, echoing far-right nostalgia for a mythic past. In New Zealand, the Christchurch mosque attacker was radicalised online by the “Great Replacement” theory. On the far-left, Peru’s Shining Path and Italy’s Red Brigades show how utopian certainty and refusal of self-criticism led to mass violence. In India, Hindu nationalist extremism (far-right) paints minorities as threats; and Maoist insurgency (far-left) justifies armed struggles. Far-right Buddhist nationalism led to persecution of Rohingya in Myanmar.

Different ideologies, same mindset.