The sight of lumpen elements storming Gonobhaban, after the unanticipated departure of Sheikh Hasina, was truly disgusting. There is no way of supporting or even condoning it. But this is what happens. The lawlessness of ordinary life takes over the moment when entrenched elites relinquish their apparently timeless roles. When they do so in unseemly haste, people reclaim royal residences in boisterous, violent, epiphanic joy.

What occurred in Dhaka was preceded by recent events in Colombo, Baghdad and Kabul. In the case of Bangladesh, one video showed a group of hungry vandals invading the patrician kitchen, where the sight of what appeared to be kacchi biryani (with the chicken drumsticks yet to be added) elicited expectant roars of plebeian joy. A man was captured on video relishing a drumstick in everlasting homage to the culinary foundations of democracy. This was a feast of gonobhojon at Gonobhaban.

Also revealing was the sight of uninvited guests carting away state furniture, principally chairs, from the hallowed precincts. This struck me as vulgar theft at first, until I realised that the mob was stealing chairs less to sit in them than to display them as trophies back home. In an ecstatically wayward display of symbolic labour, the mob was metaphorically removing state chairs - proverbially the seats of the powerful - from the political bottoms of the heavyweights who had occupied them once.

Meanwhile, someone lay down on a regal bed for a moment to savour the comforts of rest that arrive after the daily toil of carrying the affairs of the state on one's shoulders. That the interloper had never done so did not matter: What mattered was that he was recreating vicariously the dialectic of work and rest that is played out on spacious royal beds even as most humans have to content themselves with overpopulated beds at home or with the spartan comforts of pati-kantha-kambal floors. For a few minutes, the imposter statesman lying on the Gonobhaban bed caricatured the idea of power at rest. Power can rest, but it cannot ever be at peace.

From the palace to the street

What did not gel with these displays of imaginatively reclaimed power was a horrifying report by Nazifah Raidah in the Daily Star. Witnessing widespread vandalism and even a mass killing in Dhaka left her asking what kind of Bangladesh was rising from the ruins of a departed autocracy. "The reason why I think I was most horrified is that the mob justified their vandalism with the argument that 'they did this to us, so we will do the same to them'. No. Students did not sacrifice their lives to establish an order of vigilante justice."

Her indignation was up for further assault. "If we still find hanging Sheikh Hasina's undergarments on fans and valiantly showing them in front of the media funny, I must say we are paving a dangerous precedent for religious bigots and other radical groups to use the same rhetoric and crack down on women empowerment with the logic - if you empower women, you will get a tyrant like Sheikh Hasina."

Now, this is very different from carting away state furniture or eating someone else's chicken, although those acts, too, are inherently wrong. Vilifying womanhood because it has enjoyed power rationalises patriarchy; legitimates (not legitimises) its daily violence towards women and other sexual minorities; and sanctifies its association with a wrongly interpreted religiosity in which women are equated with temptation and sin. Certainly, this is not the Bangladesh that the students fought for.

In the same spirit, the sporadic but serious acts of violence carried out against religious minorities are an ominous indication of what the country could descend into, should the interim government and the government installed after the next general election fail to sustain the national momentum towards a society where religious affiliation constitutes an essential marker but not the ultimate borders of national identity.

For all its manifold and manifest faults, the Awami League (AL) since the Independence of Bangladesh has stood for an inclusive and essentially secular state (secularism being a political condition in which the state is not necessarily anti-religious but plays an impartial role in balancing various and competing religious claims to a single and indivisible national identity). The AL's fall from power must not translate into the fall of secular Bangladesh.

The intervention of Nobel laureate Muhummad Yunus in the interim affairs of a temporarily overwhelmed state is a source of reassurance. So is the presence of Chief of Army Staff Waker-uz-Zaman in the transitional government. Dr. Yunus represents the accumulated credibility of the Bangladeshi nation: General Waker represents the military power of the nation. Credibility will fall by the wayside of realpolitik without power: Power will wilt into illegitimacy without the sustaining breath of credibility. The two leaders need each other: Bangladesh them both at this moment.

The furniture stolen from Gonobhaban can be replaced. The lives lost in this struggle cannot. But nations do move forward collectively even as individual lives are lost irrevocably.

Bangladeshis owe it to themselves to be the future of their nation. The failures of the past have resulted in vendetta spreading into uncontrollable violence; in the destruction of state property; in the ethnic targetting of religious minorities; and in the razing of the home-turned-museum of the leader of Bangladesh's independence. These are acts of national sabotage.

Out with them. In with the new Bangladesh.

The writer is Principal Research Fellow at the Cosmos Foundation. He can be reached at epaaropaar@gmail.com