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In medicine, certain diseases are called self-limiting. They burn out because they consume their own fuel. The pathogen spreads, triggers the body’s defenses and is ultimately purged by the very symptoms it provokes.

Rotavirus diarrhoea is a textbook example. The virus replicates by destroying intestinal cells, unleashing a deluge of watery stools. But in that process, the body expels the virus en masse. Dehydration is the main danger, not the infection itself. Treatment is rehydration, patience – and restraint. No antibiotics. Just time.

Bangladesh’s far-right political movements behave much the same way. They surge, intoxicated by their own fury, only to meet resistance that they themselves provoke. And the country’s major political parties – especially the Awami League and the Bangladesh Nationalist Party – have long learned to treat this political fever with the clinical patience of a field medic: observe, hydrate, wait.

The rise of organised Islamist militancy offers a clear case. Though its first modern stirrings emerged under the Awami League with the 1999 bombing of the cultural group Udichi, it metastasised under the Bangladesh Nationalist Party government after 2001 – amid the global post-9/11 shift and under the pretense of countering leftist extremists.

The Bangladesh Nationalist Party dismissed early warnings as exaggerations, even fabrications by...