Many detractors argued Bangladesh, as it hurtled from one disaster to another, was not a 'sustainable country'. Mujib's death sealed the fate of democracy as two successive military dictators-- Generals Ziaur Rahman and H.M Ershad--launched Bangladesh back on the road to Pakistan-type military-sponsored theocracy by legitimising Islamist parties and declaring Islam as the state religion, undoing secularism as a basic precept enshrined in Bangladesh's 1972 Constitution. No wonder, American author Lawrence Lifschultz sub-titled his book on Bangladesh as the