India, Feb. 14 -- Bangladesh held popular elections on Thursday, a few months short of two years after the student-led uprising that ousted the Sheikh Hasina government. Crowd politics has often played a gestational role for major shifts in the country's politics. It is against this backdrop that we recommend Paradoxes of the Popular: Crowd Politics in Bangladesh by Nusrat Sabina Chowdhury. The book picks up major protests that Bangladesh has seen and analyses why the crowd forms the third political pole of the nation, alongside its armed forces and political outfits. The crowd in Bangladesh, Chowdhury says, has always been a "political actor" - be it the peasant movement of 2006 or the groundswell demanding stricter punishment for "razakars". Cases discussed in the book underscore crowd politics' interplay with regimes of the day - and how this has not always been to an antagonistic effect....