Bangladesh, Jan. 27 -- There is something uniquely revealing about how a state allocates its dead—and its ministers. Graveyards, after all, are meant to be the great equalizer. Ministers residences, by contrast, are supposed to be functional symbols of public service, not monuments to privilege. When both are bent to flatter power, the result is not governance but quiet moral decay.

Consider the Banani Graveyard policy in Dhaka. Officially, it was framed as a response to land scarcity, a very real problem in Dhaka. Grave space is finite, the city is overcrowded, and burial management requires rules. Yet politics has a way of distorting necessity into deference. When Atiqul Islam, the then mayor of Dhaka North City Corporation, tigh...