“We will grow again” read The New York Times headline relating the news of Dhaka’s Holey Artisan bakery’s reopening.

While the headline read like a rousing call — reminiscent of that scene from Casablanca, of singing La Marseillaise in Rick’s Café Américain — the body read like a paean to resilience and resurrection. To resilience of the good life and resurrection of “flour-dusted baguettes and homemade pasta”.

I hold nothing against a good baguette or a plate of pasta. Even less against recognising the socio-political role restaurants have played throughout history.

But I’m holding off my celebrations just yet.

For one, the entire Holey Artisan affair has been of, for and by the elite. A war waged by one group of elites on another. The everyday people are nowhere in the narrative.

The bakery sits in an area they call Gulshan — which means garden in Urdu. The place shares its name with a lake that surrounds it. Though technically a lake, the long green water body stretches nearly five miles, meandering like a river through the heart of Dhaka. And at one point, they call it the Hatir Jheel, or elephant’s lake, where the waters fork out like a snake’s tongue creating between its two arms something akin to a riverine island. An island that sits like an Elysium of green serenity and quiet opulence in a city overridden with unceasing pandemonium and poverty.

Holey had nothing to do with real Dhaka and its real residents. It sat in a neighbourhood of bungalows with walls higher than two humans and where condos are sold ‘by invitation only’. And over the two years of its existence, the bakery served nothing but western fare to none but the city’s crème de la crème who rubbed shoulders with diplomats. Dhaka’s riffraff was kept at bay with armed watchmen, a high wrought-iron gate and even higher prices.

Save those who cooked and cleaned, Holey was a place that only the very rich knew from the inside.

Those who died in the attacks were almost all expats attached to foreign embassies. And those who did the killing were rich young men who themselves frequented the bakery as patrons.

“I can’t for the life of me imagine Nibras as a radical militant. I mean let alone being radical, he wasn’t even religious. He was such a cool dude — a playboy — a real ladies’ man,” Shaukat* a friend of Nibras Islam, the leader of the hostage operation, had said to me in an interview.

“I mean he had a poster of Ozzy Osborne in his room for fuck’s sake!” Amin* had added.

Shauktat and Amin were both musicians of some repute in the close-knit music scene of Dhaka. A community frequented by Nibras.

The killings did instill “fear in people” as the article says and impacted the upscale restaurant scene of Dhaka. But for most part, life changed little for Dhaka’s rich diners. They simply continued their fine dining at other cafes like Northend, Bittersweet and E Bistro. Or for that matter at the Izumi Japanese Kitchen — another uber-expensive Gulshan area restaurant run by the owners of Holey Artisan.

However, what changed markedly post-attack, were the lives and livelihoods of the working- and middle-class people in the area. Something a large part of the foreign media has been blind to.

For one, Gulshan has turned into this nightmarish mash-up of a police state and a war zone. The waterside promenade — a haunt of young lovers who can’t afford expensive dates — has now been barricaded. Barbed wire rolls line every wall and cameras stare down passersby at every turn. The streets have been chopped up into little bits with check posts manned by shotgun wielding paramilitary personnel.

Commuters coming in from the Baridhara side — a neighbourhood that’s slightly lower in class rankings — are randomly stopped at the check post and asked questions.

At a mere 96 police personnel per 100,000 people, Bangladesh may be one of the least policed countries in the world. But as things stand today, Gulshan is probably among the most policed neighbourhoods in the world. Armoured vehicles and militia units with an array of automatic assault rifles prowl the streets at all hours.

Every morning, many hundreds of men and women come from surrounding slum areas to work in Gulshan and its adjacent posh locality, Banani.

The women mostly come as servants and the men as rickshaw pullers. These men and women had absolutely no role to play in the Holey attack, but the entire burden of security has come down hardest on their feeble shoulders.

They are expected to wear photo IDs around their necks at all times. Their fingerprints and retina scans are now part of databases and they are frisked at every entry and exit. Long duty hours of the soldiers and guards makes them an irritable lot and every now and then, they unload those frustrations on the backs of these workers. Shouting, abusing and shoving for little or no reason.

As for the rickshaw pullers, they’ve been given clownish fluorescent jackets with roll numbers on their backs: A panopticon of sorts that keeps them visible at all times irrespective of darkness or light. Their rickshaws now carry bright yellow boards with a long list of dos and don’ts. A phone number written in large font declares the number on which to report anybody who dares put a toe out of line.

To add to the insult, the war zone-like check posts have severely affected their daily wages.

“Earlier I would earn around a 100 taka (around 1 USD) in six hours of work. But now, even an entire day’s work doesn’t guarantee me that money,” rickshaw puller Hanif Mohammed had said to me.

Unlike earlier times, when rickshaw pullers could pull their vehicles to whatever distance their bodies endured, as per post-attack rules, they can now go only from one check post to another. This has restricted the price of each trip to roughly 15 cents. So every rickshaw puller has to now make an impossibly higher number of trips and work much longer hours to earn a wage worthy of taking home.

The NYT article quotes one of the owners, Ali Arsalan, as saying how his former employees have bravely returned to work and how he is inspired by their bravery. I agree. But only in part.

Coming back to the job is an act of compulsion and not of bravery.

Cooking and cleaning positions in Dhaka are all taken by people displaced from the countryside and seeking a route to escape the poverty back home. But Dhaka’s restaurants, especially standalone ones, are very low paying and the migrants never really escape the poverty trap unless they migrate overseas.

The staff at the Holey was not much different.

From the information I gathered, the only two staffers who were paid in sums comparable to standard hotels — the head chef and the sous-chef — were both foreign nationals, Italian and Argentinian respectively. In fact, on the night of the attack, the head chef was on vacation and thus avoided the ordeal. The rest of the staff was Bangladeshi and significantly lesser paid.

Moreover, not all of those who worked at Holey before the attack have been taken back on the rolls of the new Holey. Nor have they been accommodated in the other business interests of the owners and investors of Holey Artisan. Some have had to go without jobs for months after the attack. In part because there was a lurking suspicion that they were somehow linked to the attack. Faced with cash crunch, some have been forced to take up jobs that pay lower than what they got at Holey.

However, not re-employing everyone isn’t tantamount to Holey’s owners being uncaring. By most accounts narrated to me, Holey was one of the better employers in this line of business.

But to speak selectively of those who returned, and to call it an act of bravery, paints a misleading, glorious picture.

Besides the elite angle, there is the matter of how the story of terrorism in Bangladesh is getting narrated in the West and what its resulting political implications.

Despite being a Muslim majority country, despite being home to Islamist parties and despite being a very poor country with over 38 per cent illiteracy, Bangladesh doesn’t quite fit into the simplistic narratives of Islamist terrorism that underpins US foreign policy.

Islam as a political ism and its contestations with Bengali progressive thought and the resulting political violence has existed since long before the al-Qaeda, Islamic State et al became part of the global political lexicon. But the history of that political violence has been entirely internal — one of Bengalis killing other Bengalis in the name of Islam or some other political rhetoric. Even the largest Bangla terror group, the Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh, which declared its ideological kinship to the Taliban, remained restricted to pockets and their mayhem remained within Bangladesh’s borders.

So, there’s never been enough ground for the West to interfere and bring into Bangladesh its never ending ‘war on terror’.

Holey Artisan’s story offers a segue.

With its choice of venue, choice of targets and YouTube videos pronouncing affiliation with the Islamic State, it molds the narrative to one which western mainstream media and military policy wonks are familiar with. A narrative that runs on the lines of religious ignoramuses taking up the gun because they hate western civilisation and have thus become a threat to the lives of western citizens.

The Bangladeshi intelligence agencies have consistently maintained the non-involvement of international outfits. But curiously enough, the Western media is always second guessing.

In the minds of readers, the mention of Islamic State conjures up images of battle-hardened mercenaries from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. In reality, the Holey attackers were a bunch of under-trained youngsters who got the success they did, simply because they chose a soft target. Like the blogger killers, their main weapons were machetes — variants of which can be bought in any neighbourhood of Dhaka and are used all the time for everything from slicing green coconuts by the roadside to chopping meat and fish for lunch.

“The guns were local pistols and the bombs were IEDs. There were no military grade weapons or grenades involved,” Md. Mohibul Islam Khan, the head of anti-terrorist counterintelligence in Dhaka and the lead investigator in the Holey Artisan case said in an interview to me.

Except for claims made by spurious blog posts and anonymous handles, there is no real proof of any direct link between the Islamic State and the acts of Bangladeshi Islamists. Any random knife attack can be claimed by anybody on the Internet. But can those claims become the basis for making a pronouncement as serious as the IS is present in Bangladesh?

Holey Artisan Bakery needs to be reported with more nuance than other acts of political violence. Its reopening can be celebrated — but not before all affected have been provided relief.

*Names changed to protect identities

The reporting used in this article is based on field notes from the author’s ongoing research on the Islamic State in Bangladesh