Before February 1, 2021, if someone had asked me whether the military would stage a coup, I would have said no. I would have just thought it was another empty threat. Min Aung Hlaing had even said just a day before that there were no plans to abolish the 2008 Constitution. But when the coup actually happened, I wasn’t surprised either. We already knew they could do anything. If you read between the lines, you will notice that the only thing they ruled out was abolishing the Constitution—not that they had guaranteed they wouldn’t grab power. And under the 2008 Constitution, wasn’t it impossible to stage a coup without scrapping it? In reality, they managed to do it in just a matter of days. Once the coup happened, people erupted. They were devastated. They saw it as democracy being stolen through sheer force. But let’s take a moment to really think—had we actually achieved democracy? Was the 2016–2020 period truly democratic rule? We often analyze things through comparison. C...