Revolutionary moments in Bangladesh have a parallel structure. Those who come to power begin to think the country is their inheritance. Yet, the people remerge and bring them down.
The grammar of revolutions is parallelism. They run together, if not in content then in form.
We were watching coverage of the protests in a friend’s office in Kolabagan. His desk was large, the room wood-paneled and air-conditioned. On one screen was the news. On the other, CCTV footage of the hospital he runs. Students had been in the streets for days, demanding quota reform. We were speaking in platitudes about the futility of their demands and the impunity of the government. The added years had hardened us against the possibility of newness in Bangladeshi politics. In between sipping tea and talking in turns, we watched the screen as a man stood up and stretched his arms wide under the burning July sun. He wore a dark blue polo shirt and trousers, a thick stick in his hand. The street around him was littered with debris, and the air was hazy with smoke and dust. Off frame were fellow protesters and police forces.
It was Abu Sayed and the next moment he collapsed. Shots popped in the background. It happened so abruptly that it almost didn’t register.
“They just murdered the man in front of everyone,” my friend said in disgust. “They don’t care about anything. There was no need for this. The students didn’t ask for too much here. Hasina thinks it’s all theirs and that we aren’t people. We can’t ask for anything.”
“This looks really bad.” I said. They were the only words that seemed right to say.
This new government has settled into the mahogany-paneled rooms and the velvet chairs of parliament, rooting into the state with each decision. There has already been friction – political appointments and Islamic identifications signal that it’s going to be business as usual. Yet, the meaning of the Monsoon Revolution and those burning days of July are not yet clear. We would do well to take to heart that revolutions and their political aftermaths in Bangladesh observe a parallel structure.
Leaders and parties come to power and think the country is their inheritance. They forget that the people remain, as they have always been, smoldering embers, waiting to catch fire.
“It is bad. But nothing will happen, mark it. Nothing ever happens. They’ve started to crack down, and in a few weeks, things will go back to the way they always are.” He fingered his cup. “You’ll be back in America by then. Check back in a month. Nothing will have changed except the students who are missing.”
The mind doesn’t do what you’d expect when you watch the state kill a man. There was no moment of searing clarity, no sense of burning indignation or rage. The room felt the same, but something colored my thoughts black in a way that I couldn’t yet make out.
I told myself that I had seen enough of Bangladeshi politics to know that nothing would come of it. That the tea on the table would cool and the news would turn, and the regime would keep grinding down the country.
Still, the black and white photographs of Noor Hossain, his bare chest and back shouting “Down with Autocracy” and “Let Democracy be Free”, bubbled up in my memory. He was killed while protesting against the Ershad regime in 1987, and images of him became an icon of Bangladesh’s perennial struggle for democracy. Signs of Noor Hossain were part of the country’s cultural water in the 1990s. We saw his figure and his words on murals around the city growing up, and in the textbooks we carried in our backpacks.
Abu Sayed’s fate could not have avoided this iconography. It was dug too deep into the Bangladeshi psyche. Those of us who saw Abu Sayed fall wrote Noor Hossain onto his body. It was just its meaning.
We waited in the office for the next few hours. When it was clear things would be quiet for the night, he drove me back to my Chachi’s house. The streets didn’t feel like the kind you’d hail a ride on. There were indications everywhere – the muffled silence of the roads and a palpable, shapeless restlessness in the air – that the government had crossed a line it could not come back from. It would brook no push-back. The rulers wanted silence, and they were willing to kill to get it.
– – –
I was only in Dhaka for a few weeks, sorting out inheritance matters in court. I had a return ticket, a wife anxious about where I was, and the fall classes to prepare for. My parents had passed, my siblings and I had settled in the US, and the apartment we grew up in had been sold; Bangladesh was now at a distance.
My Chachi had insisted that I stay with them while I was visiting. It was supposed to be a quiet trip, during which I would run some legal errands and see some friends and relatives. That was not the case though as the Monsoon Revolution unfurled in a matter of days in July, with the government’s siege setting the country aflame.
The internet was cut off and national curfews were imposed. Dhaka’s monstrous din was muffled into silence.
My Chachi lived in Nikunja, an upscale neighborhood on Airport Road. A planned community for senior government officials (my Chacha had been a government secretary who retired when the Awami League came to power in 2008); it was a pond of calm in the middle of a churning city. The former president, Abdul Hamid, had a house a few streets down.
When party cadres were unleashed across the country, they never came to Nikunja. The paramilitaries and police who served as their muscle knew which neighborhoods to leave alone and which ones to attack. The violence was real, yet it was happening to other people. I watched it through screens and the secondhand accounts of people who had less buffer between themselves and what the state had unleashed.
Nikunja had a private park at its heart, with a large field with a paved path looping around it. During the curfew, my cousin and I would go there for walks on evenings when the heat of the day had set. We saw older men sitting on benches watching their grandchildren, running through the field and playing with toys they had just gotten. It could have been any other day of the year, except for the absence of the constant cacophony of traffic and construction in a city bursting at its seams.
The other place we would go was the tongs at the edge of the neighborhood. We’d sit there and listen. It was worlds apart from the park. The men in the tongs were not the retired classes residing in the villas in Nikunja, but drivers, guards, and shopkeepers; people over whom the police and the cadres had been running roughshod. Where they lived, the curfew wasn’t a suggestion. It was the law.
And these men were angry and fed up. They couldn’t be bothered to hide their hatred for the Awami League government, even though they knew first-hand that they had absolutely nothing standing between them and their guns if it ever came for them.
“The witch went on television and cried about the metro rail,” one man cursed the prime minister. He was referring to the recent footage showing Sheikh Hasina crying while visiting the Mirpur-10 metro station that had been vandalized during the protests.
“She only cares about her trains. Why should she care about us?” His interlocutor said. He had a white beard and red, crooked teeth. He was picking his teeth while he spoke. “The metro is her shining Bangladesh. We aren’t part of it.”
Another man, who said he was a carpenter and lived in Badda, talked about the terror he had witnessed over the last few days. “My neighbor’s boy got shot in the head,” he said. “Right there on the street. The police killed him, and they left him hanging on the traffic island. Nobody could go get him; the police would shoot at anyone who approached. The body just lay there till the police van scooped it up with the others at the end of the day.”
“The family went to the morgue to pick it up, but they wouldn’t give them the body without signing a paper. They made them swear that he was killed by the protesters, the BNP men, the Jamaat men, whatever they wanted. The family had to sign it, or they couldn’t take him and give him a proper burial.”
“These bastards are gonna get it,” said the man he was talking to. “We’re going to cut their throats when it’s our turn.”
My cousin and I heard these stories and didn’t say anything. We didn’t have anything to exchange. We rested during the day and went on evening walks. We could nod in agreement, knowing what they said was true.
– – –
The internet would come back for an hour or two every few days during those weeks. Without warning, the phone would light up and start buzzing, with days’ worth of messages pouring in at once. I’d call my wife in America, who would update me on news from international outlets.
I would also call my childhood friend in Dhanmondi. He lived down the street from our old apartment, in the neighborhood I couldn’t help but still think of as home.
“It’s a warzone here, man.” He said with the nervousness of someone who wanted to talk about what he saw but was unsure if he should. “There are helicopters overhead and I can hear the popping gunfire all the time. I can see smoke from road 27.”
“I can’t believe this,” I said in reply.
“Believe it. There are cops and cadres on every street. They’ve put snipers on top of buildings, and they’re shooting people through windows. They’re going into apartments and dragging out anyone who is young and taking them away.”
I tried to square this image of carnage with what I had known about Dhanmondi all my life. The images of violence he reported didn’t fit the place I knew. It was supposed to be a neighborhood where uncles and aunties would go out for evening walks, stopping to haggle with hawkers about fruit. Where youngsters would ride on rickshaws and stop on corners for fuchka, jhaalmuri, cha and loose cigarettes.
One afternoon, while the internet was on, I contacted a student who had been at BRAC University when the government attacked it.
“What happened?” I typed it out.
“There were about 200 of us at first,” he began, feeling safe behind a username. “It was completely peaceful, bhaiya. We were all nervous because of all the things that had been happening, but we couldn’t not do this. There was no way.”
“The registrar came to us and said he would not let anyone attack, that he had spoken to the authorities, and that it would be all right. But then the police came into the campus and started telling everyone that we didn’t have permission for the sit-in, and we had 30 minutes to break it up.”
“They started surrounding the university. There were lines of helmets and shields. Behind them, we could see the political cadres were also grouping together. We knew that they would attack us soon, and the police would help them.”
“It was around 10:30 when it started. There were suddenly white flashes and tear gas everywhere. The university opened its gates, and we all ran inside. We carried students into the medical rooms because they couldn’t breathe and their eyes were burning, and they were throwing up.”
“We couldn’t escape the gas even when we came inside. The police started firing into the campus. The entire entrance was full of smoke, and you couldn’t see anything.”
“By then students had started sending footage to others, and people from East West came in to help. There were hundreds of them. It was then, I think, that the student from Imperial College was shot. I saw his body on the road from where I was.”
“By noon, more people came to help. I don’t know from where, but I think it was just the people who lived in Badda. By the afternoon there must have been over a thousand people.”
“The police and the cadres had tried to massacre us. But then they had to run. They went into buildings and up onto roofs. Helicopters came down to help them escape. It was like a movie.”
“Good thing they got out,” he added with what I read as bravado. “Or else I don’t think they would have made it out alive. They had tried to kill us. We wouldn’t have let them just go.”
The images of government cadres and the police having to be rescued from the hands of the students who had fought them back started circulating across people’s social media timelines and news reports. The footage showed explosions followed by tear gas, flash grenades splitting the smoke, students bleeding and crying, and police being rushed onto helicopters. This was now a fight between the people and the government. It was about who would break first.
– – –
What the government did in those weeks in July followed a well-trodden path in Bangladeshi autocratic history. The Pakistani army’s Operation Searchlight began at Dhaka University. Students and faculty were dragged from their halls and shot. When Ershad faced the student movement in 1983, his forces fought most intensely with protesters, killing at least five at Dhaka University. When the movement surged again in 1990, his cadres shot Dr. Shamsul Alam Khan Milon, a physician and activist, near the Teacher-Student Centre, the heart of the university campus.
It was Sheikh Hasina and her regime who had now become the autocracy. The daughter of the man who led the nation into 1971 and then was murdered (along with most of his family) in a conspiracy provoked by his misrule was now the autocrat. She had become the latest monster stalking Bangladesh’s hopes of democracy and sovereignty. Her gaze spread, and her party wrapped itself around every institution, contract, appointment, and deal, siphoning life out of everything.
When the curfew eased at the end of the month, I went to Dhaka University. I knew this was where the country’s resistant soul was most vital and where all successful movements in our history found their feet. So, I wanted to know what the government had tried to do to throttle the life of the place; it knew that it had to kill any spirit there or else it would never really die.
All campus entrances were barricaded to outside vehicles. They let us through (my cousin went with me) because we didn’t look like students, and we were able to walk through campus. It was an occupation. There were police and army trucks parked at every corner, and no signs of students anywhere. There were no groups laughing as they crossed the street or gesturing widely as they addaed with friends.
In Shahbagh, there were platoons of party cadres sitting on motorcycles. Packets of biriyani were being handed out from trucks; everyone eating was smiling and relaxing. They all had the air of men who knew themselves the true owners of the world. Nothing, they felt, could take their place and their privilege from them.
They were wrong.
The next week Sheikh Hasina fled in ignominy. She left no resignation speech and no explanation. She vanished when she realized that the ground had given beneath her and her regime. There was chaos everywhere and looting every day for weeks afterwards. The state had been so thoroughly captured by the party that it turned to smoke when the party went underground.
I watched all this happen from afar as I had flown back to the US two days prior to the fall of the government. Footage of crowds looting her palatial residences populated my timelines and became the background for news coverage about the unfolding events. The people beamed through my screen, gleefully relishing the reclamation of what she had taken.
Political opponents ascended as the Awami League retreated. Muhammad Yunus, continuously harassed by the government over the last decade, became the head of an interim government. The party was banned, and Sheikh Hasina was indicted, convicted, and sentenced (to death for crimes against humanity) in absentia. Khaleda Zia, her political nemesis, died and was given a state funeral, with full honors. Her son, Tareq Rahman, has returned from exile and has taken over as the new Prime Minister after the BNP won a landslide election in February.
This new government has settled into the mahogany-paneled rooms and the velvet chairs of parliament, rooting into the state with each decision. There has already been friction – political appointments and Islamic identifications signal that it’s going to be business as usual. Yet, the meaning of the Monsoon Revolution and those burning days of July are not yet clear. We would do well to take to heart that revolutions and their political aftermaths in Bangladesh observe a parallel structure.
Leaders and parties come to power and think the country is their inheritance. They forget that the people remain, as they have always been, smoldering embers, waiting to catch fire.
