Amar bhai ke marli keno?: Why did you kill my brother?
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Past midnight on August 11, as my parents drive me to Dhaka’s Shahjalal International Airport, the city I call home seems locked in a tense quiet. No one has gone to sleep, our WhatsApp groups and Facebook feeds remind us—it’s been a month since Bangladeshis went to bed at a decent hour—but the roads are empty of both pedestrians and traffic police. The few cars and trucks passing through are shepherded by cap-wearing, whistle-wielding students, the streets somehow more ordered in their untrained hands. Entrances to neighborhoods are being manned by volunteer groups from resident families. Their stake out is a precaution against a recent surge of burglaries.
In this absence of Dhaka’s usual nighttime soundscape, what calls out to us on the roads are the red and black words streaked across the city’s walls, its pillars, shop fronts, gates, along the beams of flyovers and even the trunks of trees. At varying heights and in varying directions, we read, among other phrases:
Noy dofa dabi: A nine-point demand
Ek dofa dabi: A one-point demand
Dhaka, a city of corpses.
Sheikh Hasina is a murderer. Sheikh Hasina must step down.
36 July. No more lies. The dictator has fled.
We are free.
*
It began with a killing. Abu Sayeed was 25 years old, the youngest of a family of nine siblings, studying English at the Begum Rokeya University in Bangladesh’s northwestern city of Rangpur. Poverty had forced his siblings to give up education, but they were all chipping in to fulfill their younger brother’s dream of graduating and joining the civil service, which would also allow him to support his family.
“[He] was our only hope,” Sayeed’s brother would tell reporters. “We had big dreams for him.”
I was home for the summer and in my room in Dhaka on July 16—not keeping my eyes on the news that afternoon—when my mother walked in looking shocked, tear-stricken. I have seen Ammu express disappointment, even anger at news updates before. Just a few days earlier we were discussing, confused, why the government was so adamant on preserving 30% of public sector jobs for grandchildren of freedom fighters while graduates across the country were facing unemployment.
But her tears were unusual. She couldn’t believe what had happened. That the police, ordered by the government, would attack protestors who were armed, if at all, with mere sticks and slogans.
“He was standing alone,” Ammu kept saying in disbelief. “This young boy in Rangpur, he was puffing out his chest and had his arms spread out. He looked so shocked when they shot him. He wasn’t even a threat. He was a child.”
And: “What are his parents going through?”
Since the beginning of June 2024, public university students in Bangladesh had been protesting for a reform of the job quota that unfairly benefitted freedom fighters’ descendants, thereby benefiting supporters or relatives of the ruling party who had fought in the war. In a national address to the protests, the (now former) Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina mockingly inquired whether the jobs should instead be allocated to “razakars.” By using that term, the gravest of insults for a Bangladeshi, she had compared university students asking for a fair shot at employment to collaborators who aided Pakistan’s genocide against Bangladesh during the ‘71 Liberation War. Students and their allies across the country were outraged. They poured onto the streets demanding both apology and reform, carrying slogans that now endure on the city walls.
Tumi ke, ami ke? Razakar, razakar. Ke bolechhe, ke bolechhe? Shoirachar, shoirachar!
“Who are you, who am I? The dictator says we are razakars!”
Chaite gelam odhikar, hoye gelam razakar.
“We came to ask for our rights, only to be labeled traitors.”
In media and other public statements, government officials conveniently left out the lines from the slogans which implicated Sheikh Hasina in initiating the name-calling. She and four other ministers stated that protestors were now “identifying themselves as razakars.” Ergo, they are traitors, they deserve no respect, nor the right to hold the country’s flag. The president of Bangladesh Chhatra League, the government’s student wing, declared the protestors ineligible for work. Soon, the government began claiming that the demonstrations weren’t a people’s movement for justice, but an anti-nationalist ploy by BNP, the opposition political party.
On July 16, when Abu Sayed was shot by a policeman while protesting in front of his campus, the shock, grief and outrage we felt wasn’t confined to any one home. It reverberated across the country, across divisions of class, age, educational institutions, professions. Children, their teachers and parents, artists, journalists, lawyers and even rickshaw pullers eventually united in a 9-point demand that called for an end to wide-reaching corruption in state institutions.
And with more people joining the protests came more deaths, arbitrary arrests, abductions, and attacks inside university dorms aided by electricity blackouts in the area. The government appointed armed police, border guards, and its own student wing goons to attack the demonstrations. Dorm residents were forced to evacuate their rooms, which for many of them were their homes in Dhaka. Protestors and volunteers were shot in the eyes, while others were shot to death simply for being in the streets. My younger brother lost at least two friends when private university students joined in solidarity with their public university peers—Children are dying, how can we think about eating or making conversation? he asked me when I suggested he come over to process the loss among loved ones.
The UN would later confirm that over 600 people were killed between July 16 and August 11. But that night, on July 18, as we tried to process the first wave of killings, the government shut down the internet across the country.
Laakho shahid-er rokte gora, ei desh ta karo baaper nah:
This country born of millions of martyrs belongs to no one’s dad
*
On my way to the airport, as I watch the protest graffiti scroll past me before my flight to the United States, I’m reminded of the word “patramyths,” which the Bangladeshi American author Tanaïs coins in their memoir In Sensorium. Patramyth, which shares with the word patriarchy the Greek root of patria, “lineage,” and which Tanais uses to refer to records of power. It melds patra, meaning ‘a written document’ in Sanskrit and Bangla, with myth, in English “an origin story” and a close phonetic neighbor to mithya, the Bangla word for “a lie.”
“Patramyths have justified grave violence by way of religion, science, philosophy, literature, anthropology, books, and laws,” Tanaïs writes. They are speaking of the power wielded within and against a few thousand years of South Asian history, but perhaps no other word more accurately captures the essence of Bangladeshi life under the Awami League government’s 15-year rule. The people’s rage against them in July and August wasn’t episodic.
Despite decades of sedimented violence, the narrative of Bangladesh has been, for at least the past 15 years, a patramyth.
Since becoming Prime Minister in 2009, Sheikh Hasina remained in power through multiple rigged elections. Her father, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, had played a crucial role in mobilizing the 1971 war effort that would turn East Pakistan into independent Bangladesh. He was titled Father of the Nation for his contributions. In trying to cement his legacy, Hasina made it tantamount to treason to address any nuances in Bangladesh’s history. Our origin story became a grand tale of his glories—all other milestones became subplots, any others who helped birth Bangladesh became secondary characters, and anyone who opposed the mainstream narrative became enemies of the state. Children learned to read about, nay, chant this history from state-sponsored textbooks, school curricula, and graphic novels.
Some counternarratives survived in banned books and people’s memories. In Bangladesh: A Legacy of Blood, journalist Anthony Mascarenhas records how, between becoming the country’s first President in ‘72 and facing a brutal assassination along with most of his family in ‘75, Sheikh Mujib’s tenure was swamped by famine, corruption, violence, fervent propaganda and muzzling of free speech. “Now that we had achieved our nationhood, I wanted to understand what Sheikh Mujib had in mind for me as an individual citizen,” says the character Khaleque Biswas in another book set in the same years.
Biswas is a war-time reporter-turned-disgraced journalist in Neamat Imam’s The Black Coat, a novel named after the President’s iconic costume. In this early scene in the story—set in Bangladesh’s nascent days as a free nation—Biswas is stuck replaying Mujib’s historic pre-war speech on a loop, searching for answers in moments of crisis. But Mujib’s words, their promise of freedom, fail him endlessly. Their constant repetition renders them futile, until they become a tool of deception in the novel.
These chapters from a complicated history lay buried deep beneath the gloss of nearly 2,200 statues and monuments erected around Bangladesh in Sheikh Mujib’s impression, the postage stamps and national currency bearing his image, the themed state parks, public buildings, and national holidays devoted to his memory. From 2018 onwards, the Digital Security Act made it illegal for Bangladeshis to publicly criticize the state run by his daughter. It allowed the government to arrest without warrant (read: disappear) anyone who spoke out against them; if the victims weren’t killed, their worst fate would include years of detention and torture in Awami League’s open secret of the Aynaghor (Hall of Mirrors).
Despite decades of sedimented violence, the narrative of Bangladesh has been, for at least the past 15 years, a patramyth. Those 11 days of internet blackout in July, the accompanying “shoot-at-sight” curfew, all of it make up a loaded page from this record of power.
For so long, Bangladeshis had seen and heard so much but knew not to say a word. The shock of students’ deaths in July pushed these repressed voices onto the streets, onto media webpages and social media platforms. An internet blackout was the most effective way to disrupt the protest planning and rescue operations for casualties. It sieved out the real time dispatches that were riling up public sentiment against the Awami League government. In the enforced silence that followed, we witnessed the most bizarre charade of information dissemination by the state.
Suddenly, we were thrown back to the analog cycle of waiting for TV news by the hour and waiting a whole day for new editions of print newspapers. Hundreds of people continued to die and disappear in the intervening hours, and policemen began raiding homes after sundown, arresting mostly young adults and searching residents’ devices for any signs of solidarity with the protests.
Throughout our cities, but especially Dhaka today, anger is manifest in profanities on the same walls where some students have since tried to paint over the evidence of their own rage.
When they weren’t airing celebrity talk shows or reporting innocuously on agricultural produce while the country shook with violence, TV channels owned by the state or pro-government parties spoke of law enforcement officers “killed on duty,” skirting the magnitude of civilian deaths. Several journalists and TV presenters who bravely continued to address the truth faced disruptions in their work.
Meanwhile, the Minister for Posts, Telecommunications and IT claimed that the internet had stopped working on its own. The Minister for Information and Broadcasting blamed “third party actors” for the attacks on civilians. And the Prime Minister appeared on national television to shed tears for vandalized TV and metro rail stations, mentioning the loss of hundreds of lives only in passing. It would’ve been laughable had it not been so terrifying.
No wonder the nation, as a united, angry mass, took to the streets come early August. No wonder they marched from all corners of the country and kept marching until they were at the gates of the government in Dhaka on August 5—ten days before the country would normally mourn the anniversary of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s assassination. But Sheikh Hasina had resigned by the time the Long March reached her office, and fled the country.
Marle baare awaaj digun, shoiracharer godite agun
The more you hit us, our voices double, the dictator’s throne is aflame
*
We now recognize the events of August 5 as a “second independence.” The month of July, forever red in our minds, has become one of solidarity and mourning.
But there is no neat end to this story—the people of Bangladesh are living its aftershocks still. An interim government headed by Nobel laureate Dr. Muhammad Yunus, selected by representatives of the Anti-Discrimination Student Movement, is trying to heal the damage from decades of money laundering, corruption and enforced disappearances. At the same time, Bangladesh is trying to recover from a tumultuous flood that has displaced at least 1.24 million people as of August 28. Swathes of misinformation about all of this and more continue to sweep the internet.
These newer storms are yet to arrive when I move through a blue-black Dhaka the night of August 11. Never before has a departure felt this heavy. As our car speeds up, the scene outside my window blurs, and I am reminded of Khaleque Biswas’s words on Bangladesh’s hard-won freedom in ‘71: “The sands do not remember for long.”
For now, our walls do. As time makes the anti-discrimination movement a little more distant with each passing day, the protest graffiti continues to beam the fear, rage, frustration, and courage Bangladeshis felt through July and August. In addition to bodily wounds and the lives we lost, the protest graffiti are perhaps the only tangible remnants of the movement as it happened in real time.
They depict the scenes of Abu Sayed holding his arms to his side, young Mugdho offering protestors water before he, too, would be killed. They depict a young student holding her palm up to a police van, daring it to drive over her with her brother inside, as well as a uniformed officer clamping the mouth of a young boy shut with his palm.
Throughout our cities, but especially Dhaka today, anger is manifest in profanities on the same walls where some students have since tried to paint over the evidence of their own rage. They want their hopes for the future, not their recent pains, to reflect in our public spaces. Many people, including myself, disagreed with the initiative, though it’s hard not to smile over the sentiment behind it.
After murals around the Dhaka University campus, where much of the violence occurred, were painted bright and colorful with calls for a Bangladesh that belongs to its people, our new, secular Bangladesh, unknown parties smeared over the word “secular” with “inclusive.” It’s a complicated, populous country, and we rarely agree with each other. Our walls are witness to the chaos of this existence.
