The August Revolution in Bangladesh

By Mozid Mahmud

Student protests broke out in Bangladesh in July 2024, ever since a court ruling brought back quotas in civil service exams for children and grandchildren of the veterans of the Independence War of 1971. These quotas were seen as unnecessarily benefitting a small number of people and likely to be used to privilege political favorites. The situation only worsened as the days went on, ending in a strange press conference given by the prime minister at the time, Sheikh Hasina, who termed all the protestors as razakars—a highly offensive term in post-independence Bangladesh, used to refer to collaborators during the liberation movement. As clashes between student protesters and law enforcement got tougher, the ruling party’s student organization launched physical attacks against the protestors, adding fuel to the fire. There were men wearing helmets, carrying hockey sticks, and disrupting processions. The cold-blooded killing of an unarmed university student by the police in broad daylight turned the public against the government almost unanimously, resulting in a complete shutdown of the internet for five days and shoot-on-sight orders, all of which brought life to a standstill, until the protests found a second wind in early August and culminated in Sheikh Hasina’s escape to neighboring India on August 5, mere hours before her residence was stormed by the people. It was a shock for all of us, as suddenly a fifteen-year-old regime which looked invincible, especially with its close ties with India, its large neighbor, broke down completely within hours. The celebrations that followed were, then, an expression of overwhelming relief.

The feeling of helplessness, however, was acute in those violent few days before August 5. I personally could not go on with my day as usual—as I suppose was the case for most of the people in my country. Dread prevailed in the hot air. The internet lines were botched by the powers at will, and I had trouble getting in touch with some of my family. My son, who studies in Canada, was out of reach. My mind did not stay on any of my stories or poetry. I knew this was a difficult time to write, but also that this was an event worth writing about. That everything would escalate with such ease, I wasn’t aware. Even if I could have written something about our present circumstances, no paper would have risked publishing any story that veered from the government’s versions. It was too risky for anyone involved. Those few days showed me the limits of what we are often permitted to write, more so than any other time in my career as a writer in Bangladesh.

Fifteen years of uninterrupted Awami League rule had a debilitating effect on the citizens, and they longed to get out of seeing the same old faces alternating in positions of power. This is one of the biggest reasons why public expectations of Muhammad Yunus, who has since taken charge after the former prime minister fled to India, is so high. Known as the poor man’s banker, Muhammad Yunus became a national icon at home after winning the Nobel Peace Prize for his work in microfinance. Many, including myself, were inspired by his approach to uplifting millions from poverty, and I, too, run a microfinance organization today in Northern Bengal, which I founded in the late nineties. But how successful can Muhammad Yunus be against the various sections of pressure groups (some of whom can easily transform into unruly mobs) is still up in the air. As a politician, he is still new to the scene, and one can already notice a mild pressure being applied to his interim government by certain Islamist political parties.

This is not exactly good news for writers and artists in Bangladesh, where literature often has to straddle a thin line, lest it be deemed as sacrilegious by the government and the Bangla Academy (which is often under the ruling party’s influence when it comes to which poets and writers they should prioritize for their events, fellowships, and awards). At the end of the 1980s, I published a book of poems, Mahfuzamangal, in which I used rich Islamic imagery, a part of my heritage, to reimagine a contemporary mangal-kavya, religious poetic tracts devoted to mythological deities. The reaction from some writers to those verses was controversial, to say the least, with many accusing me of blasphemy, and others saying it was too strident a blend of syncretism and political irrelevance.    

Back in 2013, the Bangladeshi author Neamat Imam, living in Canada at the time, published his novel The Black Coat (Penguin Random House India), I remember, to great consternation back at home. The novel chose to portray the terrible famine of 1974 in post-independence Bangladesh. At that time, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the leader of the Awami League party, under whose aegis the liberation war had been fought in 1971, was still in charge. Though charismatic, Sheikh Mujib had trouble establishing good governance after taking the helm. This, along with many complex geopolitical factors at play, made Bangladesh fall under the grip of severe starvation where thousands died and still more were left crippled with malnutrition. On August 15, 1975, some “ambitious” military officers assassinated Sheikh Mujib along with all his family members, save his two daughters who were abroad at the time. Neamat chose to write about this particular period to show the kinds of politics and rhetoric that people built in the midst of famine. Mujib had his rightful place as the founding leader of our country, but as his government was truly inept at handling the famine, widespread corruption, and hoarding of foodstuffs, Mujib’s popularity plummeted. The confidence he commanded had begun to look despotic. It did not help that Sheikh Mujib changed the constitution around this time and instituted a one-party state with him as president. With Mujib gone, the one-party experiment ended. Decades of military rule followed, after which a system of parliamentary democracy returned in 1991 with the election of Khaleda Zia. The Awami League was back as one of the two main parties vying for power along with Zia’s Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP). When The Black Coat was published twenty-two years later, it was Sheikh Hasina who was now in power, and it was the imperative of her government to have the memory of that famine—which had led to such dissatisfaction among the masses—to be erased out of the national consciousness. The Black Coat was virtually banned—with publishers coerced never to issue a Bengali translation. Around the same time, the Awami League government started a trial of the war criminals of the Bangladesh Independence War, which many outside the country termed “politically motivated” in one way or other to jail or execute opposition party members. This led to “popular” movements such as rallies in Shahbagh Square (mirroring the Tahrir Square in Cairo, during the Arab Spring), where a faction of activists ended up as a vocal mob for the ruling party. Whereas before, the BNP and Awami League had alternated every five years, leaving neither side much time to muscle around the general public, now the League had supreme control. Soon after, there was a one-sided election in 2014, which the BNP boycotted, and the dominance of Awami League over all aspects of political and cultural life in Bangladesh began to take hold. This was the first glimmer of an ever-increasing power that led to the great dissatisfaction and the movement in July and August of 2024. Today, we are seeing a resurgence in the sales and discussions of The Black Coat. Books that the erstwhile government had found “uncomfortable” are now seemingly more popular than ever.

However, it is not the case that literature and writers’ voices were throttled only in the last fifteen years of the Awami regime. Before them, the rule of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), from 2001 to 2005 and from 1992 to 1996, had also seen intolerant, if not downright violent, attitudes toward writers. Under both governments we have seen writers forced into exile. Another controversial writer Humayun Azad had his book Naari (Women) (1992) banned by the government for essentially talking about patriarchy. Taslima Nasreen, who wrote a novel called Lajja (1993), an account of Hindu persecution in Bangladesh, was run out of the country. Whether or not their books had literary or even political merit, they were confronted by threats and intimidation. Azad faced assassination attempts and was critically injured; others, such as Avijit Roy, a popular secular activist, did not survive their attacks. Personalities such as Shahidul Alam, a prominent photographer, were jailed and harassed for speaking against the government.

The momentary relief that Sheikh Hasina’s removal has brought has now been replaced with anxieties over a new kind of suffocation. As I write this, the army is being granted magistracy powers. There have been questions, bizarrely, of changing the flag, of restricting how women should dress. Mazars and mausoleums are being attacked on the basis of being “heretical” to certain sects of Islam, and there has been enthusiastic suggestions to scrape the national anthem, which was composed by Rabindranath Tagore, a giant of literature—but to those in the extreme, just a “Hindu.”

This is nothing new in the context of Bangladeshi politics. Interestingly, during the last few days of the Awami rule, every section of the public—including the extreme right and the uber-Islamists—were sporting all-red profile pictures on social media. They did not feel any contradiction in what was essentially a secular show of solidarity. They were wearing the same red that not only personified the blood of the martyrs during this struggle, but also the innate energy within us that stirs us, brings us out into the streets. It was the red of Tagore, who compared the color to the sun; and also of Nazrul, the national poet of Bangladesh, who termed the whole world red: Lal e Lal Duniya. The academic Joya Chatterjee remarked that “Bengali Muslim identity is thus commonly perceived as being riven by a fault line, with Bengaliness and Muslimness co-existing uneasily on the opposite sides of a deep and fundamental divide” (from her paper “The Bengali Muslim: A Contradiction in Terms?”). Those opposing the Awami League, which counts itself as secular even as it behaves in a fascist manner, often attempt to give primacy to Islamic values—yet neither side is ever able to command total influence. 

When I was writing my novel Memorial Club, I was still a journalist, and these upheavals were a common sight. The mobs that would sometimes call all the shots in the villages were striking in the myths and traditions they would conjure up to defend their actions. In the twenty-two years it took me to finish this book, life in Bangladesh has changed considerably. When before the villages were mostly left to their devices, now we see a certain centralization that viciously encroaches on them, upending the lives of these people. Much of that brutality, I tried to portray in Memorial Club. As my protagonist Hasan realizes, tragic events that happen in his life are just part of that vicious cycle. He cannot escape the stories that bind him; they are all now part of the collective memory of society, some of it staged between reality and dreams. When the Bengali version of the novel was released in 2021, I felt I was able to show the modern, urban manifestations of this chaos that had been developing for centuries in the hinterlands. I thought that story needed to be told because people like us, who came from those rural villages, were best prepared to ruminate on the cyclical nature of Bengali politics, having witnessed most of the country’s highs and lows, from liberations and assassinations to economic miracles and natural disasters. Are we now in a new chapter of Bangladesh? The pessimist among us may foresee a return of the BNP party, and then after it sows its share of discord, a come-back, perhaps, of the Awami League again. The optimist would like to imagine a new dawn, where even if things go wrong, it won’t go this wrong. We saw how the coronation of one individual can lead to improvements, but the power of the many is greater than any individual’s control over all events. The revolution that took place in August in my country has perhaps best exemplified this.

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Mozid Mahmud is a poet and novelist from Dhaka, Bangladesh. The American edition of his novel Memorial Club (Gaudy Boy) is set to be released in January 2025. 

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