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On August 5, 2024 (or July 36th, as revolutionaries called it), Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina fled the country after three weeks of a massive student-led movement that emerged victorious against the old regime. The weeks that follow a Revolution are always moments of possibilities. We asked Dina M. Siddiqi who was in Dhaka at the time to reflect about the movement itself, and what kind of futures can be envisioned for Bangladesh, now that its people have found their breath again.
“We revolt simply because, for many reasons, we can no longer breathe.”
Frantz Fanon
The epigraph above briefly made the rounds in progressive circles in the days immediately following the unexpected demise of the government of Sheikh Hasina in August this year. Fanon’s powerful words could not have been more apt, for they call attention to conditions of ruling that had turned everyday life into a form of metaphorical suffocation even as they gesture to the limits of such conditions. In what follows, I try to account for how – in the space of just 20 days – those living with the slow, suffocating violence of a vengeful surveillance state found it impossible to carry on with the status quo, necessary to revolt in order to breathe. And, by extension, how university students turned a standard movement for the reallocation of government quotas into a full-fledged people’s revolution.
In those three weeks, the words atonko (terror) and khob (resentment) cropped up regularly in conversations around me. I began to conceptualize atonko as an extension and magnification of the fear and uncertainty that ordinary citizens routinely experienced in their exchanges with what had essentially become a police state, in which the consequences of real or imagined political dissent were clear: harassment and intimidation, material reprisals, the likelihood of being disappeared into the infamous Aynaghor, or even death in an extra-judicial encounter. From cartoonists and university professors to garment workers, labor organizers, and journalists, some version of atonko shadowed Bangladeshis as they went about their lives. Khob followed naturally as the underside of atonko. But at least initially, resentment was also refracted through another word that kept popping up – agun (fire). A metaphor for desire or passion in literature and music, here agun referred to the market, to the scorching prices of basic commodities that had literally become untouchable. Together, these three words/concepts have shaped my understanding of events that I share here.