Inside Bangladesh's revolution, told by a Dhaka University student

A 22-year-old’s inheritance of 1971

The episode opens with Muzamil framing the conversation carefully. His guest is not Pakistani. Mamunur Rashid is a psychology student at the University of Dhaka, the highest-ranked university in Bangladesh, and he was an active participant in the protests that, over a few weeks in the summer of 2024, brought down the Sheikh Hasina government. Muzamil wants to understand what actually happened, in order, from someone who was there.

Mamun begins not with July 2024 but with the curriculum he grew up on. “If I have to explain this one sentence, basically, towards our generation in Bangladesh, Pakistan is a villain country,” he says. From the earliest school years through to the university level, the liberation war history is mandatory, taught in detail, and the framing is consistent. West Pakistan was the ruler, West Pakistan dominated East Pakistan, and the period from 1947 to 1971 is the story of that domination ending in genocide. Muzamil does not contest the framing; he registers it. It is the inherited lens through which every subsequent political fight in Bangladesh — including this one — has been waged.

Mamun notes one specific community within Dhaka that complicates the picture: the Biharis, originally Urdu-speaking, most of whom he says trace back to Bihar state in India rather than to West Pakistan. He describes specific neighbourhoods of Dhaka where the Bihari camps sit and where, he says, communal tension still runs hot. It is a small aside but a useful one — the 1971 line did not cleanly separate the two countries and never quite has.

From Mujibur Rahman to Ershad: a quick walk through fifty years

Muzamil asks for the political timeline since independence, because Pakistanis, he admits, do not really read it. Mamun obliges.

The story he tells is not flattering to any single party. Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the hero of 1971, in Mamun’s reading, “just tried to create a one state party in Bangladesh” once independence was won, and was killed with his family by the army in 1975. Ziaur Rahman followed — and Mamun is unusually warm about him. “Ziaur Rahman, we still call he’s the inventor or creator of the multiparty democracy in Bangladesh.” He credits Zia with opening the political field, building irrigation and pumping infrastructure, and pulling the country out of the post-war economic devastation. Zia, too, was killed — around 1981, Mamun believes — and his widow, Begum Khaleda Zia, went on to serve as prime minister three times.

General Hussain Muhammad Ershad came next, the first formally declared military dictator. Mamun calls him “a true gentleman” in the narrow sense that he did not turn the guns on his own people. “Only six people died during his demo movement,” he says, referring to the protests that ended Ershad’s rule in 1990. From 1991 to 2008, Bangladesh ping-ponged between Khaleda Zia’s BNP and Sheikh Hasina’s Awami League, with Jamaat-e-Islami as a junior coalition partner to the BNP but never in government on its own.

Then, in 2008, the Awami League returned, and stayed.

How a one-party state was built without declaring itself one

Muzamil’s interest sharpens here, because this is the stretch that produced the revolution. Mamun argues that Hasina’s first move on returning to power was to neutralise anyone who could remove her later.

He points to the 2009 Pilkhana mutiny — what he calls the “Pilkhana murder” — in which, he says, around 57 senior army officers were killed in what was officially described as a clash inside the BDR. Mamun reads it as preplanned. “She knew these 57 army military officers, if in the force, she will she will not be able to be a dictator in future.” On top of that, he frames it as the daughter of Mujib settling a score with the institution that killed her father in 1975.

The second move was Jamaat-e-Islami. Through the International Crimes Tribunal, the party’s senior leaders were tried for collaboration with Pakistan in 1971 and hanged. Mamun is candid that the historical charge had substance — Jamaat did side with Pakistan in 1971, and never repositioned itself convincingly afterwards — but he is equally clear about what the tribunal was for. “She knew Jamaat-e-Islami is the only strongest party in the country who can do a revolution.” The historical narrative was the cover; the operational goal was to dismantle the one organised force capable of mobilising the streets.

The third move was the caretaker-government law. Bangladesh’s constitution had previously required that, at the end of a government’s term, a neutral caretaker administration run the country until elections were held. Hasina, through parliament, removed that provision. From 2014 onwards, Mamun says, every election was “a puppet show.” He is officially a registered voter. He has never been allowed to cast a vote. “I will try my vote. Oh, your vote is complete. Please go to home. I have to hear that.”

Why a generation that loved Sheikh Hasina turned against her in twenty days

Muzamil pushes on a question that matters: how was she popular for so long if all of this was visible? Mamun’s answer is unsparing and partly self-implicating.

The Awami League sold development. Metro rail in Dhaka, the Padma Bridge, cheap smartphones, 4G and 5G rollout — what Mamun calls “mega project eyewash plan.” For a generation that had never lived under another government, the visuals were persuasive. “She had a popularity among young generation who are nonpolitical … oh my god, she’s the smartest leader.” The alternative was framed relentlessly: Tarique Zia was a terrorist, Jamaat were religious extremists, the BNP were arsonists. With no credible third option visible in public, the dictator wins by default. Mamun is direct about it. “A dictator, when there is — like, who is the alternative? Sheikh Hasina. So who is the alternative? This situation created Sheikh Hasina.”

The January 7, 2024 election, he notes, was the most blatant of them all. People knew it was unfair. People accepted it. The bar had moved that far.

The quota, the press briefing, and the word “Razakar”

The episode now arrives at the trigger. Mamun is careful to walk Muzamil through it slowly, because the sequence matters.

Bangladesh’s government job quota system reserves 56 percent of positions for specific categories — 30 percent for descendants of freedom fighters, the remainder for women, ethnic minorities and other categories. A 2018 student movement had won a court order suspending the freedom-fighter quota. In June 2024, the High Court — by then, Mamun argues, fully aligned with the Awami League — reinstated it. Job-seeking graduates began protesting on June 5 in Shahbag Square. Ten or twelve people, banners, a memorandum to the president. The demand, repeatedly, was not abolition but reform: lower the percentage to something that left a level playing field for everyone else.

What turned the small protest into a campus-wide one was a single press briefing. Asked about the protesters’ demand, Sheikh Hasina, by Mamun’s account, said that if the children of freedom fighters could not get the jobs, then they would have to go to the children of “Razakars” — the 1971 term for Bangladeshis who collaborated with Pakistan. A follow-up question made the implication explicit, and she did not retreat from it.

That night, Mamun says, every dormitory in Dhaka University emptied. “In my campus, in Dhaka university, there were some almost 12 plus dorms, student dorm … all the ladies, all the boys just came out from the hall, and they just started the protest. Who am I? Who are you? Razakar Razakar.” The chant was deliberately ironic. The Gen Z students were not embracing the label; they were mocking the prime minister for using it on her own electorate. The boomer political class, Mamun says, took the chant at face value and treated it as proof that the students were Pakistani agents. From that moment on, the gap between the regime and the generation was not closeable.

Chhatra League, the police, and the BGB

Muzamil asks whether the protests stayed peaceful. Mamun is precise about who escalated and how.

The Awami League’s student wing, Bangladesh Chhatra League, was sent in first. They came onto campus with hockey sticks. The general students, including women, were beaten. The same night, the apolitical students of Dhaka University reorganised, went back to the halls, expelled the Chhatra League committees from every dormitory, and — for the first time in the university’s hundred-year history — physically pushed them out of campus. In Chittagong, Mamun says, a Chhatra League worker was dropped from a sixth-floor building.

Hasina then escalated again. Police were deployed. Then the Border Guard Bangladesh, which by its mandate is supposed to patrol the international border. Mamun is methodical about why she leaned on these forces and not the army: “Sheikh Hasina not always dependent on army because he she knew army is the dangerous person. Army killed her father. Right. So army should kill her anytime.”

The first martyrs came in mid-July. Abu Sayeed in Rangpur, who stood in front of police with his arms open. Mugdho, a student of Bangladesh University of Professionals, who was handing out water to protesters and was shot dead the same morning. The phrase he had been calling out — “pani lagbe, pani” — became a slogan. Mamun watched it on social media, like everyone else. “When we see this scenario … we just got mad. Oh my god. What’s going on?” The hashtag that emerged that evening was the one that defined the next two weeks: step down Hasina.

That night, the internet went dark across the country.

The shutdown, the curfew, and the helicopters

For the next seven to eight days, Bangladesh ran without internet, under a nationwide curfew, with the army deployed in the streets. Mamun lives in Mirpur, in the centre of Dhaka, an area he describes as historically calm even during political flare-ups. During this week, police were firing in front of his house. Helicopters circled overhead. The Awami League’s official explanation for the helicopters, he says, was that they were spraying water to put out fires. The footage said otherwise. A four-year-old, Riya Gope, was killed inside her own home by a stray bullet.

Mamun is unusually emotional in this section, and Muzamil lets the pause sit. “We knew what’s going on, but we knew we never knew where it will be ending. Every day, are feeling such of many people are dying. The electronic media is not showing the real news … even we don’t know who are dying, how dying because internet is absolutely shut down.”

The official narrative for the shutdown itself, given by a junior minister, was that BNP and Jamaat “terrorists” had burned a data centre. Mamun notes the obvious hole. State television’s office was also burned during the protests, and state television came back on air the next day. Only the internet stayed off.

He describes how the students kept coordinating. Phone calls still worked. SMS group chats were spun up. Neighbourhood-by-neighbourhood updates moved by text. The shutdown slowed information; it did not stop the movement.

The leaderless movement

Muzamil flags something he thinks matters and asks Mamun to confirm it. In the past, he says, Bangladeshi protest movements had been ended by the government picking off a single leader, cutting a deal, and using that leader’s face to call the crowd home. Why did that not happen this time?

Mamun’s answer is the cleanest line in the conversation. “This movement had no specific leader. This movement itself was a leader.” There were coordinators, called samannayak in Bangla, but their role was to announce and to relay, not to negotiate. When Hasina invited the coordinators to her residence after the internet returned, the answer back from the crowd was unambiguous: anyone who went would be treated as a traitor to the dead. “When you kill thousands of people brutally without any humanity, discussion period has been over.”

The students moved from a quota demand to a nine-point demand to, finally, a single point. Hasina must resign.

August 5

The army was the variable Mamun and his friends could not predict. He describes spending the night before the long march on August 5 calling every army friend in his contacts list. The junior officers — lieutenants, captains, majors, ordinary soldiers — gave him the same answer. They would resign before they fired on their own people. The upper hierarchy was less clear. Some, he says, were sympathetic to the Awami League.

On the morning of August 5 the internet was cut for a second time. A news ticker said the army chief would address the nation at 2pm. Mamun expected an ultimatum to go home. Around noon, the message that actually came through was that Hasina had left the country.

He went into the street. He went all the way to Ganabhaban, the prime minister’s residence, with the crowd that filled it. He watched people walk out with her saris, her furniture, her livestock. He took nothing. “I felt I get back my country. I don’t need anything from Ganabhaban.”

Muzamil asks the obvious counterfactual: what if the army chief, General Waker-uz-Zaman, who Mamun describes as a relative of Hasina’s, had given the order to fire? Mamun does not soften the answer. “Then situation will be more massacred. There will be a domestic war in our country.” More dead. Probably an armed insurgency. The institution destroyed for the sake of one person’s power. The army chief, by his reading, had two options on August 5: be the villain of the history book or be the hero. He chose the second.

What an interim government can and cannot do

Muzamil ends on the present. It has been a few months. Is the country going in the right direction?

Mamun’s metaphor is sharp. “Say I am travelling to Karachi for a tour purpose. I was supposed to be there by 6pm. But by any chance I was there around 3am in the night. I am very hungry. I need to eat something. But since it’s 3am, there is no standard food anywhere. There are some bread or banana.” You do not judge whether the bread is worth eating. You eat the bread, because you are hungry, and because that is what is available at 3am.

The interim government under Muhammad Yunus is, in his reading, that piece of bread. Not the meal you wanted; the meal the situation has handed you. He acknowledges the cost. Without a stable elected government there is no investment. Without investment the economy stalls. But he is unambiguous about the alternative the country was rescued from. “Hasina created this term with the alternative. He says, see, without you we can create the alternative and country is going on.”

His prescription for what comes next is narrower than Muzamil seems to expect. Not a new strongman. Not a particular party. A genuinely non-partisan election commission. “If people think they will vote Awami League, they will vote Awami League. If people think they will vote BNP, they will vote BNP. If people think they will vote Jamaat, they will vote Jamaat. But election should be 100 percent free, fair.” Fifty years after independence, he points out, Bangladesh has not yet held one that meets that bar.

What a Pakistani audience is meant to take from this

Muzamil closes with a line directed at the people watching from Karachi and Lahore. He will not say much about Pakistan directly, he says, but if any of this story has felt familiar — the captured institutions, the rigged elections, the curated economic narrative, the generation that loved a leader and then did not — that resemblance is worth sitting with. Not as a prediction. As a question. He thanks Mamun, notes that they are at the one-hour-twenty-eight-minute mark, and promises a second conversation on Pakistan, Bangladesh, and India.

The episode does what the best episodes of Thought Behind Things do. It hands one careful firsthand source to an audience that has been getting the story secondhand, and lets him talk.