YOU could almost hear the plastic of the television screen bending from the weight of it. Names. Three of them. Bright as blood under fluorescent lights. Allegations. Extortion. Corruption. One crore taka, just like that — enough to make you choke on your morning tea.
And I knew those names. Not from the CID files. Not from police pressers or courtroom transcripts. I knew them the way you know your own bloodline — by rhythm, by scent, by memory. These weren’t thugs a year ago. They were the ones we chanted for, wept for, stitched slogans for in the half-light. They were the firewalkers of July, walking into the maw of a collapsing state while the rest of us stood on balconies, clutching our own children tighter.
And now this?
It felt like finding the holy book soaked in gutter water. You want to look away. You want to throw up. You want to believe it’s fake. But it isn’t.
Ìý
They gave the children power — but not the truth
SOMETHING began to rot — not suddenly, not with a bang, but with the silent efficiency of betrayal. You could almost smell it in the rooms where men talked about the uprising like it had been a seminar, not a convulsion. As if the blood spilled was already archived, itemized and footnoted. As if the streets hadn’t burned.
A deputy commissioner, a man seasoned by the bureaucracy’s slow violence, leaned in like a gossip-monger in a dying empire. ‘All operations go through student reps now,’ he said. Not through the parties. Not through the elders. Not even through the veterans who first bled for July. Through students. Children. Boys and girls still limping from their wounds. Their eyes, feral from watching too much and healing too little, now govern what remains of the state.
I laughed. You would too. The absurdity was theatrical — until you realised the theatre had replaced the republic.
They are everywhere now. In air-conditioned boardrooms and committee meetings where language is bartered like contraband. They sit beside superintendents of police and UNOs, offering approvals, recommendations, transfers and license clearances with the unshaken confidence of seasoned brokers. They speak in the new code — ‘one crore taka’—not as hearsay, but as currency. It’s not corruption anymore; it’s choreography.
They walk like ministers, briefed and battle-ready, as if waiting to be photographed by history. They speak like junior bureaucrats from a failed state — crisp, curated and without conviction. Their rebellion, once tragic and raw, has been repackaged as prestige. The trauma sold. The memory commodified.
And we — the watchers, the veterans, the journalists — are complicit. We nod. We rationalise. We pretend this masquerade is meritocracy.
But it began with silence. Not just the absence of sound, but the heavy, curfew-born silence that falls on cities before tanks roll in. The old opposition — BNP, Jamaat — stayed home, nursing their irrelevance like a wound. NGOs busied themselves with bullet points for UN reports. And the interim government — patched together with donor credentials and alumni networks — was little more than a think tank in panic.
So they reached into the fire and pulled out the children.
They didn’t offer justice. Or therapy. Or truth. What they gave them were titles. Coordinator. Sector commander. Strategic lead. As if new titles could erase old trauma. As if a nation could be rebuilt with designations borrowed from corporate HR manuals.
And these children? They accepted. Not out of greed, but hunger. For meaning. For safety. For something to make the bloodshed worthwhile.
But they were not alone. They were led — manipulated — by a new priesthood. The munshis of mayhem of the post-uprising state: media intellectuals, self-proclaimed strategists, revolution consultants. Men who traded in myths and fed these children a potent theology — you are pure. You are the future. Everyone else is contaminated.
It was seduction masquerading as purpose, ideology as anaesthesia.
And it worked — briefly. Like all imperial fantasies do. Until the children looked around and saw that they had inherited not a revolution, but a franchise.
A people’s uprising reduced to talking points. Its leaders — still bleeding inside — turned into consultants, brand ambassadors, even state actors. History did not just repeat; it was reverse-engineered to serve the very forces it once rose against.
There are names. There are files. There are receipts. But in a nation where truth is always too expensive, we trade in metaphors because facts are fatal.
Ìý
Future that never was
IN JULY 2024, something stirred that felt older than the republic itself. A call for dignity — raw, uncoached and defiant — rose from the streets. It wasn’t just about wages or tuition. It was about presence. About being seen. About being heard in a country that had long outsourced its conscience.
And for a moment, the system blinked.
But revolutions, if left unguarded, tend to become commodities. This one was no different.
The hijacking wasn’t chaotic — it was methodical. A grassroots upheaval was repackaged as ‘youth engagement.’ The young weren’t co-opted violently; they were flattered, repurposed and absorbed. Consultants. Sector Heads. ‘Voices of the New Republic.’ The nomenclature was generous. The power, hollow.
What happened wasn’t new. Rome did it with tribunes. The British perfected it with clerks. Our postcolonial republic, ever the loyal student of its former masters, pulled the same move: it didn’t crush the uprising. It consumed it.
Files were opened. Titles handed out like candy at a donor conference. Ministries welcomed new ‘coordinators’ whose only qualification was that they had once stood between a barricade and a bullet. But there was no healing. No reckoning. No space to grieve what had been lost — only deadlines, meeting invites and hashtags.
The youth were given proximity to power, but not the tools to question it. Their pain was dressed up as leadership. Their anger, misread as readiness. And when it all started to crack — when the same old corruption reappeared in new clothes — we didn’t flinch. We shrugged. As if this was the price of reform.
But the betrayal didn’t begin in 2024. It began years earlier, in the silence of those who knew better. Parties watched from a distance, too consumed with managing decline. NGOs saw a funding opportunity. And the interim government — cobbled together with LinkedIn résumés and legacy credentials — offered neither stability nor vision. Just syntax.
They didn’t build legitimacy; they borrowed it. From the very kids they’d later discard.
It wasn’t a transition. It was a substitution. A movement was replaced by a marketing strategy. Power didn’t change hands; it changed fonts.
And in the absence of elders, the young turned to prophets. Not teachers of history or ethics — but algorithm-fed sages fluent in rage and dopamine. They offered simple enemies and instant truths. They preached purity over patience. Revolution as brand.
The result? A new elite, fluent in buzzwords but estranged from grounding. They learned to simulate leadership. They learned how to sit in meetings. They did not learn how to mourn.
Now, as the glow fades, the cracks show. Yesterday’s ‘liaison’ is today’s middleman. The revolution’s child is caught doing deals in ministry corridors. This isn’t mission drift. This is architecture.
We live under a system that doesn’t destroy resistance — it recycles it. The tools that once disrupted are now the user interface of the machine.
And the invoice? It won’t go to the architects of this betrayal. It will land on the desks of those who thought they were walking into freedom.
Unless we learn to remember differently.
Ìý
A revolution lost to the market
THE most dangerous outcome of any revolt is not its failure — but its absorption. Bangladesh’s July uprising now risks being remembered not as a break from the past, but as its sleekest rebrand.
People ask why we don’t name names, pick sides. But that’s not the point. The point is that we took a generation that bled and handed them over to a system that needed buffers, not reformers. The institutions were never restructured. They were repainted.
The youth were placed in positions too brittle to hold their weight. They were expected to perform leadership while their wounds were still fresh. And when some fell to greed, others to cynicism, we blamed them — as if we hadn’t set the trap.
Let’s not kid ourselves: this was not an accident. This was a playbook.
And now, as August 5 looms and the speeches pile up, we must ask: Are we celebrating a revolution? Or laundering its memory?
Because history doesn’t end with slogans. It ends with audits. With consequences. And unless we reckon with the choices we made — the silence we maintained — we’ll keep mistaking theatre for change.
Real reform doesn’t begin with triumph. It begins with grief. With difficult memory. With looking at what we’ve done to our young — and asking whether we deserve them at all.
Because this wasn’t a revolution.
This was liquidation.
And the cleanup is just beginning.
Ìý
Abdul Monaiem Kudrot Ullah, a retired captain of the Bangladesh navy, is an informed voice on institutional reform, geo-strategy, strategic governance and supply chain management.
