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ON A pillar of the metro station in Shahbagh, within view just after the flight of stairs by the side of the Pubali Bank, is a graffiti. While the form has drastically exploded in popularity during and after the July uprising of Bangladesh, there remains a political distinction. This one, evidently hastily sprayed on well after the fall of the Sheikh Hasina regime, reads: ‘Abu Sayed-Mughdho, Shesh hoyni juddho’ (Martyrs Abu Sayed and Mughdho, the war is not yet over).

Just over two months since the collapse of Sheikh Hasina’s authoritarian regime, Bangladesh remains at the precarious juncture at which it had hard-braked in July. The fall of Hasina, who ruled with an iron fist for over a decade, leaves the country in a liquid state of hope and uncertainty. A new interim government led by Nobel laureate Dr Mohammed Yunus is now tasked with the herculean effort of restoring democracy to a nation torn apart by crony-clientelist-dynastic-mafia state capture, corruption, and deep economic crises. The urgency for clear leadership is palpable as the public grapples with critical questions, material and metaphysical, about the future direction of their country.

The student leaders who spearheaded the July 2024 uprising, which began as protests over job quotas but morphed into a broader revolt, are now part of Yunus’ advisory team. These figures, once deemed enemies of the state, include prominent activists, journalists, and NGO heads who faced violent crackdowns during Hasina’s reign. For many, their rise from the margins to the heart of the interim government represents a powerful shift in Bangladesh’s political landscape.

Yet, beneath the optimism, the road ahead is fraught with peril. Economic dis-order looms large, as hundreds of garment factories — vital to Bangladesh’s state economy — remain shuttered due to ongoing protests. The instability in the apparel sector, ironically already dealt with harsh crackdowns by the military, is a stark reminder of the deep economic damage wrought by years of cronyism and mismanagement under Hasina, whose inner circle is reported to have siphoned tens of billions of dollars out of the country since 2014. Now Yunus and his advisers must reckon with an economy that teeters on the edge, compounded by reasonable absences of trust in law enforcement and, in fact, public institutions altogether.

One of the most pressing issues facing Yunus’ interim government is the restoration of law and order. Since the uprising, the police — once a tool of state terror under Hasina — have largely disappeared from the streets fearing violent retribution from the public. Police stations have been set ablaze, and in their absence, student-led groups have taken up roles in maintaining local order. In a country where state violence was once the norm, the people’s reliance on these grassroots organisations rather than formal law enforcement is a telling indicator of the deep mistrust in state institutions, although, over the span of two months, we have also witnessed that dynamic of trust taking on significant concessions and alterations in the questions of nationalism, the phantom of separatist movements and the security discourse enveloping the Chittagong Hill Tracts.

In response to the absconding policing force, the interim government has taken the controversial step of granting special executive powers to the military. This move, framed as a temporary solution to stabilise the country, has rightly raised more than just a few eyebrows. While Yunus insists that military intervention is only a short-term measure, lasting apparently just two months, the history of military involvement in Bangladeshi politics casts a long shadow over these assurances. The military played a significant role in enabling Hasina’s regime to suppress dissent and consolidate power, notably through the Directorate General of Forces Intelligence and army intelligence units that were implicated in various human rights abuses. This complicity raises crucial questions regarding accountability and oversight, particularly in light of past experiences, notably the military’s role in the 1/11 political intervention, which was seen to have further entrenched military influence over civilian governance and organisations of political formations.

Perhaps above all else, the Chittagong Hill Tracts have historically been a flashpoint for military-police dynamics, reflecting tensions between the indigenous populations, popular local political parties and civil society members on one side, and Bangladeshi state authorities, the military, and the plainland settlers serving as vanguards of the Bengali-Bangladeshi nationalist project on the other. The military’s sustained and in fact, expanding presence in the CHT, justified as means of ‘maintaining order’, has led to systemic human rights violations and a climate of permanent, pervasive fear, discontent, animosity, and distrust, and for good reason.

Indeed, what can be said about the Army’s role in mitigating or at the very least, de-escalating the state of unrest — one that very swifty took on a communal, racial frame — that had been sparked following the death of a Bangali man, Md Mamun, allegedly beaten to death whilst fleeing on a stolen bike in Khagrachhari on September 18? However, for most people watching on from the rest of the world, Mamun was clearly, for lack of better words, only the cover-up for translating the situation into its desired violent communal, inter-ethnic angle. Mob lynchings are rife across the Bengal delta, taking on terrifying forms in recent memory among the Hindutva strongholds in North India. Even within the territory that is the modern Bangladeshi state, post-5th August uprising, numerous more had ‘Mamun’s lost their lives.

As per a report by the Human Rights Support Society, in the month of September alone, 28 were killed in 36 different incidents of mob lynching across Bangladesh, with 14 others injured. Political violence claimed another 16 lives and injured 706. In their report, HRSS refers to a wild-wild-Western state of affairs that is still developing, including factional clashes within the two major political parties, targeted violence against ethnic and religious minorities, attacks on journalists, extrajudicial killings, and worker protests. Overnight, netizens witnessed footage of defenceless Tofazzal and Shamim Mollah, mercilessly beaten to their deaths in the two top public universities.

Mamun’s death ignited a series of retaliatory attacks, resulting in violent clashes between indigenous people and Bangali settlers, allegedly backed, directly or otherwise, by the olive-uniformed military. Tensions escalated further when a procession of Bangali settlers in Dighinala took to vandalising at least 30 homes and businesses belonging to the indigenous community, intensifying provocations through targeted, racialised, inflammatory speeches.

In a political ethos marred by these alarming and extremely contemporary contexts, the interim government’s decision to lean on military power risks perpetuating the oppressive nexus, alienating marginalised groups even further, inviting loss of trust in the allegedly novel, reformed state apparatus.

Analysts warn that such powers, even if temporary, could entrench the military’s role in governance, undermining the very democratic reforms this government seeks to implement. In the wake of the uprising, clarity is also due regarding the roles of the paramilitary Rapid Action Battalion unit, the Detective Branch of Bangladesh Police and army intelligence in addressing human rights violations, particularly as the new government attempts to distance itself from the oppressive legacy of the previous administration. In two months, it is alarming to not yet have the entire picture vis-a-vis the surveillance networks and military-industrial complexes that thrived in symbiosis serving Hasina’s regime.

While creatively managed by community grassroots organising, the distrust in official law enforcement does however threaten to inspire a vacuum that could, as we have already seen, potentially be filled by actors ranging from various armed groups to ideological vigilante justice, further complicating the already volatile security landscape.

On the metro or the bus to work and back, everyone agrees. The judiciary, police, the banks, the electoral systems — all require fundamental overhauls to codify preventive measures against any return to the authoritarianism that plagued the country under Hasina. Of course, everyone on the metro or the bus also agree, this process will be long and complicated. As student leaders, now sitting at Yunus’s side, have made clear rather poetically, reforming these institutions is crucial to ensuring that Bangladesh never falls into authoritarian hands again.

‘The main challenge is that many of the fascist systems that Hasina put in place are still there,’ said Rezwan Ahmed Refat, a protest coordinator, in a conversation with The Guardian. ‘We have a long way to go with reforming the government secretariat, the police, and the judiciary. Until these institutions are independent, nothing will change.’Ìý

The struggle to rebuild Bangladesh at the state level is a fight against both the ghosts of its authoritarian past and the very real dangers of its current political instability. The uprising that ousted Hasina was driven by a deep-seated demand for change, but as Yunus and his advisers are discovering, delivering on that demand requires more than just good intentions.

July’s strength lay in its non-partisan, anti-discrimination platform, which successfully united diverse groups across class, gender, sexual orientation, and political divides. Women played a crucial role in the movement, leading marches and organising key actions, while workers —particularly urban labourers — joined en masse. Yet, despite their pivotal contributions, worker representation in the interim government remains absent, highlighting a disconnect between the uprising’s stakeholders and its representative leadership within the state.

As the uprising continues to unfold — indeed, rightly identified by many as dynamic and ongoing — the threat of ‘counter-revolution’ looms, with vested interests, both domestic and global, likely to push for a return to status quos that served the toppled elite. The student and people mass coalition’s focus on preventing a resurgence of Awami League supporters,Ìý epitomised surrounding the August 15 hullabaloo regarding guarding against/paying respects at Dhanmondi 32, is understandable, but the risk of authoritarian purges or stifling dissent should not be overlooked. Freedom to critique both the new leadership and the uprising itself must be preserved.

British social scientist Doreen Massey reminds us that mobs are not merely chaotic assemblages of spontaneous rage, but complex social phenomena shaped by uneven geographies of power and oppression. The eruption of collective violence reflects deeper structural tensions — between center and periphery, elite and subaltern, the dominant and the marginalised. These tensions manifest vividly in post-Hasina Bangladesh, epitomised in the rise of populist mobs as a tool of mass mobilisation as well as a mechanism for reclaiming power by entrenched elites. The danger then lies in how these mobilisations can be co-opted by counter-revolutionary aspirations eager to restore the status quo under the guise of popular will.

This is especially true when we consider how global neoliberal agendas intersect with local political upheavals. Like the Arab Spring, derailed by counter-intelligence tactics, surveillance capitalism, and imperialist interventions, Bangladesh faces the risk of its uprising being neutralised by the coalescence of state surveillance, corporate interests, and international capital. The convergence of military intelligence, former Awami elites, and foreign backers — including both regional powers and multinational corporations — threatens to undo the revolution’s hard-won gains by appealing to reactionary fears and mobilising mobs against progressive forces.

Massey’s insight into the spatiality of social movements emphasises the need to understand how Bangladesh’s urban-rural divide, ethnic tensions, and labour struggles create fault lines that counter-revolutionary forces can potentially exploit. The mob violence witnessed in the university campuses, at the shrines and mazars of pirs, fakirs and Sufi sants, in the hill district of Khagrachhari, reflects the racialised logic of state violence — a logic popularly used to marginalise vulnerable groups under the guise of ‘national unity.’ The interim government’s reliance on military power at such a time, that too under the pretext of national stability or law and order, risks entrenching these divisions further.

It is here that the lessons of the Arab Spring or other anti-imperialist uprisings across the global south come to the fore: the struggle against authoritarianism must also be a struggle against the structural forces that seek to reimpose it.

The fight at hand is against both visible and invisible matrices of domination — an intersectional struggle that must resist the lure of nationalist mobs, imperialist intervention, and capitalist co-optation. The student leaders, women, and workers who led July’s uprising must remain vigilant, wary of how counter-revolutionary forces mobilise populism to fracture solidarity and perpetuate exploitation. Only by confronting these dangers head-on can the revolutionary potential of the movement be safeguarded — this is no time for caution. We must move, if needed stomp around the cabin regardless of whether the captain has turned off the fasten seat belt sign, via constitution or otherwise, amidst the very turbulence. To do so is to retain commitment to July’s radical aspirations of accountable, just, non-hierarchical social systems.Ìý

Bangladesh stands at a crossroads. The uprising has undeniably shifted the country’s mass political consciousness. To ensure that it remains true to its principles, the interim government and the people must prioritize social justice, equality, and human dignity for all, while resisting efforts to revert to old power structures. The student leaders who toppled Hasina’s regime remain a powerful force, but without radical, decisive action, the optimism of this moment could quickly give way to disillusionment and subsequent fertile incubation of untoward geopolitical maneuvers. The battle for the soul of Bangladesh is far from over.  

Ìý

Sayrat Salekin is a student of anthropology at the Independent University Bangladesh.