JULY FILES: How memes shaped dissent, what comes after

by Punny Kabir

ON JULY 30, 2024, at the height of Bangladesh’s July uprising, Sheikh Hasina appeared on national television to declare a National Day of Mourning. By then, security forces had already killed hundreds of protesters, many of them captured on livestreams or mobile footage that flooded social media. Yet in her address, Hasina did not focus on the killings; instead, she once again invoked her tragedy — the 1975 assassination of her family — repeating the line:‘Āponjon haranor bēdona je koto koshṭer, ta āmār theke bēshi ār kē jāney?’ (‘Who understands the pain of losing one’s family better than me?’)

The timing was incendiary. Within hours, memes flooded the internet mocking her appearance in a black saree — a theatrical display of mourning, perceived by many as grotesquely ironic given that the victims were those killed under her own orders. Several of these memes went viral. But one, in particular, stood out — at least to me — for how precisely it captured the public’s fury. It remixed a scene from Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown (1997), featuring Robert De Niro, in which a woman keeps provoking a man until he quietly, suddenly, shoots her. In the meme version, the woman’s voice is replaced with Hasina’s mournful refrain, ‘Āponjon haranor bēdona je koto koshṭer, ta āmār theke bēshi ār kē jāney?,’ looped again and again. A man’s voice responds — calm at first, then increasingly frustrated: ‘Please, stop. You’ve said this story so many times.’ When she continues, he finally shoots. Silence.

This meme did not introduce a new critique — it distilled existing outrage into a sharply minimalist form. By creatively looping her refrain and brandishing the film’s violence as metaphor, the meme portrayed Hasina’s invocation of personal grief as political performance, one that had become unbearable. Audiences recognised it immediately; it captured public fatigue — the collective weariness at seeing genuine state violence erased by familiar emotional rhetoric.

Initially circulated across Facebook, the meme was shared by several pages that, despite operating under the constant scrutiny of the Digital Security Act, had become skilled at tactfully crafting and disseminating political satire. This mode of dissent had already gained momentum in the final years of Hasina’s regime, when politically charged memes began appearing on individual timelines — created and shared directly from personal accounts by those bold enough to confront the state through irony and ridicule. Alongside these individual efforts, dedicated meme pages such as ‘Deuliya Rastro’ (Bankrupt State), ‘Gonomojatontro’ (a satirical twist on Gonotantra, or democracy), and ‘Unnoyon Manei Apa’ (Development Means Sister, a mocking reference to Hasina’s development discourse) became digital platforms for frustration and dissent. Likely run by young people disillusioned by state repression, censorship, and systemic corruption, these pages gave voice to sentiments that many could not express openly, and memes became their sharpest instrument.

By the end of July, the digital atmosphere had undergone a decisive shift. The fear that once governed online political expression under the Digital Security Act was no longer dominant. As police killings intensified and the streets filled with protest and mourning, many users, especially younger ones, began openly defying digital censorship. Memes that would once have circulated quietly through Messenger, WhatsApp, or Telegram were now posted publicly from personal accounts, often without anonymity. Facebook pages that previously confined themselves to light-hearted humour or safe cultural commentary began sharing memes with charged political content. Their tone turned sharper, angrier, and more confrontational.

At the same time, regular users also began creating their own memes, often hastily made, technically clumsy, and yet emotionally precise. The meme form allowed them to say what they could not risk stating in text, often compressing sarcasm, rage, and satire into a few seconds of recycled footage or a simple screengrab. This is part of the meme’s power: unlike political cartoons, which require artistic skill, memes are accessible to anyone with a smartphone and a basic editing app. In this sense, memes became a profoundly participatory mode of protest — crude, unpolished, but inclusive. One might even say democratic: not in the institutional sense, but in how they opened up political expression to those without cultural capital or technical training.

Among the most widely circulated examples was the meme that adapted the line ‘Natok kom koro, Pio’ (‘Stop the drama, dear’), originally from a pre-uprising viral video made by a teenage boy. On July 26, after Sheikh Hasina visited the burnt BTV building and vandalised metro station — crying in front of cameras while her security forces continued killing unarmed protesters across the country — the line took on new life. The meme, reframed with Hasina’s image and mourning performance, struck a nerve. It spread fast, not just on meme pages, but across timelines, comment threads, and even protest graffiti. The phrase, deceptively casual and deeply cutting, became a shorthand for a population exhausted by state violence and political gaslighting.

In the fraught atmosphere of Bangladesh’s July uprising, the viral spread of the same meme across social networks wasn’t just an act of digital playfulness — it became an engine of profound solidarity. In a society marked by media censorship, political intimidation, and an ever-present sense of collective anxiety, the simple act of sharing a meme served a subversive double function: it allowed individuals to express dissent in a language both safe and instantly recognisable while signalling affiliation with a broader movement. Each time a meme lampooning government theatrics or highlighting official hypocrisy ricocheted through Facebook feeds and WhatsApp threads, it reinforced a sense of unity and identification — an ‘us’ that transcended geographic, social, and even generational divides. For many, the act of reposting or reacting to a meme provided a first, low-risk entry into activism, breaking the psychological barrier of fear and isolation imposed by an authoritarian system. Laughter, in this context, wasn’t mere escapism but a weaponised affirmation of courage and shared struggle — turning outrage into in-jokes, anxiety into camaraderie, and scattered frustration into a visible, swelling chorus of dissent. Memes became more than satire: they evolved into digital badges of belonging and swift vehicles for underground communication, anchoring real-world mobilisation with a sense of collective purpose. As those snatches of ridicule and irreverence transformed from pixels on a screen into slogans on placards and graffiti on city walls, it became evident that viral humour, when widely shared, could bind a disparate population into a resilient, mobilised community — one unwilling to let silence be its only voice.

The July uprising did not just bring people to the streets—it brought an entire generation into the domain of political discourse, often for the first time. For many young people, meme-making became their entry point into public engagement. What had once been a domain dominated by seasoned cartoonists, columnists, and activists became radically open. In late July and early August, an extraordinary number of memes flooded Facebook and other platforms, made by individuals with little to no prior involvement in political debates. Their tools were simple — Canva, Meme Generator, screenshots, and re-edits — but their affective range was wide: grief, rage, irony, refusal, and sarcasm. The line between joke and protest blurred. In this brief window, the meme was not just a form of communication—it was a mode of belonging.

This digital mobilisation coincided with the broader sense that something had been achieved. After years of repression, the dictator, popularly referred to as a fascist, regardless of how that term is debated in political science, had finally fallen. Protesters had, at great cost, reclaimed the right to speak, to mourn, and to demand. It felt, for a moment, like the arrival of a new civic horizon. Yet, in the months that followed, it became clear that this space — newly opened — would not remain empty or uncontested.

While many continued to use memes to challenge authoritarianism and hold political elites accountable, a parallel surge emerged: a rapid proliferation of conservative, ultra-religious, and even jihadist-aligned meme content. Thousands of new pages appeared online, many of them presenting themselves as ‘voice of the youth’ or ‘true Islam,’ but openly propagating sectarian, misogynistic, or ethnically exclusionary ideologies. Women, non-Muslims, Adivasis, and other minorities were often targeted through memes that couched hate speech in sarcasm or moral righteousness. The meme format made such content seem harmless — even humorous — when in fact it worked to normalise discrimination, distort public memory, and circulate communal ideologies at scale.

What makes this even more dangerous is the velocity and subtlety with which such content spreads. Memes do not require the cognitive labour that long-form writing demands. Their affect is immediate. They are easy to share, quick to digest, and often disguised as jokes. And it appears that considerable capital has been invested in their proliferation. Many of these pages run sponsored posts. Others use so-called ‘engagement manipulation’ formulas — buying likes, comments, and shares through bot accounts to simulate grassroots support. Some pages openly advertise these services, offering packages that will fill your comment section with phrases like ‘Alhamdulillah,’ ‘This is the country we want,’ or ‘Mashallah, finally truth is being spoken’ — all for a fee.

This creates an illusion of public consensus. A meme that might otherwise go unnoticed now appears with thousands of reactions, giving it the credibility of virality. It no longer resembles propaganda — it looks like the voice of the people. This is precisely where memes become not only tools of political expression but weapons of narrative warfare. Their very informality, their capacity for humour, and their low barrier to entry make them powerful — but also profoundly susceptible to appropriation by forces that, while not overtly authoritarian, carry other, equally dangerous authoritarianisms in new clothes.

The question now is not whether memes can be political — that has already been answered. The challenge is how to defend the radical potential of meme culture — its subversive humor, inclusivity, and dissenting energy — without allowing it to become a vehicle for domination in new forms. The dilemma is real and unresolved: We demanded a digital space free from surveillance and fear, and that demand was central to the July uprising. But in this newly ‘opened’ sphere, we now face a surge of hate speech, sectarian propaganda, and gendered hostility, often disguised as humour, faith, or cultural pride. Yet any call to reintroduce control risks reviving the very repression that people rose up against.

In the post-uprising terrain, the meme is still a powerful tool, but no longer only a weapon of dissent. It is now also a site of ideological struggle. Memes that once challenged authoritarianism are now also being used to normalise discrimination, rewrite collective memory, and fracture the fragile solidarities the uprising had begun to build. The question, then, is not who is speaking — everyone should be —but what socio-political conditions are amplifying certain voices, and what kind of future that dominance is shaping.

 Punny Kabir is a PhD researcher in anthropology at the University of Cologne, Germany. Political meme is her mode of civic engagement