The revolution will be televised, marketed, and sold back to you
- Newage
- Aug 13
- 8 min read
Updated: Aug 19
by Sayrat Salekin
HOPE is no longer the promise of freedom. It is the partisan propaganda, ‘governmentalised’ mural that blasts through in between two announcements of betrayal.
I
JULY was more, much more than one discrete uprising against one autocratic regime, fixed in time. Indeed, it likely gathered its widespread heterogeneous popular support from, and eventually did articulate its ultimate political demand through the one-point (ek dofa) calling for Hasina’s resignation. But such mobilisations had been attempted before: from the December 10, 2022 mass congregation by the Bangladesh Nationalist Party to later agitations, calls to do away with what, by then, most had been able to define as a ‘fascist’ mafia state, were sounding through the country for a while. Surely, something beyond the mere articulation and enunciation of the demand must have been at play — surely something also not restricted to the credential monopoly ostensibly held by the young student organisers turned National Citizen’s Party leaders.
July was a rupture in time. At that moment, more so once the people began to break out of the hastilyimposed curfew and in the emergency aesthetics, night messages on the walls through which people spoke to each other — the chika — Dhaka’s streets sounded like the future; indeed the portal which Arundhati speaks of had arrived, hovering only miles above the city’s bloodsoaked skyline, awaiting clearance to land. Not utopia manifest, but something unstable. Pulsating with radical possibility, and beautifully unfinished.
It’s partly why I find the self-serving urgency of the NCP-affiliated bloc in demanding from the Yunus-led interim government a ‘July Charter’ as well as a ‘declaration’ so ridiculously self-important and removed — for one, who gets to decide, a year after the confluence of those forces (some unlikely to converge again for some time to come) to oust Hasina, what strictly-defined, sacred oath culminated in the Uprising’s victory over Hasina, and two, why wouldn’t the ‘proclamations’ of the people themselves during July count in the first place? What better gives language to this ‘spirit’, if not for the hurriedly sprayed chikas in between military APC patrols, police checkposts; or the homemade posters and placards, curled in the rain, rapped verses by breakout artistes like Hannan and Shezan?
II
Everywhere, the post-Hasina dispensation simply inherited the old matrix and reshuffled its players — an arrangement which, even if it wasn’t evident within the second week of August (if not the afternoon of August 5 when a handpicked ensemble rushed to the cantonment to apparently ‘co-operate’ with the army chief in salvaging the state as it was, rather than dismantling it), should be now.
The contradictions were visible in the uneasy coalition. Even with a rare popular overthrow of the old regime, the young leadership, allegedly out of their own volition but more likely by military prescriptivism, effectively outsourced the governmental blueprint to a cadre of neoliberal technocrats. Of course, in doing so, they were able to also play first at apolitical neutrality, then at performative opposition.
But if this is ‘people’s sovereignty,’ as the clique’s ideological guru keeps insisting, where is the voice of the working poor? How many of the thousands online consultations boasted by the Jatiyo Nagorik Committee turned NCP came from construction workers, farmers, domestic laborers, or rickshaw pullers? The party’s political discourse is heavy on themes like identity and a revised national history(ies), but alarmingly light on economic justice. Of course, as elsewhere, when ‘culture war’ itself becomes the central ideological base of a party over class struggle, the terrain becomes ripe for right-wing populism.
What, indeed, is this ‘public’ in whose name such sovereignty is claimed? Hannah Arendt famously defined the public as a space where individuals appear before one another in speech and action as embodied, visible, and politically accountable beings. In Bangladesh post July, this ‘public’ is increasingly mediated and disembodied. Who this public is, its very numbers and presence, as well as the swelling support behind its demands, are compiled and filtered algorithmically. What dominates is a simulacrum curated consensus masquerading as collective will. Not ‘mobs’, but pressure groups, urge the chief advisor’s press secretary. Not coordinated gimmicks, but ‘agitated masses’, explain the leaders as bulldozers contracted by YouTube influencers shuttle to raze the Awami dome of the rock.Nusrat Sabina Chowdhury, in Paradoxes of the Popular (2019), notes of the Bangladeshi state’s repeated invocation of ‘the people’ as simultaneously source of legitimacy and object of discipline, thus constructing popular sovereignty in forms that preempt radical interruption. As a result, when those adjacent to the new, self-proclaimed French revolutionary descendant ruling bloc invoke this essence of ‘the people’, it reads as a ventriloquism act. The ‘people’ is flattened into a single voice; it speaks in words that sound as written elsewhere.
All the while, spokesmen in the populist epicentres go about regurgitating the lip-service of an ‘inclusive Bangladesh’ even as exclusionary majoritarian identity-fascism gathers steam, confronted only in the superficial virtual ‘culture wars’.
III
The site of this discursive warfare is, of course, most easily traced in the post-July culture industry, encompassing not only the official programme itineraries of the interim government, but also in the cultural knowledge production test sites of the ruling power bloc. Their discourses define the new, allegedly ‘post-ideological’ nationalism in testosterone-laced pageantry where the revolutionary is unquestionably a man, and performs’ his revolution in routine clannish patriotic kitsch. The angrier this revolutionary can get, the more inflamed the arteries in his neck swell as he spews proverbial fire, the more his TRP as a ‘true’ threat to the establishment.
In the rare gaps where the non-masculine must be recognised, for international observers if not for self-realised acknowledgment, the ‘July woman’ struggles to stretch her limbs and walk. A film commissioned by the Ministry of Cultural Affairs narrates in classical Niketoni visual (and political) language of three women: two student protesters and the mother of martyr Naima Sultana. Having been treated to decades of exposure to said narrative craft, the creative decisions and impositions are almost disturbing. Naima’s mother has little agency beyond repeating mainstreamed rhetoric translating the grief of her daughter’s killing into a call for capital punishment; the students either conveniently have nothing to note of the gross systemic threats that remain against women under the interim government’s watch, or those bits are left out, ultimately culminating in a sanitised half-truth that toes the government’s position on women ‘now’ enjoying unprecedented degrees of freedom and justice. The hyperbole works like a charm, and Hasina’s smug, megalomaniac face almost manifests into being for a flash millisecond. The narratives reduce these women to flattened archetypes within moralistic frames, and the stories end in triumphalist closure — July not as unresolved rupture but a concluded victory. It makes sense, then, for the entire design of these events and their public messaging to be in the past tense, of a remembering rather than an ongoing struggle, symbolised, apparently, in the UNESCO-baiting rickshaw ride of two women advisers.
IV
WALTER Benjamin said when art is detached from its cultic, ritualistic aura, its very embeddedness in a moment of authenticity and social presence; it becomes political aesthetics prone to fascistic repurposing. Benjamin witnessed this firsthand in the form of Hitler’s rise in Nazi Germany. Spectacle replaces struggle, tragedy dramatised but not interrogated.
The danger here isn’t merely in the state retelling July. It’s in the state and its ostensibly unassociated political partners selling July as an affective brand epitomised in its closure. The war is won, everybody, and there are no wars (at least on the frontier on which the last one came to a halt) left to fight. Naturally, then, what remains for the ordinary citizen as very much an open wound finds shape metamorphosed into uninspired, cabinet-approved monuments whose logic increasingly resembles the Awami epistemic playbook.
What, then, of the outpour of right-wing civil-bureaucratic mobilisation against Narsingdi Govt. College lecturer Nadira Yeasmin, or the brute Islamist showdown against the Women’s Affairs Reform Commission? In a country where the cis-hetero man has long monopolised both the microphone and the moral compass, it is almost laughable, if it was not so dangerous, to watch the righteous indignation of Hefazat-e-Islam — a hard-line collective that has one senior leader and at least a few sympathisers in the interim government, as well as a sketchy history of appeasing and being appeased in turn by Hasina’s Awami League government — erupt over the modest recommendations of the commission. The men, swelling in the scorching May sun with testosterone and moral panic, thundered in Sohrawardy Uddyan (conveniently salvaged from its prior status of being the recluse of the morally condemned) under the garb of ‘saving Islam.’ Of course, what the Commission threatened was not religion but material, patriarchal control.
What began in July as rupture now faces the risk of becoming ritual feeding of the spectacle. A manifesto on domesticating the revolution. It’s this very trajectory from political rupture to packaged, institutionalised nostalgia that renders the post-Hasina transition vulnerable not just to elite co-optation but to the emergence of a more dangerous, populist authoritarianism. The Constitution Reform Commission’s vision remains limited to liberal representative democracy, whose institutional safeguards have already proven ineffective against authoritarian resurgence across the globe. A demagogue populist autocracy with mass appeal can weaponise majoritarianism, win elections fairly, and yet gut democratic life from within. Already, we see the signs.
We need not look any further than Sri Lanka where the incumbent party seized electoral momentum not through identity pageantry but via an urgent call for economic sovereignty from the IMF and Western vulture funds. Compare that to the hollow centrism of Bangladesh’s new icons, many of whom remain ideologically adrift and echo a cliche populist posturing against corporate monopolies while doing practically nothing to confront them. Were these footsoldiers of a ‘new settlement’ serious about systemic change, they would go to war, at least rhetorically, with the Summits and Adanis of the region instead of quietly acquiescing.
Fast forward a year, and the same slogans born out of the sheer public horror and rage in July, divorced from context or public engagement, slogans that once shook the Bengali nationalist ethos of the Awami regime (and drew meaning and significance from that very defiant subversion), now echo in pastiche re-enactments at the NCP’s countrywide marches. The graffiti (by which I refer to those emergency aesthetics made prior to and during July 36) that once compiled multifarious intersectional calls for justice along multiple axes of oppression, is now part of a curated series of ‘July reminiscing’ pillarart sponsored and endorsed by Students Against Discrimination organiserturnedadviser Asif Mahmud. Worse, despite these credentials, less than one evening’s worth of online mobilising by far-right activists proved enough to lead to the erasure of one pillar featuring the profiles of bloggers brutally killed between 2013 and 2016, targeted and murdered in quick succession under charges of blasphemy and atheism. The result was a whitewashed vacuum with a note left by the ‘protesters’, loosely translating to ‘this is no country for the shatim (infidel).’
What was July, then? A portal glimpsed but failed to enter? We must be careful not to let the rupture be relegated to sanitized installations in the current administration’s museum-making fascinations. Not when the future is still being written in invisible ink, and its ghosts demand naming.
Chomsky had warned that manufacturing consent doesn’t always mean silencing opposition - it can also be curating it. What the state cannot destroy, it absorbs. What it cannot absorb, it decorates. And so we live in a strange twilight with dull evocations of our own revolutionary potential, tamed, beautified, domesticated. On one hand, the common Bangladeshi survives through Groundhog Day-esque re-enactments of the same defanged, decontextualised rhetoric; on the other, they take flak from the deposed Awami League, now left with few strategies except sadistic ridicule and taunt.
But memory resists. The question is not what July meant, but what we will do with the meaning not yet exhausted and coopted.
Sayrat Salekin is a researcher and writer based in Dhaka.
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