The Longest July and Ghost of Relevancy

A distinct psychological pattern echoes across the turbulent annals of Bengal’s political history: whenever a ruling regime becomes profoundly isolated from the masses, it desperately manoeuvres to shift the blame of its downfall away from the collective wrath of the people, projecting it instead onto an imagined or manufactured “other”. This serves as a defence mechanism to salvage the bruised ego of a ruler violently cast down from the pinnacle of absolute power. Just as the Pakistani colonial rulers half a century ago routinely dismissed every democratic milestone – from the Language Movement to the struggle for independence – as an “Indian conspiracy” or the “machinations of Hindu extremists”, Awami League deposed by the historic July 2024 uprising refuses to accept its collapse as the natural verdict of public fury. After a gruelling decade and a half of unyielding authoritarianism, the unprecedented and spontaneous explosion of students and citizens that forced the regime to flee is now being systematically re-engineered in their rhetoric as a mere “anti-liberation conspiracy” or “Jamaat-Shibir sabotage” or a “deep-state conspiracy”.
This engineered narrative is a calculated strategy for political survival. Arguably, the contemporary relevance and legitimacy of Awami League have long relied on maintaining a binary of fear within the social fabric. The party understands that its resurrection as the self-proclaimed vanguard of the nation’s great Liberation War and secular and progressive values is entirely dependent on the looming shadow of an anti-liberation and right-wing threat, Jamaat-e-Islami. This binary remains their final weapon to convince domestic civil society and Western allies that their authoritarianism was a necessary evil against the forces of darkness.
However, accepting the historical reality that their collapse was orchestrated by ordinary and unaffiliated citizens – rickshaw pullers, garment workers, housewives and middle-class professionals – signifies total moral bankruptcy for the party. For a political entity that built its identity as the sole custodian of the Liberation War spirit and the exclusive voice of the nation, being unconditionally rejected and cast aside by the general populace strips away any remaining ideological foundation.
To avert this historical indictment, the party’s theorists and a network of loyal intellectuals have launched a well-orchestrated campaign to distort the memory of the July Uprising. They aggressively broadcast a narrative to domestic and international audiences, claiming that the movement was not a genuine uprising of the masses but a highly coordinated and violent conspiracy by anti-liberation religious forces. Pro-regime academics and cultural figures, who long enjoyed the spoils of state patronage, have readily lent their voices to this propaganda. By aggressively refocusing the spotlight on a particular group, they seek to erase the immense sacrifices and heroism of ordinary citizens. This intellectual elite deliberately tries to resurrect a simplistic, black-and-white battleground where Awami League stands as the lone defender of light against a fundamentalist abyss, completely denying the independent agency, economic desperation and thirst for dignity that actually fuelled the public’s rage.
In a convenient turn of events for this political drama, mysterious actors have recently surfaced on the streets, displaying flags inscribed with kalima. While superficially resembling the provocative posturing of radical groups, the precise timing of these displays raises profound scepticism. It requires no extraordinary political insight to recognise this as a trap designed to brand a spontaneous, non-communal mass uprising with the stigma of religious extremism. Ultimately, these radical performances breathe life into the very ghost the ousted regime has been trying to conjure. Such provocative behaviour hands Awami League a potent propaganda weapon, allowing them to turn to the global stage and exclaim, “Look, in our absence, Bangladesh has fallen to the zealots.” Consequently, these street provocations do not advance any genuine religious agenda; instead, they serve as a lifeline to revive the moral standing of a discredited autocracy.
Yet, the wheel of history cannot be turned backward by the sheer force of artificial propaganda. The historic marches of July were never confined to the narrow script of any political party’s agenda, whether it is Awami League or Jamaat. They represented the collective, defiant cry of an exhausted population reclaiming their self-respect against suffocating fascism, systemic injustice and the theft of their democratic franchise. The courage of martyrs like Abu Sayed and Mugdho, who bared their chests to bullets, was not dictated by a party manifesto but was driven by the primal human instinct for liberty.
The ultimate tragedy of any dictatorship is its paralysing fear of looking into the mirror and confronting its own distorted reflection. To view a historic downfall as an external conspiracy rather than the harvest of one’s own tyranny is a form of terminal political blindness. Blinded by the hubris of absolute power, Awami League forgets that the human yearning for freedom cannot be forever caged by partisan boundaries. When a political philosophy can only find its purpose by praying for the longevity of its enemy, it confesses its own spiritual and moral death. Not a set of disposable chess pieces to settle partisan scores, the blood spilt on the asphalt in July was the desperate breath of a shackled nation breaking free. So, Awami League must remember that no amount of theoretical fog or intellectual sophistry can obscure this truth, for when a people write their history in blood, no artificial narrative can overwrite the text.

The writer is an Editorial Assistant at the Daily Sun