36 July 2024: The day July finally ended in Bangladesh

On 5 August, an uprising that began with students brought down a 15-year government in a day of bloodshed, celebration and historic change

The morning of 5 August was cold, strangely so for early August. The night before had been the worst of my life and the most alive I had ever felt, both at once.

Hundreds of thousands of people had announced they would march on Ganabhaban that day, and my Facebook feed had turned into a scroll of last wishes and farewells. I wrote a long post setting down what I wanted to say if I did not come home. 
That was the temper of the time, people were ready to die. I did not sleep. As the first light came up I got out of bed, thinking, almost calmly, that if I were to leave the mortal realm today, what a peaceful day it would be to meet my Maker. At 8 in the morning I was ready in my bulletproof vest and helmet, and my sister tied a rakhi on my wrist and saw me off with tears in her eyes. 

This was the day the uprising had been walking toward since the first student was shot in July, the day set for the March to Dhaka, the final push on Gonobhaban, and the last test of whether a 15-year government would kill to hold its place or fall.

The streets out of Pallabi were unnaturally quiet. I took the back alleys to where I knew the protesters would gather, near Hope School in Mirpur, not at all sure the crowds would come. My heart was going hard: what if people lost their nerve, what if only a handful came out and were shot? I could not have been more wrong. As the morning wore on, people poured from every lane between Hope School and Mirpur-13, and by 10 o'clock there were thousands of them, with a resolve in their faces I had never seen. I kept catching sight of people I knew — school friends, university friends, whole families I had known for years. 

At the Mirpur-10 circle the army had strung barbed wire and parked its armoured carriers, and the soldiers watched us without expression, though now and then something like sympathy moved behind their eyes. They would have to be mad, I told myself, to fire on a sea this size; they would run out of bullets first. 

Then the news went round from The Business Standard that hundreds of thousands were marching on Dhaka from every direction, and it spread like fire. Between half-past ten and eleven the call I had been waiting for came: the army chief would address the nation at noon. Keep praying, I was told, we might get lucky. 
What none of us on the street could yet see was that the barricades in front of us had already, quietly, been given up. A later United Nations inquiry would set it down plainly that the border guards were waving ten to fifteen thousand people an hour through the very checkpoints they were meant to hold, and an officer watching the cameras saw thousands streaming in unopposed from Uttara and understood, in that moment, that it was finished.

The miracle after noon
After the noon prayers, around half past one, the procession finally moved. It spilled out of the alleys onto the main road by Al-Helal Hospital and within minutes was a sea, people joining from every corner, everyone chanting for Hasina to step down. On foot I would miss half of it, so I flagged down a battery-rickshaw, a Bangla Tesla, as we call them, stood up on it, and told the driver to follow the crowd. 
At Agargaon the soldiers were patrolling almost idly; people were cheering them, and the whole cordon felt loose, as though something had gone out of it. I got down at the SAARC Fountain where the military had blocked the road and walked on toward Shahbagh under a bright, cloudless sun, past more faces I knew, more embraces, music playing, slogans rising. It felt like a carnival, and it was one. 
And then, near the flower shops at Shahbagh, the news reached me. Hasina had fled. Around three o'clock she had boarded a helicopter with her sister, Sheikh Rehana, and left the country, flying out via Agartala to Delhi. Fifteen years were over in an afternoon. I let out a sound from the bottom of my chest, something closer to a howl than a cry. Thousands dead, thousands maimed, a whole brutal month, and it was over. I began marching towards Gonobhaban. 

Ganabhaban falls

By the time she was gone, the crowds were already at the gate. The security detail slipped away, and thousands walked into the prime minister's residence and took it apart — furniture, refrigerators, air-conditioners, even the fish and the livestock carried out on people's shoulders, bricks prised from the walls by hand. The same tide broke over the National Parliament. 

Across the city the symbols of the old order went up: Sudha Sadan, the family home in Dhanmondi, and the Bangabandhu memorial museum at Dhanmondi 32 were set alight; the Chief Justice's residence on Hare Road was overrun; Awami League offices burned from Dhanmondi to Bangabandhu Avenue; the home minister's house, the police headquarters and the city corporation building were torched; even the Kishoreganj home of a former president was ransacked. 

The burning of the museum at Dhanmondi 32 would trouble many afterwards, even among those who wanted Hasina gone; but that afternoon the crowd made little distinction between the father's legacy and the daughter's rule. I made my own slow way to Gonobhaban by rickshaw through a crowd so thick the wheels barely turned, and found the looting in full swing. 

Later I went to the Parliament premises, and on that green field, beneath a building I had grown up thinking of as the house of a democracy we never quite had, I lay down and ran and jumped and wept like a madman, and let someone photograph me with my arms flung wide and all thirty-two teeth showing. 

The bloodshed was not over

It would be wrong to remember only the joy. The 5th was also among the deadliest days of the whole uprising: as many as 135 people were killed, 24 of them police. It was not all chaos. The night before, the government had met twice behind closed doors and resolved to stop the march by force, and the United Nations would later describe the killings of that morning as a deliberate, unlawful effort to crush what it called the March on Dhaka. But there was a terrible confusion in it too. 

By that morning the army knew Hasina had fallen, but the police did not, or would not accept it, and so they stayed in the streets to defend a government that no longer existed, firing to keep the marchers out of the centre — in places, witnesses said, shooting at whoever they saw. Awami League men fired too. 

In Jatrabari, the killing was at its worst. The police killed at least 52 people. In Savar and Ashulia, at least 57 were killed; some of the bodies were burned. 

Even after Hasina had flown, as people were celebrating her departure, the police were stillfiring into the crowds. It came close to my own family. That afternoon, near the Mirpur Model Police Station, the police opened fire on a victory march my sister was in, and she was nearly killed; a boy who threw himself in front of her took the bullet, and I do not know to this day what became of him. Liberation and death arrived in the same hours, on the same streets. 

A country changes hands

The pressure that broke the government had been building inside the barracks as much as on the streets. Retired officers had spent the previous day defying the curfew and telling serving soldiers to go back to their camps and refuse to be turned on civilians; a former army chief, Iqbal Karim Bhuiyan, had said as much in public. 
In the afternoon General Waker-uz-Zaman met the political parties at the cantonment and then spoke to reporters. It was not the formal address we had been promised, but a plainer thing. Hasina had resigned, he said; an interim government would be formed and every killing would be tried; he asked the country to trust the army and to stop the destruction. 

He had met the BNP, the Jatiya Party and Jamaat, and the academics Asif Nazrul and Jonayed Saki, though he had not yet been able to reach the students. Asif Nazrul, in a 38-second video, told the young to hold steady as he had spoken with the army chief and believed their aspirations had been understood, and that good news was coming. 

That evening at Bangabhaban, the president, Mohammed Shahabuddin, sat with the service chiefs, the political leaders and the coordinators and settled the shape of the transition: an interim government to be formed at once, parliament to be dissolved, Khaleda Zia and every detainee to be freed, elections to follow. 

Around that one table sat leaders of the BNP, the Jatiya Party, Jamaat-e-Islami, Hefazat-e-Islam, the left and civil society, and the young coordinators of the uprising, and they adopted, before anything else, a resolution of mourning for the dead. The release of the BNP chairperson, jailed for years, was agreed unanimously, and Mirza Fakhrul Islam Alamgir came out of the meeting asking the country to stay calm. 

In a late address the president confirmed it all to the nation, and ordered the offices, the courts and the schools to open again the next morning.

Even in the middle of it, the students were already thinking past the fall. At a press conference in Tejgaon, Nahid Islam declared those who had died in the uprising national heroes and said that within 24 hours they would put forward an interim national government built around the students and citizens who had made the revolt, with civil society and the professions beside them. He was blunt about that they would not accpet a government installed by the army, nor a president's emergency rule. 

Only one the uprising itself had chosen. Stay on the streets, he told them, so that the servants of the fallen order got no second chance; protect the minorities, the journalists, the property of a state that now belonged to everyone. Both Tarique Rahman and Dr Muhammad Yunus was contacted on the very afternoon. The talks of formation of the Interim Government began. 

It was, in the end, the same thing we had all been reaching for through the long, sleepless nights that the country might finally be ours, and that the debt owed to the dead might be paid by the living, in the shape of something better built in their name. 

The martyrs, I had written days earlier, leave their debts to the living; now, at last, the living had a country in which to repay them. The movement had kept a private calendar through all of it. It had refused to let July end while Hasina ruled, and had gone on counting past the last of the month — 32 July, 33, 34, 35. 

That Monday was 36 July. When the helicopter lifted off, the month was finally over. I ended the day organising the protesters in my neighbourhood to form a watch and prevent more mob destruction. I had witnessed celebrations that ran to the horizon, millions of people out in what may have been the largest and happiest carnival the world has seen. I looked at their faces for a long time. They had bought this day with blood and with grief, and they had earned every second of it. 
July, at last, had ended.