A letter to those who made the first move
By Saqib Sarker
Dear friend,
When, in July 2024, the brutal repression of the former regime was laid bare before the whole country, you rose — from the ashes of its ravaged ruins.
I spoke relentlessly with my family members about how to join the protests. The neighbourhoods outside our home were surrounded by plainclothes goons and uniformed forces. Trying to leave the area would mean arrest — or worse.
I wanted to at least reach the crowd and stand with them. I didn’t want to be picked off the moment I stepped outside. I argued: unlike students in university halls, we couldn’t form a crowd and try to break through. My brother-in-law agreed. But my cousin sister and my wife refused to be so calculating.
During one of those long, anxious evenings, my sister and wife, who had already gone out once and were attacked by batons and shot at, challenged my cautious logic. Scores had already died. My plan — to somehow link up with a larger crowd before joining the front — made little sense to them. “Everyone’s taking that risk,” they said. “Why not us?”
I didn’t have a real answer. Finally, I said what I had been thinking about but couldn’t quite articulate: “Some people will have to be the pawns.” It sounded brutal, but it was honest. I wasn’t ready to be one. I wanted to go down, if I had to, after at least one real move — not as an easy target, plucked off the board before I even arrived.
But you, my friend — you went anyway. You made the first move.
I saw you on 16 July, in front of the Begum Rokeya University in Rangpur, arms stretched, defiant, standing non-violently at the face of 12 gauge pump action shotguns pointed at you. You became the embodiment for ‘buk petechi guli kor’ (my chest is ready for taking your bullets).
I saw you on July 18 at Dhaka’s Azampur, trying to give drinking water to people assaulted by tear gas and bullets.
And I saw you again at Shahid Minar and across the country on the 3rd and 4th of August, in your thousands — chanting, marching, unbroken.
This historic uprising was different for many reasons. This time, the intellectual class — long servile to the murderous dictator — could not regurgitate their usual excuses.
For years, they gaslighted the public by fake outrage at inconsequential issues, refusing to criticize the violent state forces because the opposition was not Gandhian enough. They had insinuated for years that only if a collection of angelic opposition parties were to emerge, could their moral sensitivity be legitimately offended by the autocracy’s misdeeds.
Dear friend, this is not particularly unique to the Bangladeshi intellectual elites, who go to the same dinner parties as the ruling class, but pretend to speak for you. And when that veneer was stripped away by undeniable brutality, it became a crisis for them. They could no longer control the narrative through their op-eds and moral posturing.
“A bankrupt liberal class, holding up values it does nothing to defend, discredits itself as well as the purported liberal values of a civil democracy as it is swept aside, along with those values. In this moment, a political, economic, or natural disaster – in short a crisis – will ignite unrest, lead to
instability, and see the state carry out draconian forms of repression to maintain ‘order’,” Dissident American journalist and author Chris Hedges wrote in his 2015 book Wages of Rebellion: The Moral Imperative of Revolt.
Like all autocrats, the Sheikh Hasina regime crushed protests under the pretext of maintaining “order.” But “order,” in their hands, was a manipulated game – the board was rigged: you were the pawns, expendable and constrained, while the rulers moved freely like bishops and knights.
Every tyrant knows that even the smallest piece, like the pawns in a chess game, can reach the end and become something powerful if they survive long enough. A queen. A knight. Something harder to control. That’s why they don’t follow the rules. They don’t let pawns cross the board. They kill them before they get close.
Yet these tyrants overlook how abruptly their downfall can come. It had long been clear that the Hasina regime would never relinquish its grip on power without massive bloodshed. Only when a large number of people are willing to lay down their lives in the streets – making it impossible for the security forces to continue killing – will the brutal dictator finally fall.
Hedges, who as a foreign correspondent for the New York Times covered uprisings and civil wars across the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and Central America, observed that authoritarian regimes collapse only when their own security apparatus stops obeying orders. And with power-hungry despots, that breaking point comes only after people have paid the highest price – with their eyes, their limbs, their lives.
“Once the foot soldiers of the elite – the police, the courts, the civil servants, the press, the intellectual class, and finally the army – no longer have the will to defend the regime, the regime is finished,” Hedges wrote in Wages of Rebellion.
“When these state organs are ordered to carry out acts of repression,” he continued, “… such as clearing people from parks and arresting or even shooting demonstrators – and refuse their orders, the old regime crumbles.”
On August 5, we witnessed this inevitability unfold — and it was you who made it happen. What once seemed impossible became reality. From Abu Sayeed in Rangpur to Mir Mugdho in Dhaka, you grew into millions. The power of brave defiance crashed down on the despotic regime with thundering fury. A government kept alive on the life support of its security forces disintegrated within minutes. As Chris Hedges wrote: “And when dying regimes collapse, they do so with dizzying speed.”
This victory was made possible by your courage — and by the silent suffering of hundreds of thousands over the past 15 years. Those final minutes were built on your sacrifices and the sacrifices of those who watched their brothers and husbands rot in prison, vanish without a trace, or return broken — or never return at all.
But still, you kept moving. Knowing you were expendable. Refusing to accept tyranny. Refusing to believe you were just pawns.
And now, because of you, the board has shifted. But the game isn’t over.
Dear friend, the lesson of August 5 is not just that regimes collapse — it is that power must be kept in check, a lesson you cannot afford to ignore.
Chris Hedges addressed this issue many times in his public talks:
“In the words of Karl Popper, the question is not how to get good people to rule, because most people attracted to power are mediocre at best,” he said in a 2013 speech.
“Instead, the question is, ‘How do you make the power elite frightened of you?’”
In 1971, an anti-war protest of such enormous scale took place in Washington, DC, that President Richard Nixon ordered city buses to be lined up bumper to bumper around the White House, forming a makeshift barricade – Hedges told the crowd, a story he often recounts.
Even with this wall of buses, Nixon remained deeply anxious. Henry Kissinger later recalled in his memoirs that the president feared the demonstrators might still break through. “Henry, they’re coming for us,” Nixon said.
“And that is exactly where we want people in power to be,” Hedges concluded.
Unlike chess, real life doesn’t end with checkmate. The struggle for liberty, human rights, and dignity never truly stops — because, as American abolitionist Frederick Douglass famously said, “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”
This is why, my friend, the deeper lesson of the July revolution is that the fight for civil rights and the rule of law is a continuous one. It is slow. It is painful.
And while we have removed a mass-murdering, kleptocratic regime — a ‘second liberation’ no doubt — we must now keep moving, one square at a time.
