Footsteps of 1/11 being heard: Adviser Mahfuj Alam
“Footsteps of 1/11 are being heard! But July will prevail. The people's struggle will not be defeated,” he said.
Footsteps of the 1/11-styled government are being heard, Information and Broadcasting Adviser Mahfuj Alam said today (4 August).
He made the remark in a post on his verified Facebook account at 6:40pm.
Shortly after, he edited the post and added another line: "Footsteps of 1/11 are being heard! But July will prevail. The people's struggle will not be defeated."
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However, within the hour, he changed the visibility of his post to "friends only", making it closed off to public.
Meanwhile, following a meeting at the BNP Chairperson's office in Gulshan, journalists asked BNP Standing Committee member Salahuddin Ahmed about the information adviser's Facebook post, according to media reports.
Salahuddin said, "I think Mahfuj might delete the post in about an hour. I have no further comments on this matter."
What Mahfuj was referring to is 11 January 2007, when a state of emergency was declared in Bangladesh, leading to the formation of a military-backed caretaker government led by former Bangladesh Bank governor Fakhruddin Ahmed. This period is widely referred to as "1/11" in Bangladeshi political discourse.
In the comment section of his post, Mahfuj explained why he mentioned the "Footsteps of 1/11".
"The forces of July lack unity — and while we bear some responsibility for failing to maintain that unity, the subversive activities of the old 1/11 forces are even more to blame. The complacency among July's forces has allowed space for division and sabotage by the old 1/11 loyalists to grow. There is a mainstream effort to normalise the Awami League and vilify the student-public coalition of July," Mahfuj wrote.
"Moves are underway to restore the old economic and cultural arrangements, which would pave the way for the Awami League's return. Amid power struggles among parties, public trust is eroding, and a familiar effort to depoliticise is resurfacing.
"There's an attempt to portray state institutions as failures to foster public despair, and within that disillusioned public, a 'savior crisis' is being manufactured. There is an effort to reduce July's popular uprising to just another event, fostering a sense of inferiority — especially among students. A gradual portrayal of July-aligned forces as chaotic, incompetent, and failed is being used to dismiss the potential of July altogether," he added.
"Confusion is being created around elections, even though there is no significant conflict between the government and political parties on that front. The push to end politics, depoliticise the system, foster despair about political leadership and state institutions, and stir up a savior complex — all of it points toward an attempt to repeat 1/11."
A few hours before this post, Mahfuj shared an old Facebook post from 2 August 2024 and wrote: "When everyone was calling for Hasina's downfall with a single-point demand, and coordinators were pressuring us on the night to adopt the same, we were talking about non-cooperation. Despite criticism from many, the non-cooperation movement was turned into a formal programme."
He added, "Had non-cooperation clearly separated the forces of July from fascist forces on all sides, today's crises could have been avoided."
