22 July 2024: ‘Sheikh Hasina does not flee’

Mosammat Liza was 18. She had come to Dhaka six years earlier, sent by hardship and by her elder brother Rakib, to work as a domestic helper in a Shantinagar apartment. She studied Arabic at an all-female madrasa nearby to become a Hafiza.

On the afternoon of 18 July, hearing the din of clashes below, Liza stepped onto the balcony to watch the chase and counter-chase in the street. A bullet found her head. She collapsed where she stood.

Her brother, a construction worker in Gazipur, heard at half past three and set out for Dhaka, only to be turned back at checkpoint after checkpoint. He reached her at last on 20 July. The next day she was moved to another hospital, and that night the doctors operated. The day after, she died.

In their last conversation, Rakib had urged her to come home as their parents were seeking a groom. "Just three more months," Liza told him. "By then I will be Hafiza. Then I will go home for good." 

Instead, she went to the family graveyard in Deulashibpur, in Bhola.

'Sheikh Hasina does not flee' 

Liza was buried on 22 July. That same day, in the calm of the Ganabhaban, then Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina met the country's leading businessmen. She had an answer for the rumours moving through the blacked-out country. "It is being spread that Sheikh Hasina has fled," she said. "But let me say it plainly: Sheikh Hasina has not fled, Sheikh Hasina does not flee." 

Power, she added, meant nothing to her; she was not one to depend on it. 

Just 14 days later, on 5 August, she fled the country by helicopter as crowds bore down on that very residence.

There is no crueller witness than the calendar. The boast would outlive her rule as a national joke, but it revealed something graver than vanity. After 15 years in power, every institution of the state bent to her party's grip, and she had come to believe she could not fall. 

She had forgotten the one lesson the country's history teaches: that no autocrat who turns the students and the people against them survives it. Not Ayub Khan, not Ershad. Not her.

Consolidation by curfew

While Hasina reassured the men who financed her, the machinery of her survival worked the streets. This was the third day of curfew and the fifth of the internet blackout, and the security forces used the darkness to launch a nationwide "combing operation". 

By the next morning, the police and RAB had arrested at least 1,427 people in a single day, 692 of them in the capital, with more than 500 hauled in during six hours of block raids in the dead of night. 

Since 17 July, the total had climbed past 2,000 and would soon cross 3,000. The blame fell chiefly on the BNP and Jamaat, the political opponents onto whom the government was shifting the blame for its own bullets.

Everything about the day was consolidation. The business elites pledged their loyalty, one business tycoon assuring her they had stood by the government and always would. Hasina blamed the opposition for the arson and warned of stronger action still. That evening she signed the summary reforming the quota. 

The army chief toured a subdued Jatrabari and promised normalcy; the police chief, standing where students had been shot, vowed that every criminal would be made to account "to the last penny". 

The alarm reached the United Nations itself. Its Secretary-General, António Guterres, conveyed "serious concern" through his spokesman over reports that armoured vehicles bearing UN peacekeeping markings, whose insignia meant only for mandated missions abroad, had been deployed against the protesters at home.

A movement not meant to die

From beneath the blackout, the students found a voice. Nahid Islam, dumped a day earlier under a Purbachal bridge and barely recovered, appeared to suspend the shutdown for 48 hours and issue a four-point ultimatum: restore the internet, lift the curfew, clear the campuses, and guarantee the safety of every coordinator. 

Others, suspecting he spoke under duress, kept the nine-point demand alive, texting their statements from phone to newsroom because the internet was gone. University teachers demanded an end to the killing and an accounting for the missing. 

Six more names joined the roll of the dead that day — Hasib, Asadullah, Rabiul, Mostafa, Rasel, and Liza.

The demand had hardened past quotas into something no curfew could reach. The streets could be emptied. The grief could not.

Liza had asked for just three more months. Hasina expected to stay in power for many more years. In the end, Liza was buried in her hometown, while within two weeks Hasina fled for her life — the very fear she had dismissed that afternoon.