25 July 2024: Crocodile tears pour gasoline on the fire of the uprising 

"I just wanted to see what was happening. I wasn't protesting." 

That was what Rifat, a 10th-grader from Badda Alatunnesa High School, told a reporter from his bed at the National Institute of Traumatology and Orthopaedic Rehabilitation. He was staring at the space where his right leg used to be.

He had been sipping a sharbat in Rampura on 19 July, watching the chaos unfold from the roadside, when a bullet found him. Two operations later, doctors had no choice but to amputate the leg from the knee down.

"I don't know if I'll be able to go to school again," he wept.

A few beds away lay Imran Sarkar, a fourth-year philosophy student at Dhaka College. He had been walking home from Friday prayers through Rayerbazar on 19 July when a round tore into his left leg. "Suddenly, I felt a bullet in my leg, and I lost consciousness," he said. He was still trying to imagine a life without it.

By 25 July, Dhaka's trauma wards were full of boys like Rifat and Imran — alive, but permanently altered. Elsewhere in the city, the prime minister was also in tears. Just not for them. For the metro rail. And that put gasoline on the embers of the July Uprising.

A prime minister's tears

On the 25 July morning, Sheikh Hasina travelled to the Mirpur-10 metro rail station, vandalised a few days back, to inspect the wreckage of its ticket machines and signalling systems. Officials from the Dhaka Mass Transit Company briefed her on the damage; an inquiry committee, formed three days earlier, had 10 working days to assess when services could resume.

Standing amid the wreckage, Hasina frowned, then began wiping her eyes with a tissue.

"What kind of mentality drives them to destroy structures that make people's lives easier?" she asked. "Dhaka city was plagued by traffic jams. The metro rail provided relief. I cannot accept the destruction of this transport system." 

She said she wanted justice for the machine. "The people must judge the perpetrators themselves," she said. "I am seeking justice from them." 

Awami League General Secretary Obaidul Quader added that the prime minister would personally bear the cost of treating the injured and supporting the families of the dead. It was a promise made the same afternoon a nation was tallying its funerals.

The students would not stand down. Their 48-hour ultimatum regarding internet restoration and lifting the curfew expired without a new programme announced, but plans were already forming for Friday: prayers and mourning processions at mosques and temples nationwide and medical teams to help the roughly 15,000 injured protesters still needing care. 

Crocodile tears

The country did not take it well.

"We lost hundreds of students. But Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina had time to cry for the metro rail, not for the people who will never return," one user wrote on X, in a post that spread quickly.

"While others are dying, a railway line is crying crocodile tears," read another.

Journalist Zulkarnian Saer put it plainly. Hasina had found time to visit a vandalised station, he said, but none to meet the families of the students shot dead in the streets.

"She definitely went there to get some attention and sympathy," a Facebook user wrote. Online, the phrase "crocodile tears" would outlive almost everything else said that week. 

Memes and troll posts flooded Facebook. Graffiti appeared with the tagline "Natok kom koro, pio" (Curb the drama, dear). 

The count that would not stop climbing

At Dhaka Medical College Hospital, two more names were added to the register that day. Zaman Mia, a 19-year-old garment worker from Narsingdi, and Zakir Hossain, a 29-year-old tailor's shop employee from Rayerbagh. Both died of gunshot wounds. 

Their deaths pushed the official toll, counted from 16 July onwards, past 156, including three members of the police. Independent tallies published the same week already put the real number closer to 203. Amnesty International released a report that day accusing police of using lethal weapons against demonstrators. 

At the Dhaka Medical College morgue, 85 bodies had by then been identified and returned to families for burial. Eight more, still unclaimed, were handed to the volunteer organisation Anjuman Mufidul Islam so that they, too, could be buried.

Behind the blackout

The internet stayed largely dark. Days earlier, the junior ICT minister, Zunaid Ahmed Palok, had accused Facebook and YouTube of defying Bangladeshi law, the pretext for a clampdown that kept Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp and TikTok offline through the week.

The curfew, on its sixth day, was relaxed for just seven hours, from 10am to 5pm, later extended by two more. Soldiers patrolled Dhaka's streets and checkpoints through the hours in between. Markets and offices came briefly back to life in the gap, then went quiet again. 

Arrests kept pace with the casualties. Nationwide, nearly 5,000 people had been detained over nine days — 2,209 of them in Dhaka alone, with hundreds more in Chattogram, Narsingdi, Sylhet and Barishal. The BNP said its joint secretary general, Shahiduddin Chowdhury Annie, had been picked up from Elephant Road by the Detective Branch that afternoon.

The world begins to watch

Volker Türk, the UN human rights chief, condemned the crackdown and demanded the government publish, transparently, the names of the dead, the injured and the detained. The UN, he said, stood ready to help investigate.

BNP secretary general Mirza Fakhrul Islam Alamgir called for an international inquiry and compensation for every victim, including protesters, police and Ansar members. India's foreign ministry said it was watching closely and hoped peace would return soon. In Washington, the State Department authorised non-emergency US embassy staff and their families to leave Dhaka voluntarily.

Inside the country, the students would not stand down. Their 48-hour ultimatum regarding internet restoration and curfew lifting expired without a new programme announced, but plans were already forming for Friday: prayers and mourning processions at mosques and temples nationwide and medical teams to help the roughly 15,000 injured protesters still needing care. 

Ninety-one students signed a statement calling the government's 23 July gazette only a partial victory — the fight, they said, was not over until the killers were tried and the dead were compensated.

By the time 25 July ended, the country understood exactly what its prime minister would weep for and what she would not. A nation was burying its dead and amputating its children's legs. She had wept for concrete and glass. And she would not go unpunished for it.