35 July 2024: The final call for ‘March to Dhaka’

I had never witnessed anything like that before. At Mirpur, students filled the streets like floodwater, wave after wave, and the ruling party's goons stood on the road ahead of them, working the bolts of their rifles, pistols out, as though it were a military drill. 

The violence resembled something from previous centuries, primitive and savage, and watching it in the open, in daylight, on a street I knew, left me shaking. My job, it seemed, was simply to stand and see. Man and monster, occupying the same few metres of road.

The internet was cut off in Mirpur in the middle of the day. Later, I would see police walking along the elevated metro line, weapons in hand.

It was 4 August, 35 July by our reckoning, the first day of the non-cooperation movement the students had called for, and it became one of the bloodiest days the country had seen until then. Before it ended, at least 98 people were dead across some 20 districts — 14 of them police officers, including 13 killed at a single station in Sirajganj.

The Awami League had done exactly what Nahid Islam had accused it of doing: it had put its cadres on the streets with guns to crush the protests. Since 16 July, the death toll had passed 311 by the newspapers' count, and everyone knew the real figure was higher. The government cut the mobile network at noon, imposed an indefinite curfew from 6pm, and Sheikh Hasina called the dying protesters "terrorists".

Wholesale violence engulfs the country 

A network of university teachers, meanwhile, put forward the first formal plan for what might come after — an interim government to which Hasina would hand over power.

In Dhaka, the fighting unfolded from Jatrabari, where it started at 10am, up through Science Lab, Mohakhali, Rampura, Badda, and Uttara's Azampur — three-way collisions involving protesters, police and party men. 

At the medical university beside Shahbagh, Chhatra League cadres who had chased the crowd took shelter inside the buildings, while at least 24 vehicles burned on the grounds. And the people were beginning to meet violence with violence.

By the police's own account, 27 stations and outposts were attacked that day, and more than 300 officers were hurt. Across the country, Awami League offices and the homes of its leaders were set ablaze. The High Court threw out a petition asking it to stop the firing, ruling that the forces could use force as their duty required.

Mirpur was one of the places where that arithmetic was written in blood, and I was unfortunate enough to witness it. Home to a dozen colleges and schools, it had been a stronghold of the movement from the first week, and by mid-morning it was a battlefield. 

Around 11, students moving from Mirpur 13 towards Mirpur 10 ran into Awami League, Jubo League and Chhatra League men who had taken the intersection before dawn, armed with shotguns, pistols, machetes and sticks. The students answered bullets with brickbats. It was no contest, and still the running fight went on past half past 12.

I got caught at a League checkpost, where cadres armed with machetes and rods stopped my bike to check my identification, even though I was in full bulletproof gear. As I hurried my bike away, I was hit a few times. Then I took shelter on a street near Benarashi Palli and saw the waves of protesters.

The coordinators had planned their March to Dhaka for 6 August. But they realised that Hasina would use everything at her disposal to prevent any sort of movement on that day. So, to deprive her of those extra 24 hours, the coordinators brought it forward by a day.

One of them was Shakil Hossen, 23, a student at the University of Development Alternative, one of those bright, restless young people who had been in the streets since the road-safety protests of 2018. He pushed forward with the protesters, using the benches of footpath hawkers as shields. When the Awami League men came on, firing from the Mirpur 10 side, Shakil was shot.

I never met Shakil, though we were in the same fight within the same square mile, and I have thought since that the only thing dividing his story from mine was where a bullet happened to go. I spent that afternoon a few streets from where he fell, watching the same battle from the other side. 

I remember two boys, 18 or 19, muttering from a shop ledge that maybe today was the day they finally could not do it, and a younger girl turning to them, "Stop talking rubbish and get on the road. Go."

Red-faced and shouting, they disappeared into the crowd.

By late afternoon, the students had taken the Mirpur 10 roundabout, and I stood on the base of the footbridge and simply stared. They were flying the national flag from every railing; gunfire still cracked somewhere close; law enforcers had begun clearing people away in the name of the curfew.

Three-way violence engulfed the country as protesters began fighting bare-handed against the police and against Awami League, Jubo League and Chhatra League men. Feni lost eight. In Lakshmipur, another eight died, among them a college student shot as ruling-party men and protesters chased one another through the town from mid-morning. Narsingdi counted six; Kishoreganj, Bogura and Sylhet, five apiece; and the roll ran on down through Magura, Rangpur, Pabna, Munshiganj and Cumilla until there was scarcely a division without its own funerals.

Where the crowds could not reach the police, they reached the party: its offices and the houses of its leaders went up from Faridpur, where the Kotwali police station was stormed and set alight, to Nilphamari, where the home of the lawmaker Asaduzzaman Noor was wrecked. The curfew that came down at six did not take.

In Chattogram, Sylhet, Rajshahi, Khulna, Barishal, Cumilla and a dozen towns besides, the marching carried on into the night.

By nightfall, at least 98 had been killed.

The long march to Dhaka 

The coordinators had planned their March to Dhaka for 6 August. But they realised that Hasina would put everything at her disposal to prevent any sort of movement on 6 August. So, to deprive her of those extra 24 hours, the coordinators brought it forward by a day.

At Shahbagh that afternoon, Nahid Islam had already drawn the line. "Our destination is one," he said — victory, and nothing else. "We are still giving time. If the government keeps killing, we are looking towards Ganabhaban." Sheikh Hasina had a single choice left: go on with the bloodshed or resign. Build resistance committees in every neighbourhood, he told them; wherever the blow lands, meet it there.

At six, as the curfew came down, the protesters carried their dead out of Dhaka Medical College and marched them through TSC to Shahbagh, chanting the question the whole month had been asking: "When will Hasina step down?"

The answer would come the next morning, from a country already walking towards her door.