Two years ago, on this very day, Nahid Islam was the most sought-after person in Bangladesh, and, for millions of people, the one they were looking toward.
A day earlier, on August 3, 2024, he had stood before a sea of people at the Central Shaheed Minar in Dhaka and reduced weeks of bloodshed and political turmoil to a single demand…Sheikh Hasina must resign.
On August 5, Hasina did just that, though hardly in the manner in which long-serving rulers imagine their departure. After more than 15 years in power, she flew out of Bangladesh as protesters poured into the streets and toward the centers of state power, leaving behind a government in collapse and a country battered by weeks of violence.
Nahid, then a university student, had become essentially the principal face of the uprising. Two years later, he opened the door to a considerably different scene.
When the Daily Waadaa team arrived at his modest apartment in Iskaton, in central Dhaka, Nahid looked tired.
The fatigue was understandable. He had spent several days over the previous two weeks on fiery political road marches, part of the difficult transition of the National Citizen Party, or NCP, from an organization born out of an uprising into a party trying to establish itself on Bangladesh's unforgiving electoral terrain.
During the marches, an NCP convoy had been attacked by activists of the ruling party, leaving some party leaders and activists injured. The streets had once made Nahid famous. They were now extracting their price.
Inside the apartment, though, there was little of the ‘theater’ of politics. Nahid wore a navy-blue panjabi and spoke in the same calm manner and deceptively docile voice that has become familiar in Bangladesh…a voice that can sound almost subdued across a table but can, when projected into a microphone before thousands of people, produce an uproar.
He frequently folded his arms across his chest, settling into the locked-arm posture that has become something of a trademark. On a wall in the room hung a painting from another life — or, more precisely, from another Bangladesh.
It depicted the rickshaw puller whose resolute salute during the tumultuous days of the 2024 uprising had gone viral. For a brief moment, the anonymous working man (later people knew his name) had become one of the uprising's enduring visual symbols…an ordinary citizen caught in an extraordinary time, raising his hand in a gesture that seemed to contain defiance and hope all at once.
The painting remained on Nahid's wall as a reminder of the movement that had carried him from university politics into an interim government and then, eventually, into Parliament.
At 28, Nahid is now an NCP member of Parliament and the opposition chief whip. In between, he served as an adviser in the interim government and became the founding convener of the NCP.
“These past two years have been an incredible — almost unimaginable — journey for us,” he said. He paused periodically as he spoke, the exhaustion of the recent marches still visible.
“We were university students, then became part of a student movement, which turned into a mass uprising,” he continued. “From there, we entered the government, formed a political party, went through an election, and now we have experience in Parliament.”
It is difficult to find another recent political career in Bangladesh compressed into so little time. But when Nahid looks back, the most difficult period was not necessarily the uprising itself. It was what came immediately afterward.
“Among all of this, the period immediately after the uprising was the most challenging for us,” he said. “Forming the interim government was a major task, though things are now on much more stable footing.”
His memories of August 5 remain surprisingly granular.
The night before, Nahid had been staying at the home of one of his university professors. The movement was approaching what its leaders understood could be its final confrontation with the Hasina government. They spent the night deciding where protesters would gather, drawing up a rough plan and coordinating with the different groups involved.
A crucial decision had already been made: the march on Dhaka would be brought forward by a day.
There was a curfew coming. The organizers were also receiving information that the internet and mobile networks might once again be shut down. The possibility of another communications blackout, like the one that had crippled the movement earlier, changed their calculations.
“We knew we couldn't afford to lose another two days,” Nahid said.
Initially, the organizers had wanted to give people outside Dhaka enough time to reach the capital. But they realized that every additional hour offered to protesters was also an additional hour available to the government.
“As it turned out, moving it forward was strategically advantageous for us,” he said. “The government simply didn't have enough time to get ready, whereas the public was already prepared.”
There have since been arguments about who first proposed advancing the march, another small battle over the authorship of history. Nahid has little interest in settling it.
“Questions about who first proposed it or who played which role are, in the bigger picture, not very important,” he said.
By the morning of August 5, his own movements were being carefully controlled — not by the government, but by the people protecting him.
The plan was for Nahid to reach Shahbagh early and remain there. The public would march toward Ganabhaban, the prime minister's official residence, while the student leaders stayed behind and issued further instructions if necessary.
But the people sheltering Nahid refused to let him leave while soldiers were still positioned around Shahbagh. Only after the area appeared secure was he brought there, around noon.
Then the plan ceased to matter.
Nahid and fellow coordinator Asif Mahmud found themselves standing in a crowd so enormous that they could not remain where they were. The procession simply absorbed them. “We couldn't hold our ground or stay behind,” Nahid said.
Someone found a rickshaw, helped the two young leaders onto it and began pushing it through the mass of people. It was an oddly fitting vehicle for a revolutionary scale uprising in Dhaka.
Sitting in his Iskaton apartment two years later, with the painting of the saluting rickshaw puller nearby, Nahid described being carried through the capital on another rickshaw, no longer directing the crowd so much as traveling inside it.
By then, rumors were spreading that Hasina had left the country. Nahid did not believe them. “I kept thinking it could be some kind of trap,” he said.
Sometime between 1:30 and 2 pm, Asif was speaking with a journalist when confirmation came through Agence France-Presse. Other reliable news organizations followed.
“Even then, it didn't fully sink in until we were actually on our way,” Nahid said.
The procession had been expected to move toward Ganabhaban. Instead, much of it poured into the Parliament complex, and Nahid went with it.
What he remembers most vividly is a strange absence of words.
For weeks, Bangladesh's streets had been filled with slogans. Protesters had shouted themselves hoarse. On August 5, at the moment of victory, many seemed to lose the ability to form words.
“That day, I witnessed the largest procession of my life,” Nahid said. “People were so overwhelmed with joy that they couldn't even talk or chant slogans. Everyone was simply shouting with emotion.”
He leaned back as he recalled it.
“The excitement, the emotion, the sense of unity among everyone — it was unlike anything I've ever experienced,” he said. “I don't think I'll ever witness that kind of emotion again.”
The sentence carried an unintended melancholy. The Bangladesh of August 5 — united and temporarily unburdened by the question of what came next — did not last long.
Nahid himself had begun to suspect much earlier that the Hasina government might not survive. By July 16, he said, the direction of events was becoming apparent. His conviction deepened after he and other coordinators were released from the Detective Branch, or DB.
Something had disappeared…the surveillance.
“Up until then, we had been under constant surveillance,” he said. “But after our release we noticed that the surveillance was gone — no one was following us anymore.” For Nahid, it was a signal.
“At that point, it became fairly clear that this government was not going to survive.”
He believed the student leaders had been released because the confrontation was reaching its end. “We believed we had been released so that we could make one final call — one final announcement,” he said. “The only thing left was to announce the government's downfall; everything else had already been set in motion.”
That final call came at the Central Shaheed Minar on August 3.
Until Nahid arrived there, he still had one lingering doubt. It was not about whether Hasina should go. It was whether the country was ready for the demand to be made explicitly.
Then he saw the crowd.
“When I arrived at the Central Shaheed Minar on August 3, all my doubts disappeared,” he said. “The only doubt I had was whether the timing was right. But when I got there and saw the crowd, I felt, this is the time.”
He remembers sensing that the demand had escaped the boundaries of the student movement. “I felt that the nation had been waiting for this moment for many years.”
Nahid resists the temptation — irresistible to many politicians — to claim the moment as his own. “I don't see it that way,” he said. “I believe I was given the opportunity to carry out a historic responsibility.”
The Anti-Discrimination Student Movement had entrusted him with making the announcement, he said. But the declaration belonged to the people standing before him.
“The individual is not what matters most,” Nahid said. “What matters is the declaration itself. On that day, with the entire nation and the Central Shaheed Minar as witnesses, that declaration was made.”
There was another possible ending, of course.
If Hasina had survived, Nahid believes the punishment awaiting those who challenged her government would have been severe.
“Had the government remained in power, countless people who took part in the movement would have suffered the consequences,” he said. “The government would have taken revenge.”
He believes journalists covering the uprising could also have faced grave repercussions.
But by August 3, he said, such calculations had largely ceased to matter.
“We had reached the decisive moment — the final battle,” he said. “At that stage, we weren't thinking about what would happen if we failed. Our only focus was on making it succeed.”
Nahid's understanding of what failure might mean was not abstract. He said that when he was forcibly taken and held in isolation during the uprising, his captors explicitly threatened that he could remain secretly detained indefinitely if he refused to cooperate.
“I asked them whether I had been disappeared, because I knew what enforced disappearance meant,” he said. “They admitted that they had disappeared me.”
According to Nahid, his captors told him that nobody outside knew where he was and that there would be no news of him if they decided not to release him.
He said similar pressure was applied at the DB office. Nahid alleges that the Directorate General of Forces Intelligence had been pursuing movement leaders since around the middle of July, initially to intimidate them and later to pressure them into ending the protests.
The experience also informs his interpretation of one of the most disputed episodes of August 5: the military's meeting with established political parties as Hasina's government was collapsing.
Nahid said military officials later maintained that they had tried unsuccessfully to contact the student leaders. From the students' side, he said, no communication took place. He remains scathing about the political parties that gathered at military headquarters.
“We believe that the political parties' meeting at military headquarters will remain a shameful chapter in Bangladesh's history,” Nahid said.
His objection is partly symbolic. People had died in the streets, he said, and yet at the decisive moment established political parties were discussing the country's future inside military headquarters.
“If the military — or the Army Chief — had a statement to make, he could have met with the political parties at another venue,” he said. “In our view, what happened was not a positive development for democracy.”
That dispute contained the argument that would dominate the next two years. Was July a revolt that removed a government and cleared the way for an election? Or was it a mandate to remake the state itself?
Nahid and his fellow student leaders wanted something closer to the latter.
He said they initially proposed a national government involving the country's major political forces. The Bangladesh Nationalist Party, then the country's principal political force, was central to those discussions.
On August 5, Nahid said, the student leaders spoke with the BNP's acting chairman and proposed the arrangement.
According to Nahid, the BNP declined. “Their position was that there should instead be a caretaker government that would hold an election within three months and then step down,” he said.
He said the party was consistently skeptical of the more expansive reforms sought by the student leadership. “They were not in favor of any broader reforms or structural changes,” Nahid said. “From the very beginning, the BNP consistently maintained that it did not support that kind of transformation.”
The eventual answer was an interim administration headed by the Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus. Two years later, despite everything that followed, Nahid still believes Yunus was the right choice.
“I believe Professor Yunus was the best choice at that time,” he said. “We felt then — and still feel — that there really was no other alternative.”
The interview had moved far from the euphoria of August 5 and into the less romantic business of what a revolutionary-scale uprising becomes once institutions and politicians take possession of them.
Nahid's judgment of Yunus is now complicated. “We do have some disappointment and frustration with him,” he said. “The expectations we had, and the way we had hoped things would proceed, were not fully met by him.”
His greatest complaint concerns reform.
Nahid believes the interim government made a foundational mistake when it created reform and consensus commissions rather than using its own authority to implement more fundamental institutional changes.
“The whole concept of the Consensus Commission and the Reform Commission was flawed from the beginning,” he said. “The government should have carried out the reforms itself.”
In his view, the interim administration possessed a mandate unlike that of an ordinary caretaker government. “It was given that responsibility, along with the mandate of a revolutionary force at that time,” he said.
Instead, he argued, the government returned the central questions of reform to the same political parties whose interests were embedded in the existing system.
“In Bangladesh, it was already very clear to the people that the political parties did not want any fundamental changes,” Nahid said. “So I believe the idea of the Reform Commission was a mistake.”
He also rejects the argument that the Yunus government had become overwhelmingly unpopular by the end.
“If you assess the situation even now, and compare this government with the interim government after another six months,” he said, “I think people would still prefer the interim government.”
The student leaders themselves did not emerge unscathed from their time in power.
Nahid said they became targets of sustained character assassination. Some attacks, he believes, came from forces associated with the fallen political order. Others, he said, came from people within the post-uprising establishment who had no interest in seeing a new political force emerge.
“The old fascist forces were certainly involved,” he said, “but those currently within the establishment also worked from various directions to prevent the rise of a new political force.”
He pointed out that student leaders who never entered government were subjected to similar attacks. Eventually, Nahid left the interim administration and helped create the NCP.
The transition required an awkward transformation: a movement that had derived its legitimacy from rejecting an entrenched political order now had to learn the mundane mechanics of party politics — constituencies, candidates, organizational committees, elections, parliamentary procedure and road marches.
The marks of that transformation were visible during the interview.
Two years ago, Nahid had been pushed through an enormous crowd on a rickshaw as a government collapsed. Now he was visibly worn down after days of political campaigning, including marches in which his party's convoy had come under attack.
The revolution had become politics.
Nahid, now sitting in Parliament as opposition chief whip, argues that Bangladesh nevertheless expects too much from opposition parties and too little from governments.
“I don't know whether many people expected the opposition party to call for a general strike within the first five months,” he said. Instead of concentrating on the government's performance, he said, public discussion often turns to whether the opposition is doing enough to resist it.
“The opposition is being held accountable as if it is responsible for governing,” Nahid said. “But the focus should be on holding the government accountable and ensuring that the government answers to the people.”
His assessment of the elected government is severe.
“I think this government has become unpopular in such a short period of time,” he said, “and I don't know if any elected government has become this unpopular within such a short timeframe before — especially after securing a two-thirds majority.”
To Nahid, the reason lies in a question Bangladesh has yet to resolve: Who inherited the July uprising?
An election transferred constitutional authority. But Nahid argues that the election itself cannot be separated from the uprising that made it possible.
“People do not believe that this transfer of power happened solely through an election,” he said. “We all know that there was a broader context behind it — the July uprising, the sacrifices people made, and the blood that was shed.”
He pointed to the July Charter and the referendum, arguing that the government's subsequent approach to reform contradicted the mandate voters believed they had endorsed.
He called it “a form of deception against the people.” “That is how many people have come to view it,” he said.
If the conversation about domestic politics made Nahid analytical, the subject of India sharpened his voice.
He accused New Delhi of pursuing a strategy intended to keep Bangladesh politically unstable and preserve leverage over its governments. These were Nahid's allegations and interpretations; he offered no direct evidence for some of the broader claims.
“This is no longer just an issue involving the Awami League,” he said. “It is now a matter of diplomatic relations between Dhaka and Delhi. The government needs to address this directly with Delhi.”
He believes India ultimately wants the Awami League restored as a major political force because, in his view, the party has historically served Indian strategic interests.
“They want to destabilize the country and, in one way or another, they want the Awami League to return to power because the Awami League serves their interests,” Nahid said.
He also pointed to the return of the exiled Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasrin to Kolkata, interpreting her presence as part of a broader attempt to intensify communal tensions and anti-Muslim narratives. He provided no evidence establishing such a connection.
“Creating communal tensions, increasing social divisions, and continuously building a narrative against Muslims and Islam — this is part of India's plan,” he said.
He accused New Delhi more broadly of using political pressure, border tensions and instability in sensitive areas, including the Chittagong Hill Tracts, to increase its leverage over Dhaka.
“So, I believe Delhi wants to keep this government under pressure so that it is forced to reach an accommodation with Delhi,” he said.
And then there is Sheikh Hasina.
Two years earlier, Nahid had stood at the Shaheed Minar and publicly demanded the resignation of one of the most powerful leaders in South Asia’s history.
Now, asked whether he thought she would ever return, he answered almost immediately.
“I don't think Sheikh Hasina will return,” he said.
“In my view, Sheikh Hasina no longer has that kind of courage. If she did, she would not have had to flee on August 5.”
If she did return, Nahid predicted an enormous mobilization demanding that she stand trial and face the most severe punishment available under Bangladeshi law.
“I do not believe Sheikh Hasina has the courage to return and face the trial,” he said.
By then, the tea had been served, the apples and nuts sitting between the visitors and one of the most recognizable figures produced by the uprising. Nearby, the painted rickshaw puller remained frozen in his salute.
There was something almost too neat about the image.
The rickshaw puller belonged to the brief period when the uprising could still be represented in a single gesture. Before governments had to be assembled. Before reform commissions. Before accusations and counteraccusations. Before a student movement became a party and its leaders became politicians.
Before elections produced winners and losers and July itself became contested political territory. Nahid's own life has traveled the same distance.
Student. Protest organizer. Detainee. Face of an uprising. Government adviser. Party founder. Candidate. Member of Parliament. Opposition chief whip.
The institutions around him have changed almost as quickly. Hasina is gone. Yunus has come and gone from the government. The movement has splintered into competing interpretations of what July was supposed to accomplish. Former allies now occupy different sides of political arguments.
The vocabulary of a revolutionary-scale uprising has migrated from university campuses and street intersections into commissions, manifestos, election campaigns and Parliament.
And Nahid, who was visibly exhausted after another round of marches through Bangladesh, is back on the road — this time not to overthrow the political system, but to survive within it.
Yet when he speaks of August 5, 2024, the politician briefly gives way to the student again.
He remembers the crowd swallowing him at Shahbagh. He remembers being put onto a rickshaw. He remembers distrusting the first reports that Hasina had left. He remembers the procession spilling toward Parliament.
Above all, he remembers the sound. Or rather, the inability of people to produce anything coherent.
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