On the midnight of July 14, 2024, Bangladesh's political landscape experienced something akin to a messianic rupture. Led by thousands of female students who broke through the locked gates of Rokeya Hall, Shamsunnahar Hall, and other residential halls at Dhaka University, an unprecedented chorus filled the night air:
“Tumi ke? Ami ke? Razakar, Razakar!” followed immediately by the rhythmic counterstroke: “Ke bolechhe? Ke bolechhe? Shoirachar, Shoirachar!”
They were performing a dangerous act of linguistic alchemy. Their presence on the dark asphalt of Dhaka University was not merely a protest against a slur; it was an act of radical corporeal reclamation.
This chant emerged as a response to the insulting press conference held by Sheikh Hasina earlier that afternoon. To the regime, it was immediately branded as treason. But for a generation confronting more than a decade of authoritarian rule, the slogan revealed a deeper truth.
They had witnessed how, time and again, the Awami League and its cultural auxiliaries deployed the nuclear option of political denunciation to dehumanize dissent, crush opposition, and weaponize 1971 through a proprietary Chetona industry.
The chorus of that midnight generation gave birth to a defining historical event. Between dusk and dawn, Bangladesh witnessed a transformation of meaning, memory, history, and political subjectivity.
It was the moment when the collective subaltern conquered its fear, dismantled decades of epistemic violence, and re-authored the limits of what was politically imaginable in Bangladesh.
Overnight, activists of the Bangladesh Chhatra League attacked the protesters who had chanted the slogan, including the women of Rokeya Hall.
The violence that followed—culminating in the killing of Abu Sayed in Rangpur on July 16 and the deaths of many more students in the days thereafter—transformed a movement for quota reform into a nationwide moral crisis.
The slogan had already done its work. It exposed a government that could not out-argue a chant and resorted instead to batons, curfews, and internet shutdowns. Each response converted more people into witnesses of the authoritarianism the slogan had accused it of embodying.
To understand how the midnight march fractured the Awami League's Chetona complex and its administration of political correctness, we must turn to Walter Benjamin's Theses on the Philosophy of History. Benjamin critiqued historicism—the homogeneous, empty conception of time through which ruling elites construct official, teleological histories that justify their dominance.
For decades, the word Razakar—historically denoting collaborators in the atrocities of 1971—had functioned as an ideological death sentence. It became the Awami League's supreme arsenal of interpellation: a mechanism through which the state hailed the citizen, defined identity, and enforced submission through guilt and fear.
A history of collective liberation was transformed into an instrument of everyday subjugation and political excommunication. Anyone who disagreed could be expelled from the national imaginary through the ultimate accusation of betrayal: Razakar.
The midnight march was what Benjamin would describe as a "Now-Time." By tearing down the physical and symbolic barriers of their halls, the students did not merely protest a quota policy; they enacted a messianic interruption.
They retrieved the memory of a collective struggle for dignity and justice and hurled it against the regime's weaponized version of history.
In his essay Critique of Violence, Benjamin distinguishes between "mythic violence," exercised by the state to establish and preserve law through fear and coercion, and "divine violence," which destroys unjust legal and symbolic orders and opens the possibility of redemption.
Hasina's attack—branding dissenting youths as descendants of wartime collaborators—constituted an act of mythic linguistic violence. It sought to achieve what Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida identified as a form of epistemic violence: the structural annihilation of the Other's capacity to speak, appear, or be recognized as a moral subject.
The regime attempted to lock the student body into a permanent condition of guilt and linguistic paralysis.
Yet for the first time, the nation witnessed a revolt against this economy of defensive compliance. Through a semantic leap that mirrors Benjamin's notion of divine interruption, the students repeated the slur back to the autocrat. In doing so, they stripped the word of its weaponized power. They refused to remain passive objects of official definition.
Out of this inversion emerged a new political subject—not merely the "quota reform protester," a narrow economic identity, but a subject constituted through the reclamation of dignity.
The moment the students embraced the label ironically, the state's infrastructure of fear began to collapse. The language of humiliation was transformed into a language of resistance. They became subjects who could no longer be interpellated, governed, or silenced by the established vocabulary of the Chetona industry.
For decades, Razakar functioned in Bangladeshi politics as a transcendental signifier—an apparently fixed point of absolute moral evil used to police the boundaries of legitimate citizenship. Derrida's concept of différance reminds us, however, that meaning is never stable or fully present.
It is perpetually deferred, produced through a network of shifting differences.
The transformation of the slogan relied on what Derrida calls iterability. For a sign to function, it must be capable of repetition across different contexts. Yet every repetition introduces the possibility of displacement, or even reversal of meaning.
When the students repeated the word Razakar, they performed an act of deconstructive defiance. They detached the signifier from its mandated signified and attached it to a new political condition: the contemporary victim of state authoritarianism.
The subtext was clear. If demanding justice and equality makes one a traitor within your vocabulary, then the word traitor no longer possesses moral authority.
Hasina sought to summon the ghosts of 1971 to terrify the living. Instead, the students inherited the revolutionary spirit embedded within that history. They allowed the specters of the past to haunt the present, turning the regime's own ghosts against the Gonobhaban.
The second line of the chant—
“Ke bolechhe? Ke bolechhe? Shoirachar, Shoirachar!”—completed the deconstructive gesture. It destabilized the regime's linguistic authority by redirecting the locus of guilt toward the power attempting to vilify them.
A word uttered by the regime as condemnation was carried over, unchanged in its surface form but transformed in its political function, into a word spoken by the students as indictment.
The signifier remained the same; the direction of accusation reversed. This was not merely clever wordplay. It enacted language's capacity to found or unfound legitimacy. A regime that rules partly through its power to name its enemies loses something fundamental when that act of naming can be inverted by the people it targets.
For fifteen years, Sheikh Hasina and the Awami League structured Bangladesh's political imagination around a binary inherited from 1971: one was either with the "spirit of liberation"—and therefore with the Awami League—or against it. To be against it was, structurally, to be branded a Razakar.
It was through this logic that the regime sustained an authoritarian order, mobilizing state apparatuses on a vast scale to execute egregious human-rights abuses, including thousands of enforced disappearances, extrajudicial killings, arbitrary mass arrests, and the cultivation of willing bureaucratic executioners.
Through cultural programming, textbooks, embedded media narratives, and political rituals, it constructed a culture of fear that reinforced its symbolic monopoly over the nation.
The students shattered that hegemony through a semiotic insurgency. They mobilized the carnivalesque power of collective protest, transforming isolated and fearful individuals into a singular, resonant force.
What emerged was more than a political mobilization; it was a spiritual awakening—a reawakening of the revolutionary imagination that enabled an unarmed population to look beyond bullets, tear gas, and the machinery of state violence.
Two years into the post-uprising era, the linguistic insurgency that occurred on July 14 appears less an isolated anomaly than part of a broader global lineage of resistance, like the Négritude movement of the 1930s and 1940s founded by African and Caribbean intellectuals such as Aimé Césaire, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and Amílcar Cabral.
It belongs to those watershed moments when the oppressed seize the master's whip and transform it into a banner of liberation.
The echoes of July 14, 2024, should continue to serve as a foundational reference point for contemporary civic life in Bangladesh. That night taught the nation an enduring lesson: tyrannies are semantic structures before they become military ones.
They depend upon internal compliance with their dictionaries of fear and their monopolies over historical meaning.
Those young July warriors who stepped into the corridors of history did more than initiate a political transition. They performed a structural reset of the national psyche. They demonstrated that when a society finds the courage to deconstruct tyrannical and abusive vocabularies, it strips the tyrant of the power to rule.
As Bangladesh continues the difficult, fragile, and necessary work of rebuilding institutions and reimagining its future, the lesson of July 14 remains a guiding star: true liberation begins when a people reclaim the authority to define who they are.
—
Mustain Zahir is a writer, Dongfang scholar and development professional. He served as a member of the Constitutional Reform Commission and as Senior Aide to the National Security Adviser