Among Bangladeshi netizens, few greetings produce an automatic smile quite like “Shommanito Guys.”
It is a strange marriage of Bengali courtesy and English informality. But when Advocate Kamal Uddin says it, you know something rather more entertaining is coming.
The greeting is usually followed by a monologue of magnificent indignation, liberally seasoned with expletives, directed at Sheikh Hasina and the Awami League grandees who fled Bangladesh after the July Revolution of 2024. Kamal is an Awami Leaguer himself. This is what makes the performance so irresistible.
While the rest of Bangladesh's political establishment has spent two years debating what to do with the Awami League, Kamal has arrived at a simpler solution…keep the party, discard the fugitives. He has even given the enterprise a name. The Bangladesh Non-Fugitive Awami League.
Yes, really.
It is difficult to imagine a more devastating political adjective. Parties normally advertise themselves as democratic, revolutionary, nationalist or progressive. Kamal's distinguishing proposition is that its members are physically present in the country.
In post-Hasina Bangladesh, apparently, that is a manifesto.
When Hasina fled to India on August 5, 2024, following the revolution against her government, many senior Awami League figures disappeared from public view. Some escaped abroad. Others went underground.
The party's grassroots workers, meanwhile, faced arrests, attacks, political exclusion and the consequences of belonging to an organisation whose government had presided over a deadly crackdown on protesters. Kamal understood something that the party's exiled leadership apparently did not. Abandonment makes excellent political material.
His Facebook and TikTok performances became increasingly popular because they articulated a grievance that conventional Awami League loyalists were reluctant to express publicly. Why should the ordinary activist take to the streets while the people issuing instructions remain safely overseas?
Why should a local party worker risk arrest while a former minister enjoys the comforts of exile? And why, after years of pledging eternal loyalty to the party, should its leaders suddenly discover that the most attractive constituency is somewhere beyond Bangladesh's borders?
Kamal delivered these questions without the usual politician's concern for varnished language. And his targets were not Hasina's opponents. They were Hasina and her own circle. That turned him into an unlikely source of amusement for people who would ordinarily have little sympathy for an Awami League politician.
The joke worked because the anger beneath it was recognisable.
It is worth remembering what made that anger possible. The July revolution followed years of authoritarian rule and culminated in a crackdown involving grave human rights violations. The suffering of Awami League workers after Hasina's fall does not erase the victims of her government.
But neither does the conduct of the party's leadership make every abandoned grassroots supporter disappear. Kamal found an audience in that uncomfortable space.
Kamal's credentials are not entirely imaginary. He is a lawyer from Satkania in Chattogram, a former law affairs secretary of the Chattogram South District Jubo League and a former assistant public prosecutor at the Chattogram courts. He also worked as a panel lawyer for International Islamic University Chittagong.
He was expelled from the Jubo League in 2022. In that year, he accused Awami League lawmaker Moslem Uddin Ahmed of involvement in nomination trading worth 30 lakh taka during a local government election.
He made the allegation on Facebook, pursued a case against a Jubo League leader close to the lawmaker and subsequently faced a case himself over his social media remarks.
Kamal, it seems, did not require the July Revolution to discover the pleasures of insulting powerful Awami Leaguers.
In October this year, he announced the formation of the Bangladesh Non-Fugitive Awami League and appointed himself its president. He invited applications for committees across all 64 districts.
The recruitment exercise reportedly involved submitting CVs through WhatsApp, an admirably modern arrangement for a political organisation built around the traditional virtue of not running away.
Filmmaker Mostofa Sarwar Farooki was sufficiently amused to comment on Facebook that even Gabriel García Márquez could scarcely have imagined such a character. One understands the sentiment.
Then came Saturday, November 14.
At around 1.30 am, residents surrounded Kamal's rented accommodation in the CDA Tech area of Karnaphuli, Chattogram.
Some of those gathered identified themselves as BNP activists and alleged suspicious activities at the property. Police arrived and took Kamal into custody. Video footage circulated showing him emerging from the building and accompanying officers downstairs.
Karnaphuli Police Station officer-in-charge Nur Ahmed initially said Kamal had been taken into protective custody to prevent a possible mob attack. He said no complaint had yet been filed against him and police would investigate allegations raised by residents.
By late afternoon, however, the account had changed. Kamal had been formally shown arrested in connection with existing cases and sent to court. The irony is almost too generous.
The man who built his political identity around remaining in Bangladesh had found himself surrounded at home, escorted away by police and facing the very sort of legal predicament from which his former party bosses had escaped.
Kamal was later released and the netizens expressed their satisfaction.
Well, Kamal Uddin is not a reformer merely because he insults Hasina. Nor does refusing to flee absolve anyone of responsibility for past wrongdoing. Still, he has managed something remarkable…becoming an Awami Leaguer whom many of the party's staunch opponents find amusing rather than threatening.
And for a political organisation associated with the repression of dissent, that is quite a transformation.
So, in many places in Bangladesh, mobile phones will probably light up with another video tonight. A familiar face will appear. A voice will announce, with the solemnity of a statesman addressing the United Nations: “Shommanito Guys.”
And a considerable portion of the country will smile before he has said another word.
Because whatever else may be said about Advocate Kamal Uddin, he has discovered the one political distinction that the Awami League's exiled leadership cannot easily claim.
He stayed.
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Faisal Mahmud is the Managing Editor of Daily Waadaa