At half past eight on Saturday morning, the eleven-party opposition alliance set out from Shapla Chattar in Motijheel for Laldighi Maidan in Chattogram. The programme was billed as a long march. It carried seven demands, among them relief from the electricity, gas and fertiliser crisis that is now the daily conversation of every farmer, every factory owner and every household in the country. By seven in the evening the convoy had reached Laldighi. Eleven hours, give or take, door to door.
Eleven hours is roughly what the Dhaka-Chattogram highway takes on an ordinary day with ordinary traffic. Nobody marched. They drove.
The phrase "long march" is not a loose one. It was earned. Mao's columns walked some nine thousand kilometres over a year across mountains and rivers and arrived with a fraction of the men who set out. Gandhi walked three hundred and ninety kilometres to Dandi to pick up a handful of salt, and the empire never quite recovered from the gesture. And we have our own. In May 1976 Maulana Bhashani, well past ninety and frail, led the Farakka Long March from Rajshahi toward the border on foot, in the heat, to protest the diversion of the Ganges. People joined him from the villages along the way because they could see him, because he was on the road with them, because the walking itself was the argument. The distance was the message: we are prepared to suffer a little to make you notice that the people are suffering a lot.
Set that image beside Saturday's. Air-conditioned buses and SUVs, windows up, moving in convoy on one side of a highway that the police had thoughtfully kept clear for them while ordinary traffic squeezed past on the other. Five roadside rallies at Narayanganj, Paduar Bazar, Chauddagram, Mahipal and Mirsharai, each a brief address from a stage before the leaders climbed back into their vehicles. Stoppages in Comilla and Noakhali for lunch and prayers. Then onward.
Daily Prothom Alo reported on Saturday the most telling statistic of the whole exercise. Toll collections at the Meghna and Meghna-Gumti bridges put the convoy at roughly six hundred vehicles, and the two bridges together earned about forty thousand taka from the passage. The bridge authority did well. The roadside tea stalls and hotels of Comilla did well. The fertiliser dealer in Noakhali whose godown is empty, and the garment worker in Chattogram whose factory runs three days a week on the generator, did not do measurably better on Sunday morning than they had on Saturday.
None of this is to say the demands are frivolous. They are not. The energy shortage is real, the fertiliser shortage is real and arrives at the worst possible moment before the aman season, and the government will have to answer for both. An opposition that presses those questions is doing its job. The question is whether Saturday's programme pressed anything, or whether it merely transported a grievance from one city to another in comfort.
Do the sums that the organisers apparently did not. Six hundred vehicles, fully loaded, air-conditioning running for the entire journey, most of them four to seven years old by the look of the convoy, over two hundred and fifty kilometres of highway. On any reasonable assumption that is twenty-four to twenty-five thousand litres of diesel and petrol burned in a single direction, and at least forty to fifty metric tons of carbon dioxide put into the air along the route, before anyone has driven home. This, in the name of a people who cannot get fuel for their irrigation pumps. A movement protesting an energy crisis chose, as its instrument, one of the largest single-day acts of fuel consumption the highway has seen this year. Every kilometre of the "march" left its exhaust on the villages it passed through.
And so the honest question: how many lives did this long drive touch? Not how many people stood at the roadside to watch it pass, but how many went home with anything they did not have that morning. A cheaper power bill? A bag of urea? A functioning gas line? Or was the day's real product something else entirely, a set of headlines, a prime-time slot, a day of media attention for the alliance and its leaders?
Look at what the headlines were actually about. The loudest scream to come out of the week was not the fertiliser queue. It was Sifat Abdullah, the twenty-year-old who posted a video abusing the Prime Minister in the vilest language over an electricity bill and was jailed for it. The same opposition that drove to Chattogram spent the preceding days elevating this young man to the company of Nur Hossain and Dr Milon, martyrs who gave their lives for democracy, while somehow never finding room in the roll of honour for Abu Sayeed, the hero of July 2024 who stood with his chest bared to the police and paid for it with his life. A boy's rudeness was dressed as sacrifice. A polluting motorcade was dressed as a march. There is a pattern here, and it is the pattern of a politics that has confused the appearance of struggle for the thing itself.
Consider, too, the people the alliance has not asked. Sifat's own parents and relatives, whatever their politics, are probably embarrassed and ashamed of his gross lack of etiquette. That is the reaction of any Bangladeshi household. To champion such a boy as a hero is not to speak for the ordinary family; it is to insult its values.
Here is the part the alliance's strategists may be slowest to grasp. None of this appeals to the young citizens it is meant to impress. This is the age of limitless information. A twenty-two-year-old in Chattogram can watch the convoy on one screen, pull up the fuel arithmetic on another, and read the police report on Sifat on a third, all before the leaders have finished lunch in Comilla. Gen-Z has grown up on leadership by example. Its ethical standards, its behavioural standards, its sense of what a life is for, are more conscientious than the generation that is trying to recruit it, not less. Long drives do not earn its votes, its support or its empathy. They breed, if anything, a deeper toxicity toward politicians as a class. And that is a shame, because many of the men who sat in those buses on Saturday did once risk their lives to free Bangladesh from the former fascist regime. They have real courage on their record. It is being spent on theatre.
It does not have to be this way. If the alliance wants a long march, let it march. The road from Shapla Chattar to Laldighi is still there, and any leader is free to walk it, without adding a single vehicle to a highway that is already one of the most congested in Asia. If walking the whole distance is too much, walk a stretch of it, and let every district organisation walk its own stretch on the same day, so that the map of Bangladesh is covered on foot rather than in diesel. Or go the other way entirely and take the twenty-first century seriously: a virtual assembly of the leadership on multiple screens, a digital march connecting the alliance directly to the households that are actually suffering, with no logjam, no toll receipt, no exhaust, and every taka saved on fuel put toward something the people can use.
Either would be honest. Saturday was not. It was a long drive, and the country should call it one. The alliance's leaders have a history of struggle worth honouring, and seven demands worth arguing over. They should stop burying both under borrowed words and borrowed heroes, and keep the crusade honest.