The July Uprising, the middle class and the 'far-right Dilemma'
The July movement succeeded where several earlier movements had failed. During the long years of Awami League rule, protests had erupted again and again, often with courage, often at great cost.
Many were met with force. Some extracted promises. A few appeared, briefly, to have won concessions. But none could bring the government to the point of collapse.
July was different.
The difference, I think, lay in two conditions that had not fully existed before. The first was that the Awami League had emptied politics of negotiation. By the end, there was no reliable connection between what the party said and what the state did. Agreements could be made, but they could not be trusted.
A movement could force a concession, send people home and still find, weeks or months later, that the settlement had been undone through the courts, the bureaucracy or some other arm of the state.
The 2018 quota movement had already shown the pattern. Students mobilized, the government retreated, and a settlement seemed to have been reached. But the issue returned through institutional channels, and many of those associated with the movement later faced pressure and harassment.
The lesson was clear: under that system, even victory could be temporary.
This was not merely a problem of bad faith. It reflected a deeper breakdown of power. Power and force are often treated as the same thing, but in politics they are different. Power rests on the ability to secure consent and reach durable arrangements without constant coercion.
Force becomes most visible when power has begun to fail.
By the time the Awami League formally left office in August 2024, much of its authority had already collapsed. After the 2024 election, widely dismissed by critics as a managed contest, and amid an economy strained by jobless growth and depleted reserves, almost any major protest carried the possibility of becoming an endgame.
The government had turned every dispute into a question of survival. In doing so, it helped design the conditions of its own fall.
The second condition was the unusually broad social composition of the July movement. People from different classes, professions, campuses and ideological traditions stood in the same political space.
They did not arrive there with identical beliefs. They brought their own histories, anxieties and limits. But they shared enough language to remain, for a time, on the same platform.
That language did not appear by accident. Ordinary people gave the movement its force through physical presence and risk. But intellectual work also mattered. Someone had to translate scattered anger into a common argument. Someone had to make it possible for people who distrusted one another to stand together.
Someone had to answer the regime’s habit of branding dissenters as “Razakars” or “terrorists,” labels that had long been used to isolate opponents and make repression easier to justify.
The response was not owned by any one group. Many people contributed in different ways. To assign sole credit to one faction would distort the nature of the movement. July was not the work of a single ideological camp. It was an intersection.
That trust, however, began to fray after the uprising. The failure to respond adequately to attacks on Sufi shrines, the release or rehabilitation of figures widely associated with militant politics, and the growing proximity between sections of the July leadership and a party viewed by many as hostile to women and secular cultural life all had consequences.
These decisions did not merely trouble distant critics. They alienated people who had helped shape the movement’s language and many who had stood in its front lines: women, students from public and private universities, artists, professionals and secular citizens who had taken real risks.
Some now argue that July never needed secular support, that far-right religious groups alone could have carried the uprising. But the events immediately after July suggest otherwise.
During the 2024 floods, many Bangladeshis still trusted the young faces of the movement. They followed their calls and joined relief efforts under their coordination. That trust was a form of political capital.
It weakened when those same leaders appeared to settle too comfortably with the far right. Later mobilizations no longer drew the same spontaneous energy. Whether in Gopalganj, at Road 32, or in campaigns against Prothom Alo and The Daily Star, the same leadership often had to assemble support through organized logistics rather than public confidence.
Something had changed.
To understand why, one has to understand the place of Bangladesh’s secular cultural class. Its history is complicated. Like secular circles in parts of Egypt, Syria and Turkey, it has sometimes carried a strain of authoritarian liberalism, shaped by long conflict with religious politics. That history should not be romanticized.
After 2013, parts of this class moved into a kind of political moralism that helped the Awami League domesticate secular fear for its own purposes.
But that is not the whole story. Bangladesh’s secular literary and cultural tradition is also marked by a deep wound: the killing of intellectuals in 1971. That memory did not disappear with independence. It entered poems, novels, essays and family histories.
It shaped how generations read Munier Chowdhury, Anwar Pasha, Shahidullah Kaiser, Govinda Chandra Dev, Shamsur Rahman, Syed Shamsul Haq, Selina Hossain, Humayun Azad and even Humayun Ahmed.
In Shahidul Zahir’s Life and Political Reality, the return of the rehabilitated collaborator becomes almost unbearable precisely because history has not been resolved.
For many readers, this is more than just an abstract debate. The people killed in 1971 were writers, teachers and thinkers through whom later generations learned to read, argue and imagine the country.
To ask this cultural class to forget that history, or to normalize the political forces associated with it, is to misunderstand the emotional structure of Bangladesh’s public life.
This is where the role of the secular middle class in July has to be discussed carefully. To say that its participation mattered is not to praise the middle class. It is a descriptive claim, not a moral endorsement.
If someone disagrees, the response should be factual: show that secular liberals were not meaningfully present in July, or that earlier movements had the same level of middle-class participation and still failed.
The distinction matters. A descriptive statement explains what is. A normative statement argues what ought to be. Much of our political conversation collapses because we confuse the two.
If I say middle-class legitimacy is often necessary for a movement to succeed, I am not saying this is good. I am saying this is how class-divided societies often work.
Karl Mannheim described the middle class as a stabilizing force, positioned between elites and the poor. It warns elites not to exploit so much that the system breaks, and warns the poor not to revolt so intensely that the system collapses. There is also the matter of social recognition.
From the French Revolution to the Russian Revolution to Bangladesh’s Liberation War, the blood has often been shed by ordinary and marginalized people. But sacrifice becomes a recognized national movement only when it is translated through the cultural capital of the literate classes.
This dependence is itself a problem. When one class gains the power to legitimize politics, the whole field of emancipation becomes vulnerable. Control that class—through fear, incentives or ideology—and you can narrow the political imagination of the entire society.
That is what happened in 2014. The Awami League should have faced its decisive crisis then, when it dismantled the caretaker government system and pushed the country into a prolonged conflict over electoral legitimacy.
The BNP was on the streets. Its activists were attacked and arrested. Yet a large part of the secular liberal establishment accepted the bargain that voting rights could be sacrificed to stop “Razakars” or “terrorists.”
Fear produced paralysis. It allowed many in urban civil society to see the government’s abuses and look away. The result was costly. The regime lasted longer. The eventual struggle to remove it became bloodier.
Middle-class politics has another limitation. It is often too focused on its own class interests to grasp social crises in full. The 2018 quota movement showed this clearly. Once quotas for first- and second-class government jobs were abolished, the movement largely ended.
It did not seriously address the larger quota structure in third- and fourth-class jobs, where the issue was more extensive. Nor did it develop a careful reform proposal that protected the interests of women, indigenous communities and other disadvantaged groups.
If Bangladesh is to move beyond this narrow form of legitimacy, two tasks are necessaryThe first is to build a critical consciousness within the middle class itself, so that it can recognize how spectacular violence grows out of ordinary structures.
The killings of 2024 did not emerge from nowhere. Their conditions were being prepared years earlier, when institutions were weakened, elections hollowed out and settlements made meaningless.
The second task is to strengthen political culture outside middle-class institutions. Organic intellectuals from working-class and subaltern communities must be able to articulate their own grievances in their own cultural languages. This is one of the most important cultural tasks of the present.
Right-wing critics may agree with part of this argument. But Gramsci’s idea of organic intellectuals cannot be reduced to a slogan. He also wrote carefully about the difference between “common sense” and “good sense.”
Organic politics can be emancipatory, but it can also be regressive. The question is not only who speaks from below, but what kind of politics that speech makes possible.
Across the world, neoliberal capitalism has weakened the economic basis of liberal politics. In many places, middle-class cultural institutions have either collapsed under right-wing pressure or been absorbed into new right-wing arrangements.
West Bengal, which once imagined itself as a province of progressive thought, now shows how quickly cultural confidence can turn into defensive majoritarian politics.
Bangladesh has faced similar pressures, but its far right has not captured the middle-class cultural establishment in the same way. There are reasons for this. Jamaat remains tied, in the memory of many Bangladeshis, to the history of the Liberation War and the killing of intellectuals.
Its broader political ecosystem also maintains a difficult relationship with women’s rights, literature, art and cultural institutions. Even before winning power, sections of that camp speak of limiting women’s work and reshaping civil life in ways that alarm the very groups whose legitimacy they seek.
This is why Jamaat has not been normalized in Bangladesh as fully as the BJP has been normalized in India. The memory of the Liberation War, combined with the rigidity of the far right itself, has created a distance that cannot be erased by tactical alliances.
That distance explains why those who align with far-right groups often end up attacking the cultural class. They want its legitimacy but resent its refusal. They deny a basic social fact: in a modern bourgeois state, no broad social movement can easily advance by alienating the educated middle class.
Before 2024, the BNP often made this mistake. It hoped to sustain a democratic movement while remaining tied to Jamaat. Some of its associated activists dismissed the Liberation War as a “scam” or entertained fantasies that foreign sanctions alone would bring down the Awami League.
Instead of building value-based politics that could engage the middle class, they outsourced political imagination to diplomatic pressure and online rumor.
Those who criticized that approach were attacked then. Similar attacks now come from parts of the new coalition around Jamaat. The pattern is familiar. In defending a privileged political position, they refuse to confront basic historical and social facts. The messenger becomes the target.
As a believer of democracy, I do not believe religion-based politics should simply be banned. Religious parties exist in many democracies. They participate with the advantages and disadvantages of their conservative platforms. Democracy requires that risk.
But Jamaat carries a burden beyond conservatism. Its historical association with the crimes of 1971 and the positions of groups within its wider orbit will continue to shape how Bangladesh’s civil society responds to it. Whether Jamaat wins elections or not, that tension will remain.
No state in a bourgeois society can govern easily without civil society. No political project can wish away the cultural history of the country it seeks to lead. Descriptive and normative claims will always overlap in politics.
But the more a political position is grounded in historical evidence, social reality and coherent reasoning, the less likely it is to collapse whenever alliances shift.
That is the difference between politics rooted in reality and politics driven by convenience.
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Mikail Hossain is a writer and analyst