A 'meticulous design' is something to be proud of...

At the Clinton Global Initiative's annual meeting in September 2024, Dr Muhammad Yunus told an American audience that the July uprising had been meticulously designed and identified his aide Mahfuj Alam as the person who planned it.

The fallen government's propaganda machine responded immediately. It took the word design and translated it into conspiracy, on the assumption that a plan is by definition a crime.

Leave aside whether Mahfuj was the planner, or whether the process was as coordinated as Yunus suggested. Grant the strongest version of the accusation and consider what follows.

Suppose the uprising was planned from the outset, every phase deliberate. Where, in that supposition, is the crime?

Design, in Yunus's sense, does not mean anyone arranged for protesters to be killed so the deaths could be blamed on Hasina. It means something more ordinary: a movement kept deliberately leaderless, so the intelligence services could not find a command structure that formally did not exist.

It also means careful sequencing. An open demand for the government's fall on the first day would almost certainly have been crushed and dismissed as an attempted coup.

The movement therefore began with the quota. After Abu Sayed was shot dead as he stood before the police, arms outstretched, and after Farhan Faiyaaz and many others were killed, it escalated to nine demands and finally to one. This is not a conspiracy. It is what any serious movement must do under a state that fires on its own citizens. It has a name: strategy.

The propagandists then advance another claim: if the real objective was always to remove the government, the movement must have been dishonest about the quota all along.

The quota was never the substantive issue, and should never have been treated as one. Nobody was willing to be shot over a recruitment percentage, least of all the rickshaw-puller, the day labourer, the cultivator's son or the madrasa student who did most of the dying.

An uprising years in the making 

For years the regime allowed people to protest safe things—the price of rice, failures of the power supply, the ordinary injustices of daily life—because such grievances drew energy away from the one demand it could not permit: that it should go. The quota belonged to the same category of tolerated complaint.

It was small enough to be raised aloud, which is why it could stand in for the grievance that could not be raised at all. That grievance was hardly obscure. People had no vote, could be disappeared at will, and watched the cost of living climb as their rights receded.

Set against the loss of the ballot and physical safety, a job quota was beside the point. People did not fill the streets over an administrative ratio; they filled them once it became clear that the real question was whether the state would allow them to choose a government, or even to stay alive.

This is the point the design debate is meant to obscure. Hasina's culpability does not begin in July 2024.

It began on February 25, 2009, at Pilkhana, only weeks into her second term, when scores of army officers were killed inside the headquarters of the border force. A state commission has since concluded that the killings were planned rather than the product of a spontaneous mutiny, and that it is examining evidence of foreign involvement.

The implication is substantial. If one of a government's first major acts in office is a massacre that eliminates much of the army's officer corps, and that massacre served a foreign interest, its legitimacy was in doubt from the outset.

No political system tolerates a foreign agent directing its affairs. The United States spent years preoccupied with whether Donald Trump's 2016 campaign had been in contact with Russia, and India would not permit a party to govern at the direction of Pakistan's ISI.

If that is right, the accusation is exactly backwards. A design assembled to remove such a government is not something one confesses to; it is something one takes credit for.

If I have any criticism of Mahfuj, Yunus, or the BNP, Jamaat and the students, it is the opposite of the one now being made. The fault was not that they planned, but that they planned so late.

The design, such as it was, took sixteen years to assemble. The natural moment had come and gone in February 2009, when the officer corps was destroyed and the government forfeited its legitimacy almost as soon as it took office. 

To their credit, the middle class eventually came out into the street. The more honest complaint is that it did not come out sixteen years earlier.

The regime of terror 

Recall what the regime actually was. Its principal crimes were not committed in July, nor did they concern commodity prices.

They included the dismantling of the caretaker system that once guaranteed credible elections, the Shahbag mobilisation and the mobs it licensed, the manufactured hostility that pushed the pious majority to the margins, the killings at Shapla, and tribunals that executed opposition leaders on evidence that often pointed back at the state itself.

Most significantly, the regime made enforced disappearances a routine. Individual politicians had been abducted and killed before her, but Hasina institutionalised secret detention as a function of the state, a practice associated with Latin America and the former Soviet bloc, not Bangladesh.

There was also a particular cruelty to it. The families of the July dead were summoned to the prime minister's residence and given cash while she posed beside them. For years, the families of the disappeared had been made to do the same, their children placed on her lap for photographs.

Public tolerance had shifted dramatically. At Kansat in 2006, a handful of deaths in a protest over electricity was enough to destabilise the government of the day.

Under Hasina, a comparable toll was scarcely treated as news. A single officer—the Teknaf inspector associated with more than two hundred "crossfire" killings—suggests the scale, once one accounts for the officers whose names never became public.

The propaganda did not end when Hasina left the country; it merely changed form. A young man shot dead while distributing water to protesters, whose family survives and whose friend saw the police open fire, is now said to have been killed by the opposition he supported.

The claim that thousands of police were killed circulates freely, although a serving officer cannot simply vanish and the state keeps records of its own personnel. These are less arguments than noise, meant to complicate a record that is not especially complicated.

The strongest response, however, comes from the accusers' own history. The Agartala case of 1968 was initially dismissed as a fabrication, a frame-up of Sheikh Mujib by the Pakistani state.

Decades later, one of the accused, a man the Awami League had elevated to deputy speaker, later confirmed that the plot had been real. Its participants had organised, sought assistance across the border, and planned to separate the eastern wing from Pakistan.

The relevant question, then, is whether 1971 was itself a meticulous design. Its architects would answer yes, and with pride, presenting the planning that began in the 1960s, in the name of a Pakistan they held to be unjust, as what makes them founders rather than conspirators.

The logic is difficult to escape. If a deliberate plan to bring down a state they considered unjust was legitimate in 1971, the same kind of plan cannot be illegitimate in 2024, unless the operative principle is simply that only one political lineage is entitled to make history.

The same holds for the charge in its strongest form. If a meticulous design makes its planners responsible for every death that follows, then the so-called 3 million deaths of 1971 belong on Mujib's account long before any are entered against Mahfuj's.

Until Mujib's heirs are willing to enter those deaths in his own ledger, they are in no position to hold July's planners to a standard they will not apply to their own founding. Until then, I do not see how July can be judged anything other than justified.

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Md Ashraf Aziz Ishrak Fahim is academically trained across Thailand, England, and Qatar, bringing together political, philosophical, and theological perspectives. He writes on the intersection of politics, society, gender, religion, and culture in Bangladesh and beyond