Beneath the banner: The fiction of a July revolution

By Jahanara Nuri

1.

In July 2024, the streets of metropolitan city Dhaka and several other cities in Bangladesh erupted in student-led protests under the seemingly innocuous banner of “quota reform.” Placards fluttered. Chants soared. Social media brimmed with hashtags about fairness, meritocracy, and equity. It appeared to be another chapter in Bangladesh’s long tradition of youth-led democratic activism.

But peel back the slogans, and something murkier emerges. Within one year, you could see the July protests led Bangladesh into a political quagmire—one where the lines between activism and terrorism blurred beyond recognition.

What if, as Slavoj ŽïŽek might argue, this was not a demand for emancipation but what he terms a “pseudo-emancipatory demand”—where the visible cause conceals a darker objective: the destabilisation of the existing order?

Yunus’ performative statesmanship and the politics of diplomacy

This investigative feature delves into the anatomy of the July quota protests, exploring how a student movement morphed into what some scholars and analysts believe was a politically orchestrated attempt at institutional subversion.

Now the key question is, was it a revolution or a rehearsal?

2.

Reportedly, the theatre of the July protests was named “meticulous design” by Muhammad Yunus. The narrative began predictably: a group of people appearing as students had some students at the forefront, demanding a first ‘elimination’ and then reformation of the quota system in government jobs. At face value, this resonated with a meritocratic impulse. The movement gained swift momentum, capturing headlines and online platforms and among the Western media and bureaucrats alike, who were expecting it to happen.

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Meticulous design: Mahfuj Alam reveals July conspiracy, defends mobs

Fact-check: How Yunus lies about his complicity in July Conspiracy

BNP’s mob attacks reach peak after Yunus-Tarique meeting

Yunus is weaponising ACC to harass NBR officials, suppress movement

Patiya police chief transferred after threat of bloodshed by Yunus’ mob gang

Fact-check: Adviser Mahfuj Alam was member of Chhatra Shibir

But while the surface story was emotionally compelling, the underlying script was charged by the extreme political ideology of the Islamists and a small part of the left.

“It wasn’t a quota reform movement,” argues a Dhaka University professor of sociology who requested anonymity. “It was a masked rehearsal for regime change.”

Visuals of students occupying administrative buildings, disrupting classes and exams, and blocking and destroying most important government offices and all police stations and major transport arteries created a spectacle not unlike what Antonio Gramsci described as a “passive revolution”, a movement led not by a disenfranchised majority but a frustrated segment of the educated middle class seeking to recalibrate the power structure in its favour. The secularly educated part is one percent, while the rest were from Islamic ideology propagandist schools, colleges, and departments of the universities.

3.

Who were the leaders behind the rallies?

Investigative scrutiny reveals that 138 of the movement’s front-line figures had prior affiliations with radical right-wing political factions, particularly Jamaat-e-Islami’s student front, Shibir. Some had connections with Hizb ut-Tahrir’s student wings; others had publicly supported the Islami Constitution Movement, Jama’atul Mujahideen Bangladesh (a radical Jihadi group), and the more obscure Jama’atul Ansar Fil Hindal Sharqiya—a group organised to promote jihad against India. Several leaders were also known sympathisers or active supporters of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) and opportunistic individuals with personal political ambitions.

This complex network of actors and their actions revealed the protests as a “colour revolution,” a manufactured uprising designed not for reform but for systemic destabilisation. As one political observer noted, “It was organised by rogue elements from rogue groups and extreme elements of Islamic empire dreamers to destroy, to create, and to maintain the political vacuum expected by the neo-liberal system change operatives.”

“What we witness here is Jacques Lacan’s ‘Master’s Discourse’ in motion. This discourse, according to Lacan, is characterised by the dominance of a master signifier (S1) that imposes meaning on a subject (S2), often leading to a sense of alienation and the production of a surplus (object a). In essence, it is a power dynamic where one individual or group exerts control or influence through a dominant idea or principle, shaping the understanding and actions of others to achieve their unspoken agenda. In July, the protest leaders projected the image of victimhood and reform, but their real fantasy was to become the new masters.

Their slogans shifted subtly but significantly over time: from calls for “quota reform” to chants of “nine-point demands” and finally “one-point demand” for government change. What began as a plea for policy review rapidly escalated into a campaign for political upheaval.

4.

French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of “symbolic violence” offers another lens. The protests, while disguised in democratic garb, effectively served as a form of ideological and political coercion against the state. Despite the ideological mask, the performance of July Movement actors faltered—haunted by affiliations to dogmas too familiar to the generations they now aimed to erase—and eventually revealed their true face.

It was a spectacle that turned a democratic state’s institutions into villains and privileged urban elites and non-democratic rogue groups into martyrs. An experience of someone slapping their face is considered an act of revenge, decapitation of a whole family. In Comilla, two children and a mother were killed two days ago. The day before the killing, they sent a notice to their girl, who lives in a city.

Rather than amplifying the voices of the truly marginalised, the protest was dominated by urban, educated, predominantly male students who were mostly already among the better-off sections of society, and many among them have been guiding the movement and major actions from foreign lands. In the framing of prominent French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, this was an instance of a social class reproducing its own dominance, strategically co-opting the language of justice and democracy while ultimately advancing the ideological interests of extreme right-wing and neoliberal politics.

Economist Dr. Amartya Sen’s capability approach insists that equality is not merely about formal sameness but about compensating for structural disadvantages. From this lens, the quota system of the Bangladesh Government was not an injustice but a correction mechanism. To oppose it without offering alternative mechanisms of inclusion is to embrace a form of privilege masked as meritocracy.

5.

This coordinated act of sabotage carried unmistakable foreign fingerprints and mirrored the symbolic theatrics often seen in the West-supported regime-change experiments.

Some observers have pointed out the eerie resemblance between the events of July and Western avant-garde performances, particularly Marina Abramović’s infamous “Rhythm 0” experiment, where she invited the audience to use any object on her body without thought of any consequences.

What we’re seeing in Bangladesh on the ground is Rhythm 0, politically being applied. When the world is watching how far the Bangladeshi political sphere’s body politic can be pushed before it breaks.

Muhammad Yunus’s name has been surfacing in critics’ minds repeatedly, not just as a Nobel laureate who was under legal scrutiny of the previous government, but as a symbolic figure in this neoliberal experiment. According to critics, Yunus became the proxy around which Western narratives of democratic collapse and authoritarianism were sculpted, despite domestic due process ,and its good results were still ongoing.

6.

Who can compare apples and coup attempts? It seems the non-state actors of the July conspiracy in Bangladesh. Many supporters of the anarchy that occurred in that month likened it to the 1990s anti-Ershad movement in Bangladesh. But the comparison crumbles under scrutiny.

Ershad was a military dictator who cancelled elections and imprisoned dissenters. The political dispensation before August 5th, 2024, however flawed, held elections and preserved most of the civic space.

7.

Therefore, July can be termed a proxy war in student uniforms against a legitimate democratic government, which began as a call for reform and ended as an act of subversion. The July quota protests weren’t just about jobs. It was clearly acknowledged by the leaders themselves. They were a proxy war, waged by a frustrated elite group using student bodies as foot soldiers and social media as a place to fool their own nation.

The damage was real: institutions vandalised, education disrupted, and a dangerous precedent set with mob violence escalating across the country.

If we continue to romanticise every outburst of unrest as a revolution, we risk missing the quiet coups that slip in under the radar, covered in cries for justice.

As Gramsci warned: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old are dying and the new cannot be born.” July 2024 might just have been that interregnum—a dangerous limbo masquerading as ‘Bangladesh 2.0’ or ‘Freedom 2.0’ by the interim government led by Muhammad Yunus.

Ultimately, the responsibility for the unrest and mass destruction cannot be divorced from the actions of a government and the people it employed, who, at best, enabled and, at worst, orchestrated the chaos that’s been ongoing. In time, history—and the people—will demand answers, not only for what was done in July but for what it attempted to disguise as revolution.

References:

• Slavoj ŽïŽek, “The Sublime Object of Ideology”

• Pierre Bourdieu, “Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste”

• Antonio Gramsci, “Prison Notebooks”

• Jacques Lacan, “The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis”

• Amartya Sen, “Development as Freedom”

• Marina Abramović, “Rhythm 0” (1974 Performance Art)

• Interviews with academics, journalists, and political analysts in Dhaka (2024-2025)

Jahanara Nuri: Journalist and Writer; can be reached at rfrnet01@gmail.com.