28 July 2024: Scripted statement, rejection and the walls that answered
As a coerced video tried to declare victory, Dhaka's morgues — and its walls — told an entirely different story
The statement came as a short video. It was meant to be the end of the movement. Six of the key coordinators were seated at a table, Nahid Islam reading from a page he had plainly not written, in a voice gone flat.
"Our main demand was ttbhe logical reform of the quota system. It has already been fulfilled by the government. Now, I strongly demand that the government open educational institutions quickly to ensure a fair environment for education. In the interest of the whole, we are withdrawing all our programmes from this moment."
Watched once, it played as a surrender. Watched again, the words fell away and only the faces remained — drawn, rigid, unmistakably under duress. Whatever this was, it did not look like a choice freely made.
To much of the country, it read as a mockery of the hundreds already killed, a demand no one could accept.
Keep updated, follow The Business Standard's Google news channel
The country did not accept it.
The coordinators had been gathered for this, one by one, and always, the police said, for their own "security".
Nahid Islam, Asif Mahmud and Abu Baker Majumder had been carried out of their hospital beds at Gonoshasthaya two days earlier. Sarjis Alam and Hasnat Abdullah were taken on Saturday evening. At dawn on Sunday, 28 July, Nusrat Tabassum's family said that men broke the gate of her Mirpur flat and took her too. By that evening, the Detective Branch held all six coordinators of the Students Against Discrimination movement.
By morning, students on campus after campus had said the same. The statement built to end the uprising had become the reason it could not stop.
That same night, DB's additional commissioner, the infamous Harun-or-Rashid, released a photograph of the coordinators seated around a table laid with food. The message was that these were guests, not captives — that they had been fed, not held. Families who went to the DB office to see them were turned away at the door. And the country was furious.
"We were, are, and will remain steadfast in our demands."
The rejection at midnight
The rebuttal came from Abdul Kader, a coordinator still outside the net. Past midnight, he issued a statement in the name of the remaining organisers. The withdrawal, he said, was a scripted statement wrung from hostages at gunpoint, an insult to the hundreds killed by police fire and Chhatra League attacks. "We were, are, and will remain steadfast in our demands," it read.
He called the whole thing a new naatok (drama). After days of killing and mass arrests, he said, the government had abducted the coordinators, held them in the DB office, and put a script in their mouths. It had threatened the families of the dead, dragged them to Dhaka under armed escort, and taken false testimony to shift the blame onto the protesters. It had, he wrote, made a mockery of the blood of the martyrs.
Then he declared that until the demands were met, the movement would go on. Through the same statement, the Students Against Discrimination called students and citizens onto the streets across the country on Monday. Before dawn, general students at public and private universities had echoed it, one campus after another, vowing to stay out until their nine-point demand was met.
The walls answered first
Even before the video aired, the day's programme had been quieter and harder to prevent: graffiti and wall-writing, in the streets and online. In the capital, students met the police at the walls themselves.
At BUET, cartoonists and Fine Arts students had barely begun before officers moved in and seized their brushes and paint. The work went on anyway at Chittagong University, at Shahjalal University in Sylhet, at East West University, and on walls across the city. Soon, every other wall of the city began bearing the graffiti of deviance.
The slogans were the day's real statement: "Why is golden Bengal a graveyard today?"; "Why did you kill my brothers?"; "On one side they stage a drama, on the other they disappear people" — painted hours before the drama in the DB office aired.
In Sylhet, students drew Abu Sayeed, arms flung open, chest bared to the guns.
On a wall not far from our office, someone had written the name of little Riya Gope, shot dead on a rooftop.
That afternoon, teachers and students at Jahangirnagar University rallied for the release of their own detained coordinator, Arif Sohel. By 11 at night, students from nearly every university and many Dhaka colleges had announced they would be back on the streets in the morning.
Mobile internet, cut for 10 days, was restored on this day, but Facebook, WhatsApp and TikTok stayed blocked.
The state's own count
Against the video, the numbers told a different story. By Sunday, the nationwide arrest tally had crossed 10,000 as per the police's own figure, with 2,764 of them in the capital across 229 cases, 22 of the cases filed that day alone. At the Secretariat, Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan put the death toll at 147.
The morgues suggested who the dead were. Three Dhaka hospitals had logged 109 bodies; of the names recorded, most were not students at all. They were rickshaw pullers, hawkers, shop workers, caretakers, and a few of them were children. They were people who had been in the street on the wrong afternoon. That same day, the prime minister visited the injured at the police hospital and at BSMMU, and handed financial assistance to the families of 34 of the dead.
The statement from the DB office had been built to close the uprising in a single evening. Instead, it did the opposite. By the time the next morning came, the question was no longer whether the students would stop. It was when the government would finally read the writings on the walls.
Shadique Mahbub Islam is a journalist.
