Sharif Osman bin Hadi a courageous young poet, activist and educator was fatally shot in the head, riding a rickshaw after Friday Prayers on the twelfth of this twelfth month. He was rushed to hospital with severe brain injuries and passed into the next life on the evening of Thursday in Singapore. He was buried in Dhaka alongside Nazrul Islam whose poetry he loved and whose 1921 Bidrohi ( The Rebel) he performed with a becoming that is really something internally transforming to behold. His funeral prayers also were, with an estimated 1 to 1.5 million moved to attend physically and pray for his onward journey. Many wiser heads than I have concurred that he was the real deal, he bore witness to so many truths that so many tyrants in so many placed worked so hard to bury. Hearts of Green Birds inshAllah
Condolences to those close with him and duas for your ongoing flourishing, uprightness, good guidance and protection through everything.
Overcoming the Firaunic Function
The 2024 Bangladesh Rising that ousted the tyrannical Awami League regime, made space for political thought and organising that had been suffocated for a long time. Suffocated by a public-private Firaunic infrastructure that included the state security, higher education, media and cultural institutional participants.
In this Opening, Hadi, as he was publicly and affectionately known, had focused his energies on co-developing the Inquilab Moncho, promoting learning of the political and social realities of Bangladesh and a path of Insaaf (Justice). Perhaps just in my imagination, the project resembles Hosseiniyeh Ershad, established in the 60s Tehran, where Ali Shariati gave epic lectures, an institutional space I have long longed for in Bangladesh. Hadi had recently put his hat in the ring for electoral constituency of Dhaka-8 as an independent candidate and was building momentum in his campaign, there is an outpouring of love and support for the July leaders generally, but this one especially. He was interviewed by the English language Centrist Nation a week before his assassination. You will find many of his discussions and contributions over the years online on a range of subjects, not *just* the topic of Indian Hegemony over Bangladesh.
Who did it?
The Bangladesh sociopolitical scene is well populated by foolish blunderers, liars and psychopaths. I do not mean any of these categories to be mutually exclusive. For now, many of the more empowered psychopaths are off the pitch yet still have an outsized influence over events, whether by remote control or institutionalised psychopath reproduction. Hadi, along with other leaders of the Movement were constantly under threat and abuse, knew they were on hit lists and had expressed this to authorities. The Yunus leadership has failed miserably on security, with a fresh resignation from the home affairs brief coming in at the time of writing. It was probably designed to.
The fingers on this assassin's trigger are currently believed to have been the Awami League linked IT entrepreneur Faisal Karim Masud, his parents have been arrested following confessions of helping their son dispose of the weapon and evade capture. It would not be unreasonable to extrapolate that there are many bands of cultists trained and ready to make good on their party's threats to disrupt proceedings and Ousted Hasina's explicit commands to 'talk less' and 'do more'.
The question of participation, signalling and support from elements of different states and the Hasinic fugitive regime harboured in New Delhi remains contested, occluded territory, occluded more by the electoral fog and a media ecosystem primarily motivated by fear and favour.
Why?
Motivations suggested have included creating chaos, provoking backlash and preventing elections slated for February. Perhaps its a warm up for the Awami League's latest delusional comeback tour. The subsequent events, feelings and counter-provocations are all quite manipulable, disgusting and in their playbook. I can't think of a worse security situation for a country like Bangladesh, for so many of its senior security officials to have run off to its large hegemonic neighbor with epic amounts of surveillance data and spycraft. However, if we are to be honest about the India Doctrine, the point is moot.
There is a political, intellectual and emotional resonance, for me at least, to the assassination of Aftab Ahmad, Professor of Political Science at Dhaka University, in the run up to the 11/01/2007 military coup that ushered Bangladesh into the recently concluded Awami Fascibadi period. He had a discourse on the concept of the Bengal Subaltern that is very pertinent to the assassination of Osman Hadi.
In my reading so far, the work of Inquilab Moncho, threaded a rare Bangladesh-First, religion-inclusive, grassroots and justice-orientated approach to the issues Bangladesh has on its plate. Hadi had traction, an unsullied adorability and longer term vision. In this assassination operation we see a classic "kill them before they grow" tactic used by powers and their apprentices who have controlled the people of the region for centuries and centuries.
If this is the case, then the trick would be to keep growing into that Krishnachura Period of Justice, Creativity and Prosperity. The futures of Climate Guantanamo and Bracottabad are humiliating non answers to the challenge that the powers and their apprentices would be quite happy doing business with.
What now?
With the progress of the work of the Commission of Inquiry of Enforced Disappearances and the somewhat reformed International Crimes Tribunal, the Interim Government has moved some way towards establishing the beginnings of Justice, under difficult conditions. We now have firmer knowledge of the architecture of state enforced disappearances and maturing cases of serious crimes of regime leaders. These initiatives and their successors must do much much better at improving the ideas, personnel and institutional arrangements at play within them. How do we build healing and reparation without contrition, and can we invite contrition?
With less that 2 months to go until scheduled elections, a compelling, practical and well telegraphed Justice Agenda would do the world of good.
The traditional yellow media of Bangladesh has already made the Assassination Situation all about itself, its eternal right to bat for the Ousted regime and its Indian Sponsor with impunity and its exclusive access to the megaphone. It will behave according to its colonial nature, incentives and assets around the world. Much to improve on and lampoon there.
What this underlines is the great gap, between the kitsch-compromised farts of Dhaka's donor-driver, gate-keeping, war-on-terror-rentier , green-zone-whispering, uncivil-civil-society, and the Post July 2024 hunger for something better. Yet what we have all recently witnessed, so awfully, about the path to Insaaf is the lesson here. A beautiful thing about the story of Hadi, is the existence and futuristic tradition of people like him, that despite the waves of prejudice, cruelty and sadism that he witnessed at Dhaka University, at Shapla Chottor and all through the Long month of July we, sorry they, have the ingredients to refine and transform the situation, and this present transformation has legs.
