The young man who walked into the television studio that day didn’t look like someone who had helped bring down a government.
Osman Hadi was 30, slim, with the calm demeanor of the university lecturer he was. He spoke softly. He smiled easily. Nothing about him suggested danger.
But the regime that had just fallen—the one that had ruled Bangladesh for fifteen years, that had killed over a thousand protesters in a single summer, that had made people disappear into secret torture cells—that regime had considered him one of the most dangerous men in the country.
Not because he commanded an army. Not because he had money or weapons. But because he had something more threatening to tyrants: he told the truth, and people listened.
The host introduced him as “the most courageous and outspoken young politician of our time.” Then he asked a simple question: What does Bangladesh need most?
Hadi’s answer would define his legacy. And eventually, it would get him killed.
The Answer No One Expected
You might expect a revolutionary, fresh from victory, to demand trials for the murderers. Or elections. Or economic reform.
Hadi wanted something stranger.
“We need a cultural revolution,” he said.
The host paused. Cultural revolution? The phrase conjured images of Mao’s China—Red Guards, struggle sessions, chaos. Surely that wasn’t what he meant?
It wasn’t. But what Hadi meant was, in its own way, more radical. He believed that Bangladesh had just accomplished something extraordinary—a genuine popular uprising that had toppled a dictator—and that it was all about to slip away.
Not because the old regime would return with tanks. But because the revolution had happened only in the streets. It hadn’t happened in people’s minds.
The Dictator’s Greatest Trick
To understand what Hadi was worried about, you need to understand what Bangladesh had just escaped.
Sheikh Hasina had ruled the country for fifteen consecutive years. Each election was more fraudulent than the last. By 2024, she had perfected a system: opposition leaders jailed or exiled, journalists silenced, critics disappeared into a network of secret detention centers with names like “Aynaghor”—the House of Mirrors—where torture was routine.
But Hasina’s greatest achievement wasn’t the repression. It was something subtler.
She had convinced a nation of 170 million people that the state belonged to her. That the bridges and railways she built were gifts from her hand, not investments made with their money. That they should be grateful for what was already theirs.
When she opened the Padma Bridge—a massive project connecting the country’s southwest to Dhaka—it was presented as her personal accomplishment. Never mind that every citizen had paid for it through taxes on everything they bought. Never mind that the project cost five times what it should have, with billions siphoned abroad. The people who paid for it didn’t know they had paid for it.
That ignorance was the dictator’s greatest trick.
The Question That Revealed Everything
Hadi had discovered this ignorance firsthand. As a political scientist, he’d conducted an informal experiment. He interviewed people from every walk of life—rickshaw drivers, vegetable sellers, schoolteachers, even college professors—and asked each one a simple question:
Do you pay taxes?
Almost everyone said no.
This astonished him. Because of course they did. Bangladesh has a value-added tax embedded in nearly every transaction. When you buy rice, you pay tax. When you buy medicine, you pay tax. When you buy the cloth that will wrap your body for burial, you pay tax.
From the moment of birth to beyond death, every Bangladeshi finances the state. But they don’t know it.
“If you don’t know you own something,” Hadi explained, “you can never claim it. It’s like inheriting land from your father but never being told it exists. You’ll never fight for it because you don’t know it’s yours.”
This was why Hasina could rule for so long. This was why people accepted corruption, rigged elections, even murder. They didn’t see themselves as owners of the state being robbed. They saw themselves as subjects, hoping for benevolence.
The revolution had removed Hasina. But it hadn’t touched this deeper problem. The people who had stormed the streets in July still didn’t know they owned the country they had just liberated.
The Language of Slavery
Hadi noticed the problem was embedded in language itself.
In Bangladesh, everything is called “government property”—schools, hospitals, roads, public buildings. Never “public property.”
“The only thing we call ‘public’ in Bangladesh,” he said with a dark laugh, “is the public toilet.”
It wasn’t just a joke. Language shapes thought. When every school is “government property” rather than “the people’s property,” citizens learn to see the state as something that belongs to politicians—not to themselves.
The government produces nothing. It has no money of its own. It only collects what citizens provide and distributes it. But the language hides this truth, transforming owners into beggars grateful for their own money.
The Cult
There was another obstacle to the revolution Hadi imagined: the true believers.
The Awami League—Hasina’s party—had ruled for so long, so totally, that it had become something more than a political movement. It had become what Hadi called “a semi-religion, a cult.”
He had evidence. Hadi had friends and acquaintances who supported the League. In the year since the uprising, he had talked with many of them. Not once had any expressed remorse for what happened in July.
Not for the helicopter gunships firing into crowds. Not for the children killed. Not for six-year-old Ria Gope, shot in the head while playing on her rooftop, her parents’ only child after years of fertility treatment, who had just come first in her class. Nothing.
They had explanations. They blamed opposition parties. They claimed students shot first. Hadi had visited the houses where children died. He had seen the six-inch holes in walls where bullets passed through small bodies. The evidence meant nothing to them.
You cannot defeat a cult with elections. You can only defeat it by building something stronger: a shared understanding of truth.
The Battleground
This is why Hadi chose to run for parliament from Dhaka-8.
The constituency contains Bangladesh’s most powerful institutions—the presidential palace, the Supreme Court, the national university. But Hadi didn’t choose it for any of those.
He chose it for Shahbag.
Shahbag is a traffic circle in central Dhaka that became famous in 2013. That year, massive protests erupted demanding trials for war criminals from Bangladesh’s 1971 independence war. The movement was genuine. The anger was real.
But Hasina’s government captured it. The protests became a tool for authoritarian consolidation. “Progressive” came to mean “loyal to the regime.” Anyone who questioned the government could be smeared as a defender of war criminals.
For Hadi, Shahbag was where Bangladesh’s mind had been colonized. If the cultural revolution was going to happen, it had to begin there. The battleground had to be reclaimed.
A Hundred Hadis
But Hadi knew he couldn’t do it alone.
This was his great frustration. Fourteen months after the uprising, his organization—Inqilab Mancha, “Revolution Platform”—stood almost alone. There should have been dozens of groups like it. Hundreds of people speaking out on different issues, each with courage, each with focus.
“If one person speaks on twenty topics, none of their words carry weight,” he explained. “But if a hundred people each speak on one topic, the collective voice becomes irresistible.”
He was honest about his own limitations. Even Inqilab Mancha couldn’t speak every truth. There were things they held back. This shamed him. But if a hundred groups existed, the truths one couldn’t speak, another could.
That proliferation of fearless voices—that was what he meant by cultural revolution. Not a leader. Not a party. An awakening.
The Ghost of 1857
Hadi knew the stakes of failure.
He told the story of 1857. That year, Indian soldiers rose against British rule in what Indians call the First War of Independence. The rebellion nearly succeeded. The revolutionaries came heartbreakingly close to driving out the colonizers.
Then came the betrayal. Elite collaborators sided with the British. The rebellion was crushed.
What followed was designed to ensure no one would ever try again. Soldiers and their families were hanged in public—at Bahadur Park, near present-day Jagannath University—their bodies left swinging for days. The Grand Trunk Road was lined with corpses. The message was clear: this is what happens when you resist.
If July fails, Hadi warned, the same logic would apply. The small groups would be eliminated first. Then the larger opposition parties. And Bangladesh—the whole nation—would drown in blood.
“The tragedy won’t be the destruction of political parties,” he said. “It will be that the sovereign land called Bangladesh will be drenched in blood.”
The Unexpected Evidence
And yet.
When the host asked if he was pessimistic, Hadi said no.
His evidence came from an unlikely place: wealthy kids at private universities.
Hadi taught at one. His students came from privileged families, paid expensive tuition, had every reason to stay apolitical and focus on careers. They didn’t need the state for anything. They could ignore politics entirely.
Instead, they were asking questions. About justice. About rights. About what Bangladesh could become.
This hadn’t happened before. Political consciousness had always been concentrated in public universities, among students whose lives were directly shaped by government failure. But something had shifted. Even the comfortable were waking up.
“If they can ask questions about justice,” Hadi said, “it means justice exists in their minds. And if it exists in their minds, the struggle will continue.”
The Philosophy
The interview ended with a story.
Hadi described the final moments of Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader killed by Israeli forces in 2024. As soldiers closed in, Sinwar—wounded, trapped in a wheelchair—threw a wooden stick at them.
He knew it wouldn’t stop bullets. He knew he was going to die. He threw the stick anyway.
For Hadi, this image contained everything that mattered.
“Victory isn’t life,” he said. “The struggle is life.”
This wasn’t fatalism. It was a rejection of the calculation that says you should only fight when you can win. Hadi believed dignity came from the fight itself. The measure of a life wasn’t whether you succeeded. It was whether you resisted.
Hadi's Final Words
“জিতটাই জীবন না, লড়াইটাই জীবন।”
“Victory isn’t life—the struggle is life.”
Epilogue
Osman Hadi didn’t live to see the revolution he imagined.
He was martyred—killed for the truths he spoke. His death made him exactly what he had called for: one of a hundred voices, silenced but echoing.
The cultural transformation he described remains incomplete. The people of Bangladesh still don’t fully know they own their state. The cult mentality still grips millions. Shahbag remains contested ground.
But something else Hadi predicted has also come true. The questions haven’t stopped. Young people keep asking them. The struggle continues—in classrooms, in living rooms, in the minds of a generation that watched their friends die for something they still don’t fully understand.
Hadi said the revolution would happen one question at a time, one person at a time, one act of resistance at a time.
He was right. It’s happening now.
And one day—as he believed until his last breath—it will be won.
From the archives of Shaheed Osman Hadi, preserved by Inqilab Delta Forum.
Source: Interview on Somoyer Aalap — Watch on YouTube
References
- 6-year-old shot while in her father’s arms passes away — The Daily Star
- July Uprising: Case filed after 11 months of Ria Gope’s death — Dhaka Tribune
- 66 children, teenagers killed in 27 days — Prothom Alo
- List of people who died in the July massacre — Wikipedia
- July Revolution (Bangladesh) — Wikipedia