JAMES C Scott, who passed away on July 19 this year, was a prominent political scientist and anthropologist known for his interdisciplinary work platforming the ways ordinary people resist domination, emphasising the value of local knowledge, hidden transcripts of resistance, and the limits of centralised power. To me, the character is vehemently relevant in understanding our present, the ‘mess’ that we ostensibly find ourselves in post-July 36th (5th August), and, of course, the very constellation of actions that made July 36th a reality in the first place. Scott’s exciting body of work holds potential to provide us with a framework to understand the subtle, quotidian acts of defiance against authoritarianism, colonial legacies, as well as ideas of local autonomy, horizontal organising, self-sufficiency, mutual aid, and the significance of small-scale, grassroots resistance.
Background: Pathways to the uprising
IN ORDER to establish context, indeed the same metaphorical page for us to start this conversation from, it is useful to retrace and identify the pathways to the movement’s escalation and eventual crescendo. While the July Mass Uprising of 2024 initially ignited over grievances regarding a controversial quota system, the situation escalated rapidly beyond reservations into a larger resistance movement against Sheikh Hasina’s authoritarian regime.
For over fifteen years, the Awami League maintained its grip on power through manipulated elections, erosion of democratic rights, economic mismanagement, and extensive foreign borrowing, all of which fueled public dissatisfaction.
Mafia state: patronage and corporate oligarchy
BALINT Magyar’s concept of the Mafia State refers to a system where political power is closely intertwined with criminal enterprises, blurring the lines between the state and organised crime. In Bangladesh, the Awami regime’s connections with powerful entities such as the S. Alam Group, Bashundhara Group, Summit Group, and Beximco Group exemplify this Mafia State dynamic. These corporations, benefiting from state patronage, amassed substantial wealth and influence, becoming integral to the regime’s power structure. These behemoths would act as the economic arm of the regime, ensuring the flow of resources necessary to maintain its patronage networks.
The relationship between the regime and these corporate entities was evident during the uprising. Facing mounting pressure, Hasina met to rally corporate leaders and trade organisation heads in a bid to consolidate support, an alliance demonstrating her regime’s reliance on corporate backing to sustain power and suppress dissent. There, alongside state ministers and heads of trade and commerce organisations like BGMEA, BKMEA, Bank Owners Association, and FBCCI, top corporate fat-cats including Ahmed Akbar Sobhan, Muhammad Aziz Khan, and A K Azad, among others, were seen pledging allegiance, seeking to strengthen the regime’s hand in ‘wiping out’ what they termed the protests as a purely conspiratorial clique of terrorists, even noting that without the Awami League, their existence would be at risk.
The corporate entities, in turn, had been using their influence to secure government contracts, tax exemptions, and regulatory leniency, further entrenching their monopolistic control over key sectors of the economy. They received protection and support from state apparatuses, creating a mutually reinforcing system of power and wealth. In recent memory, this close-knit relationship is perhaps best illustrated in the case of the Mosarat Jahan Munia rape and murder cover-up. We witnessed the state’s judiciary, police, media owned by affiliated conglomerates, journalists’ associations patronised by the group set out on coordinated campaigns to defame, delegitimise, and as they hoped, to ultimately disqualify and bury the case.
Dependency, foreign aid, extraction managers
The Mafia State apparatus was of course intricately linked to the Hasina regime’s broader economic and political strategies. Bangladesh’s development model, under Hasina’s rule, heavily relied on foreign aid and loans from international financial institutions and foreign governments, particularly India and China. While these loans and aid packages were presented as essential for development, they exacerbated Bangladesh’s dependency on external sources and compromised its economic sovereignty. Critical confrontation of the dominating developmentalist discourses will reveal that these transnational backings for an undemocratic government were no accident. Indeed, for unchecked extraction to transpire in the colony, a regime that relies little on consensus or accountability is, to say the least, convenient.
Its foreign policy, particularly its subservience to the Modi government, exemplifies this dependency. The strategic alignment with India has of course on paper been driven by a need for political support and economic assistance, but has come at the cost of national sovereignty. Delhi’s influence over Dhaka’s internal politics has grown, shaping decisions that favor Indian interests at the expense of Bangladesh’s people, their democratic aspirations, their rivers, the land.
What this has manifested is a vast, multifold nexus of domination and exploitation that stretches well beyond Delhi – a nexus that deserves much more cautious critical interrogation than vapid gung-ho reactionary identity political formations.
Resistance and grassroots organising: echoes of Scott
THE galvanisation of the July Uprising—also termed Red July—followed Hasinashahi’s brutal crackdown, orchestrated by armed cadres of the ruling Awami League, police, Border Guard, Rapid Action Battalion, and military interventions. The repression, including the imposition of a nationwide curfew on July 19, in turn, exacerbated the very public outrage the measures hoped to rein in. Even amidst the internet blackout and military curfew, news traveled through the grapevines about intense ‘fighting,’ ‘war’— the wording was abundantly self-aware—continuing in the ‘Stalingrad’s of the city.
Scott’s concept of hidden transcripts is evident in this chapter of the uprising onwards, where suppressed dissent and covert resistance converged into a powerful grassroots movement. The uprising’s success in circumventing traditional political structures and responding to the regime’s tactics underscores these anarchist principles. The movement’s ability to organise itself through informal networks and community solidarity reflects a decentralised approach that challenges centralised power, demonstrating, for one, the potential of horizontal solidarity and self-organised resistance.
The grassroots nature of the resistance was evident in the diverse forms that emerged. From organising safe houses and shelters to coordinating protests and disseminating information through covert channels, the movement exemplified Scott’s advocacy for decentralised, community-driven action. These strategies not only evaded the regime’s repressive measures but also fostered a sense of collective empowerment and autonomy.
Necropolitics: resistance and local autonomy
OVER the final two weeks of July as per the Gregorian calendar, the regime’s crackdown resulted in nearly a thousand deaths as per unofficial accounts — we emphasise the ‘unofficial’ status, for we worry if we can ever know the true extent. Beginning as early as July 17th, till the final hour, reports emerged from hospitals, graveyards, and the families of the martyred — hinting at active interventions to remove the bodies, dispose of hospital registers, seize the medical paper trail, and even threaten the families into declaring fabricated causes of death.
Achille Mbembe’s theorisation helps illuminate the broader implications of state-sponsored violence and the politics of fear that permeate authoritarian regimes like that of Sheikh Hasina. The July Uprising in Bangladesh serves as a stark example of how necropolitics operates in practice. Through it, we see firsthand how modern states exert their power not only through regulating life, but also by controlling and exploiting death. The use of lethal force, including live ammunition, against unarmed protesters underscores its unflickering willingness to take lives. The imposition of a nationwide curfew and internet blackout further restricted civil liberties, turning urban centers into zones of militarised control reminiscent of Mbembe’s description of the state’s power to dictate who may live and who must die.
Moreover, the manipulation of information and the fabrication of narratives surrounding the uprising—the disposal of bodies, falsification of causes of death, intimidation of families—illustrate how necropolitical strategies extend beyond mere visible, identifiable physical violence to encompass the management of death itself. By erasing traces of dissent and obscuring the true extent of state brutality, the regime sought to maintain an illusion of authority and legitimacy.
The regional context of the uprising adds another layer of complexity. There had already been sentiments within Bangladesh that India’s actions, influenced by its nationalist Hindutva government, were contributing to the unrest. The mass public of Bangladesh, which had already, since as recently as October last year when Israel renewed its genocide in Palestine, demonstrated creative means of practicing and aligning loosely with the themes of boycott, divest, divulge, and sanctions activism. After the latest bout of Hasina’s sham elections on January 7 this year, the people developed what came to be known as the #IndiaOut campaign, an organic boycott of Indian products to, among multiple interests, protest Delhi’s blatant conviction towards securing the Awami League’s illegal claim to power as well as multiple exploitative, ecocidal, one-sided treaties and agreements between the two.
Later, at the peak of July, immigrant workers stationed in the Middle East and Southeast Asia launched what transpired to become a brilliant remittance blackout, declaring on record that they would be abstaining from sending foreign currency back home via official channels in order to ‘stare’ a fascist government ‘which uses taxpayer money to kill our fellow people’, they said. And instead, the workers declared an open embrace of the informal Hundi.
Around the same time, when the state-directed internet blackout came to be, people worked to transmit information through creative, ostensibly invisible means, organised to meet through ostensibly ‘safe’ phone conversations for those listening in, sought out and developed technology to connect through shared networks that function without mobile reception.
Online, through phone calls, the chaatrojonota — an apt term in Bangla for a student-mass people coalition — moved fast, organising shelters and safe houses when the regime attacked with or without uniforms. At night, watchful eyes looked out for convoys heading for area-based block raids, detailed down to the particular neighbourhoods targeted, the agency involved, and even the number of vehicles engaged. During one such effort to snatch a protesting student from an apartment building in Rajshahi, we heard, in awe, of the neighbours descending on the uniformed abductors, foiling their attempt at an arrest. Lawyers took cases upon cases, most if not all sham lawsuits deployed as a means to ‘legally’ trap these everyday student-ordinary-people-turned-insurgents, pro bono, retrieving innocents from the commandeered judiciary system. In Rajshahi, teachers ‘hijacked’ students being dragged away by plainclothes officers. In Dhaka, people surrounded a police van and compelled the officers to release the two young men they had detained. A video surfaced showing a woman being freed in Barisal.
I fondly return to Scott. Clearly, the uprising’s dynamics represented a culmination of suppressed dissent and covert opposition. Bypassing traditional political structures, the grassroots, decentralised modality adopted reflected in the capacity of the uprising to organise itself — in that the uprising itself was able to become an agent in the process — through informal networks, digital platforms, and consequently, myriad heterogeneous community-based, even kin-based, organic, self-associated groups. This horizontal solidarity demonstrated what Scott’s anarchist advocacy could only theorise in principle, as the people’s movement worked to evade the regime’s signature repressive fear tactics, dismantle centralised power, and restore a democratic baseline from which all within the polity could springboard off of.
Now, a month since the fall of Hasina, the work of rebuilding continues. While a portion of the familiar, popularised faces at the helm of the movement’s steering committee have gone on to assume key positions in negotiations and decision-making, both officially and unofficially, the masses who had in fact executed, carried out the uprising to its primary goal, continue to report on gaps that require intervention — systemic flaws, oversights, critical lapses, blunders codified into the system that had run the show for 15 years.
Media coverage has resumed, but citizens remain vigilant, reporting on cases that corporate-owned media might overlook. Students and residents have taken on roles previously handled by the state, such as traffic control or neighborhood watches. Community responses to flooding and communal violence demonstrate an impressive level of self-organisation and mutual aid.
Residents across Dhaka were seen to have organised to avert nocturnal burglaries — in Mirpur and Mohammadpur, citizens were seen cooking up feasts and singing karaoke on the streets past midnight.
The July Uprising in Bangladesh epitomises this indomitable ingenuity of grassroots movements faced with authoritarian repression. The power of disruptive disorder — embracing what some liberal bourgeois urban sensibilities may interpret as mindless chaos, but could instead be read as the dispersal of responsibility beyond the sort of pastoral, concentrated state authority we have been so familiarised with — reveals the potential for self-sufficiency, autonomy and community organising to challenge entrenched power structures. Yet therefore, indeed for those same reasons, July also haunts us with reality checks about the limits of liberal democratic imagination.
Paulo Freire’s advocacy for collective action and empowerment resonates with the experiences of the Bangladeshi people. The uprising illustrates that transformative change can emerge from the strength of our organised, community-driven resistance rather than reliance on hierarchical state structures. The lessons from July 36th remind us that it was this transgenerational, cross-sectional solidarity, not the state, nor any grand design by any traditional hierarchical partisan political formation, nor a technocratic intellegentsia core endorsed by an iteration of the state that is no doubt military-backed, that brought us here. It would serve us well to remember that as we engage, coordinated or otherwise, with issues too readily deemed counter-revolutionary threats. We owe it to ourselves to remain critically dialectically aware of what the popular proposed courses of action require us to do, the kind of configurations it asks us to step into, the positioning they demand of ourselves and our chosen ‘Others’.
Embracing disorder as a force for change, the ‘chaos’ (as characterised in middle-class paranoia) as, really, the generative, transformative moments of radical change, July has shown us that omnifarious, people-centred collective action and grassroots organising can forge pathways to just and autonomous ways of living, challenging the need for hierarchical state-centric solutions, and reinforcing the strength found in community solidarity. l