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Bangladesh now is living through its “Long July” – a stretch of memory that extends for ‘36 days’ instead of the customary 31 days of July, commemorating the fiery period from July 1 to August 5, 2024, when student protests culminated in the dramatic collapse of Sheikh Hasina’s autocratic regime after 15 years in power.

It began opposing the public-sector employment quotas but mutated into a sweeping revolutionary-scale uprising. The anniversary of that upheaval arrives alongside another spectacle across the border. In New Delhi, thousands of demonstrators have marched toward Parliament over examination paper leaks, rampant youth unemployment, and institutional decay.

Police used batons and mass detentions, briefly sweeping up Rahul Gandhi, the main opposition leader. Sonam Wangchuk, a prominent climate activist whose hunger strike formed the movement’s moral core, remained under police watch in a hospital until his wife moved court to move him to a private one. Meanwhile, an outfit dubbed the Cockroach Janata Party has emerged as a visible vehicle for broad popular discontent.

To observers in Dhaka, the imagery from Delhi invokes immediate familiarity. Street marches, clashing students, viral slogans, and swelling crowds mirror scenes witnessed in Bangladesh just two years ago. South Asian history has conditioned onlookers to recognize how ordinary demonstrations can acquire sudden, explosive momentum.

Sri Lanka’s Aragalaya forced a president to flee in 2022; Nepal has repeatedly seen street power rewrite its constitutional order; Bangladesh experienced a transformative rupture in 2024. Yet structural reality dictates that similar imagery should not be mistaken for a shared political destiny.

Protests on the Raju Bhaskar statue – dedicated to student leader Raju who died fighting – at the Dhaka........

© The Wire