Dhaka, July 18, 2024: The Day I Dropped My Pen and Picked Up a Brick

July 18, 2024, is seared into my memory, not just as a journalist, but as a protester, and more crucially, as a witness to something far larger than myself.

In the early morning hours, had you asked me whether I would join the student-led uprising that shook Dhaka to its core, I might have hesitated. I was focused on my reporting, calculating angles, gathering quotes – the usual.

But my wife Nita changed that. After what she’d witnessed, what unfolded on the students the day before through unending videos and photos on social media – fleeing tear gas, narrowly escaping the batons of police and the ruling-party student wing – she was resolute.

“I have to go,” she said. “These students now need us.”

And so we went. Myself, Nita, my wife’s cousin Saqib and his wife Tumpa. We walked towards Nita’s [Nitu] aunty’s place two roads away in Dhanmondi. There, we met up with Lamisa and Duzana, her two daughters, still in their teens, barely finished with their school exams.

I called others – my cousins Appu and Nipu with their wives, Banna and Shoma who live on nearby roads in Dhanmondi. By the time we left Nitu Aunty’s home at 7A and began walking toward Road No. 27 in Dhanmondi, there were nearly a dozen of us.

We didn’t know we were walking into a microcosm of what would later be dubbed the July Uprising – the largest street protest in Bangladesh that morphed and toppled the autocratic regime of Sheikh Hasina.

'They’re firing live bullets. You could get killed'

As we made our way, we ran into journalist Zakir Bhai on his motorbike. He pulled over, wide-eyed. “Faisal,” he said urgently, “they’re firing live bullets. You could get killed.”

He wasn’t exaggerating. The Dhaka Metropolitan Police, bolstered by plainclothes members of the Bangladesh Chhatra League (BCL), had already begun using live ammunition in some parts of the city.

Videos circulating on social media showed student protestors gunned down near Science Lab and Farmgate. Amnesty International had already issued a warning that Bangladesh’s state forces were “using disproportionate force on unarmed civilians.”

Still, we kept walking.

I don’t know what shifted in me – maybe it was fear giving way to instinct, or just raw anger – but I started yelling at bystanders: “Join us! Why are you watching from the sidelines?”

It was theatrical, maybe ridiculous, but I couldn’t stop.

To my surprise, people did join in. A young man with long hair zipped ahead on a motorbike, acting as our scout, signaling where the police lines were forming.

We reached the Nazrul Institute Road intersection – barely 80 meters from Road 27 – and stopped. The sight was near biblical–considering this was Dhanmondi.

More than 200 students and some local residents – armed with nothing more than tree branches, empty bottles, and broken bricks – were holding their ground against a fully militarised police line, flanked by Awami League goons.

Tear gas curled into the sky. Rubber bullets pelted trees. And yet, the students stood firm, faces wrapped in scarves, eyes burning with resolve.

Something clicked inside us. Nita, Tumpa, Nitu Aunty, Shoma – people I had known in everyday domestic life – transformed before my eyes. Even the youngest, Lamisa and Duzana, were hurling bricks with unflinching focus.

There was no fear, no second-guessing. Just unity, raw and loud.

That day, we became more than ourselves. We became part of something no regime, no party, no baton could erase.

Since then, the fallen government has attempted to reframe the uprising as a disruption orchestrated by “foreign agents” – a tired phrase used to discredit any civic disobedience.

But that day, the truth was simpler, and more powerful: people had had enough. Enough of dynastic politics, enough of police brutality, enough of watching our children bleed on the streets while the powerful retreat behind tinted-glass convoys.

No official commission will document what happened at that corner near Road 27. But for those of us who were there–shouting, ducking, throwing, crying, roaring – July 18 will never be just a date on the calendar. It was the day the fear broke.

In those hours, nothing else existed. Not ideology, not strategy – only instinct.

Strangers opening their doors

We weren’t fighting for some abstract cause; we were simply fighting not to be broken. There was no rhetoric of revolution in our heads, no fantasy of martyrdom – only the raw, immediate conviction that we had to hold the line. Stand. Survive.

The standoff lasted more than three hours. The police, at some point, abandoned crowd-control protocol entirely and opened fire with live rounds.

I watched one of our fellow protestors – a boy who couldn’t have been more than twenty – fall, clutching his leg in disbelief. We rushed him onto a rickshaw and sent him speeding toward Ibn Sina Hospital, not knowing if he’d make it.

And then something extraordinary happened. Residents of nearby homes – strangers just hours before – opened their doors.

They handed out water, food, towels soaked in lemon water to fight the tear gas. Some offered shelter. In a city often fractured by class and fear, Dhaka, for a brief moment, stood as one.

By evening, around 5 p.m., we limped home. Dusty, sore, tear-gassed, and – in a way that surprised us –clear-eyed. We were no longer observers. We were veterans of something that had no name yet.

That night, as dusk settled over a stunned city, the government did what autocracies always do when they panic: they shut down the internet.

A near-total digital blackout descended on Bangladesh, lasting five full days. No news, no messaging, no coordination. But it was too late – the fire had already caught.

At least 44 people died that day, according to human rights monitors – though some estimates suggest the real number is higher. For many of us, this was the moment the “Long July” truly began – not as a hashtag or a news cycle, but as a lived rupture.

The illusion of stability had been pierced, and something deeper, older, more defiant took its place.

Faisal Mahmud is the Minister (Press) of Bangladesh High Commission in New Delhi

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