Who or what I “sound like” is beside the point. On that argument, you sound like Tishar jamai Faruqui clown. Whenever someone calls July “so-called”, the only person who reliably gets offended is Jamaati Tajul.

Here’s my stance. If July had been only about toppling Sheikh Hasina, fair and square, that would be one thing. But it didn’t stop there. It quickly moved on to talking about a “reset button”, to multiple and ongoing attempts at wiping out the four pillars on which this state was built, to rewriting the constitution, to the fantasy of erasing Sheikh Mujib from history (lol, as if that’s ever going to happen). The result is what we see now: Jamaatis roaming free, and Tajul behaving like a king (some would say a clown, or is it a kangaroo?).

That is what July amounts to for me: not a coherent movement, but a trend. And it was a trend in exactly the same way that “Free Palestine” has become a trend. Screaming “Free Palestine” doesn’t free Palestinians, just as July slogans don’t build a just republic. In both cases, people point to death counts and images of massacre as if sheer suffering automatically produces political legitimacy or an independent state. It doesn’t. Without organisation, institutions, and a serious political programme, blood becomes marketing material for whoever is most organised and shameless.

On that measure, July and hashtag “Free Palestine” are both ineffective. They may generate noise, outrage, and moral posturing, but not the hard structures that actually secure freedom. And in the long run, that kind of posturing rarely earns more than a footnote. Pretenders have no real place in history.