After the killing of Sharif Osman Hadi in December and the funeral that drew hundreds of thousands of people into the heart of Dhaka, the nation briefly convulsed with grief.
Then, as it almost always does, the emotion receded. Even martyrdom has a shelf life in public memory. Ordinary people, burdened by survival, do not grieve indefinitely. Mourning fades and life intrudes.
Bangladesh has seen this before. Take Abu Sayeed, the first martyr of the July uprising of 2024 that led to then-Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s ouster. The image of him standing with outstretched arms, absorbing police [rubber] bullets as if to arrest history itself, has already entered the country’s visual canon. It is painted on walls, reproduced in murals, stylised in art and embalmed in textbooks. Sayeed’s image is immortal. His grief is not.
Today, the sorrow surrounding his death likely lives on only within his family and a small circle of intimates. For everyone else, it has been crowded out by the daily grind — by inflation, insecurity, and the numbing demands of life in a harshly transactional world that steadily drains people of the luxury of sustained emotion.
There is also a harsher truth. Abu Sayeed’s death, in every grimly practical sense, achieved closure. His martyrdom sparked the mass uprising that eventually toppled Hasina’s dictatorial regime, which had ruled for more than a decade and a half through force, and the systematic stripping of political and human agency. Sayeed’s sacrifice served a utilitarian purpose. History moved. His chapter, however tragic, is complete.
Hadi’s death is not.
More than a month after he was killed, his martyrdom remains unfinished, unresolved—and that is precisely why the public response has been so fervent, so emotionally unspent. The honours conferred upon him, the intensity of the mourning, and the almost unprocessed grief point to something deeper than the catalytic role of yet another fallen hero. To understand it, one must first understand what might now be called the “Hadi effect”.
Hadi entered public consciousness through social media clips and television talk shows, in which he was in viral confrontations with some known social and political stalwarts. He was physically unassuming: short with dishevelled hair and beard, but sharp-eyed. His power lay in language. He spoke in an unapologetically plebeian Bangla, tinged with the rural cadences of southern Bangladesh, far removed from the polished, patrician diction of Dhaka’s urban elite. It was a voice that sounded familiar, even intimate, to millions.
With a modest madrasa education, time at Dhaka University, and roots in a lower-middle-class family, Hadi embodied a volatile combination: the subaltern with just enough access to threaten established hierarchies. He was neither fully inside the system nor wholly outside it. His religiosity – unapologetic and deeply Islamic – resonated powerfully in a country where roughly 90 percent of the population is Muslim and where faith remains one of the few enduring sources of collective identity.
After the 2024 uprising, Hadi began to attract sustained attention from mainstream media. As remnants of the Awami League’s cultural and political establishment cautiously tested the waters for a comeback, he confronted them head-on. His language was blunt, often abrasive, and deliberately so. Again and again, Hadi warned of the danger of allowing the party back into public life through its cultural and social networks, long before it could re-enter formal politics.
This was not a conventional political battle. Hadi’s fight – if it can be called that – was aimed squarely at culture. For decades, Hasina’s Awami League had exercised near-hegemonic control over Bangladesh’s cultural sphere, saturating media, academia and the arts with its preferred narratives. In principle, this was unsurprising. As a centre-left party that led the 1971 liberation war, the Awami League rooted its legitimacy in language, identity, culture and a particular vision of Bengali nationalism. Much of the country’s intellectual class found that vision both familiar and institutionally rewarding.
But under Hasina’s four consecutive terms – three of them secured through elections widely regarded as rigged or non-participatory – that cultural project metastasised. What had once been advocacy hardened into dogma. Bengali nationalism was narrowed, history was revised and the liberation war was increasingly reframed to elevate Sheikh Mujibur Rahman – Hasina’s father and the leader of the independence struggle – into a near-mythic figure. Cultural production ceased to be pluralistic. It became devotional.
The consequences were profound. Dominant media outlets and influential intellectuals did more than amplify this narrative. They enforced it. In the process, they marginalised the worldview of a large majority of Bangladeshis, many of whom are religiously moderate Muslims who could not recognise themselves in the imposed version of “secular” nationalism. Over time, reverence for Mujib, as Rahman is widely remembered, crossed from respect into ritual, leaving little room for dissent without social or professional penalty.
That resentment did not disappear. It waited.
After the 2024 uprising, it erupted, most visibly in the demolition of Mujib’s statues and murals across the country. It is a mistake to portray these acts merely as vandalism or iconoclasm; they were an attempt, however raw, to reclaim cultural agency from a state-sanctioned orthodoxy. At their core was a demand to reassert a sociopolitical identity grounded in religious moderation rather than enforced secular symbolism.
No figure came to embody that rupture more clearly than Sharif Osman Hadi.
Hadi’s rise in the collective consciousness followed a clear arc. Without apparent calculation, he first emerged on social media and then broke into mainstream platforms, methodically exposing the hypocrisy of a media-intellectual complex that had enabled Hasina’s authoritarianism while cloaking itself in moral superiority. His refusal to temper his critique, his insistence on naming collaborators rather than abstractions, struck a nerve.
For many Bangladeshis in the immediate aftermath of July 2024, Hadi sounded like the voice they aspired to hear. He said aloud what others had whispered or forced themselves to suppress entirely. He appeared sincere – perhaps even recklessly so. And in a political culture exhausted by doublespeak, that honesty proved magnetic.
Hadi did not stop at critique. With public funding, he went on to establish the Inqilab Cultural Center, an explicit attempt to build an alternative cultural infrastructure. Its mission was clear: to promote a Bangladesh-rooted cultural idiom grounded in Islamic values, one that resonated with the social instincts of the majority rather than the narrow, urban, secular aesthetic long amplified by elite institutions. For many Bangladeshis who had viewed the dominant version of Bengali cultural expression as exclusionary or imposed, the Inqilab Center felt less like a provocation than a correction.
Yet post-uprising Bangladesh was not a laboratory for cultural experimentation alone. Under an interim government, the country lurched from economic anxiety to political uncertainty, and the public mood increasingly gravitated towards one demand: stability through elections. Hadi grasped this quickly. Cultural resistance, he concluded, would remain vulnerable unless it was anchored in formal political power. Parliament was where lasting leverage lay.
His decision to contest a seat in the heart of Dhaka, in the upcoming elections, elevated him almost overnight. Running without the backing of any major political machine, Hadi positioned himself against a seasoned, well-financed candidate from a party widely expected to return to power. The asymmetry was stark. It was a David and Goliath contest in a city – and a country – hungry for rupture. Attention was inevitable.
What followed was not a media strategy so much as a studied refusal to have one. Hadi allowed the symbolism of the contest to grow organically. His campaign was conspicuously bare-boned: leaflets instead of billboards, handshakes instead of motorcades. He prayed Fajr with voters, walked through working-class neighbourhoods, and spoke in the same unpolished vernacular that had first made him recognisable. Social media did the rest, amplifying what appeared unscripted and therefore credible.
At the core of Hadi’s appeal was a single conviction about him that took hold with surprising speed: that he was incorruptible. After 16 years of Hasina’s rule – sustained by alliances with crony capitalists, a compliant bureaucracy, and selective patronage – corruption had become one of the regime’s defining signatures. Hadi offered himself as its antithesis. He did not promise technocratic reform or institutional overhauls. He promised something simpler and, for many, more persuasive: that he would be brave enough to confront power without flinching.
In the early days after the July uprising, that same faith had briefly been invested in student leaders who had ignited the 21-day mass movement against systemic discrimination. They, too, were seen as untainted and fearless. But that confidence eroded quickly as politics reasserted its old habits. Almost by default, the burden of preserving that belief, of proving that integrity could survive proximity to power, shifted to Hadi.
Interestingly, Hadi, by no measure, had been the architect of the July uprising. Yet in its aftermath, he became one of its most consequential inheritors. The Hadi of television debates occupied minds but the Hadi of the campaign trail reached somewhere deeper.
That explains why his killing produced a palpable sense of loss, why so many ordinary Bangladeshis felt, without irony, that something essential had been taken from them.
In death, Hadi has grown larger — but whether he has grown stronger remains unresolved. History offers no guarantees. His killing has already created opportunities for others to speak in his name, to trade on his image, to convert sacrifice into political currency. Martyrdom has always been an easily appropriated asset.
Still, it would be a mistake to assume that fading grief will render Hadi irrelevant in time. Public emotion inevitably ebbs but unfinished struggles do not. The idea he carried – the insistence on reclaiming cultural agency, on confronting corruption without accommodation, on refusing elite permission – has not been settled, let alone defeated.
Hadi’s project remains incomplete. That is the real source of his persistence in the national imagination. And anyone who believes otherwise misunderstands both the moment and the man.
