Making sense of Bangladesh’s ‘Hadi effect’ shaping the vote |
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........