The nation was briefly shaken with grief after the killing of Sharif Osman Hadi in December, whose funeral drew hundreds of thousands of people in central Dhaka.
And then, as it almost always does, the feeling went away. Even martyrdom has a lifespan in public memory. Ordinary people burdened with survival will not continue to grieve forever. Grief disappears and everyday life begins to creep in.
Bangladesh has experienced this before. Take Abu Saeed, the first martyr of the July 2024 uprising that led to the ouster of then Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina. An image of him standing with arms outstretched and absorbing the police. [rubber] Bullets that seem to arrest history itself have already become a visual norm in this country. It is painted on walls, reproduced in murals, stylized in art, and embalmed in textbooks. Said’s image is immortal. His grief is not.
For now, the grief surrounding his death is likely to remain only among his family and a few close friends. For others, it is crowded out by the daily grind, inflation, insecurity, and the paralyzing demands of life in a cut-throat world of trade that reliably deprives people of the luxury of sustained emotion.
There is an even harsher truth. Abu Said’s death marked the end in all practical senses. His martyrdom sparked a massive uprising that ultimately toppled Hasina’s dictatorial regime, which had ruled by force for more than a decade and a half and systematically stripped her of political and human agency. Said’s sacrifice served a utilitarian purpose. History has moved. His chapter, however tragic, is complete.
Hadi’s death is not like that.
More than a month after he was murdered, his martyrdom remains unfinished and unresolved. That’s why the public’s reaction has been so passionate and emotional. The honor bestowed upon him, the intensity of the mourning and the largely unprocessed grief indicate something deeper than the catalytic role of another fallen hero. To understand that, we first need to understand what is now called the “Hadi effect.”
Hadi entered the public consciousness through social media clips and television talk shows, where he went viral for his conflicts with known social and political heavyweights. He was physically modest, short, with unruly hair and beard, but with piercing eyes. His power was in language. He spoke an unapologetically plebeian Bangla, with the rhythms of the rural southern Bangladesh, a far cry from the sophisticated aristocratic language of Dhaka’s urban elite. It sounded familiar, even more intimate, to millions of people.
With a modest madrasa education, time spent at Dhaka University, and roots in a lower-middle-class family, Hadi represented an unstable combination. They are subalterns with sufficient access to threaten established hierarchies. He was neither completely inside the system nor completely outside the system. His religiosity – unapologetically and deeply Muslim – resonated powerfully in a country where about 90 percent of the population is Muslim and where faith is one of the few enduring sources of collective identity.
After the 2024 uprising, Hadi began to receive sustained attention from mainstream media. He confronted the cultural and political remnants of the Awami League head on as they cautiously attempted to counterattack. His language was direct and often aggressive, and he did so on purpose. Long before the party’s return to formal politics, Hadi warned many times of the dangers of allowing the party to return to public life through cultural and social networks.
This was not a traditional political battle. Hadi’s fight – if you can call it that – was aimed squarely at culture. For decades, Hasina’s Awami League has exerted near-hegemonic control over Bangladesh’s cultural sphere, saturating the media, academia and the arts with its preferred narratives. In principle, this is not surprising. As a center-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. Many in the country’s intellectual class found that vision both approachable and institutionally challenging.
But under Hasina’s four consecutive terms (three of which were secured through elections widely considered rigged or non-participatory), that cultural project metastasized. What was once a defense has solidified into dogma. Bengali nationalism was narrowed, history revised, and the war of liberation increasingly recast to elevate Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, Hasina’s father and leader of the independence struggle, into a near-mythical figure. Cultural production is no longer pluralistic. It became a dedication.
The consequences were severe. The dominant media and influential intellectuals not only amplified this narrative; they forced it. In the process, they alienated the worldview of the majority of Bangladeshis. Many of them were religiously moderate Muslims who could not identify with the imposed “secular” nationalism. Over time, respect for Mujib, as Rahman is widely remembered, shifted from deference to ritual, leaving little room for dissent without social or professional punishment.
That resentment never went away. It waited.
After the 2024 uprising, this was most evident in the destruction of Mujib’s statues and murals across the country. It would be a mistake to portray these acts as mere acts of vandalism or iconoclasm. These were attempts, however raw, to reclaim cultural institutions from state-sanctioned legitimacy. At their core was a demand to reaffirm a sociopolitical identity based on religious moderation rather than imposing secular symbolism.
No one embodies this disconnect more clearly than Sharif Osman Hadi.
Hadi’s rise to collective consciousness followed a clear arc. Without any apparent calculation, he first appeared on social media and then invaded mainstream platforms, methodically exposing the hypocrisy of the media-intellectual complex that enabled Hasina’s authoritarianism while obscuring moral superiority. His refusal to soften his criticism and 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 wanted to hear. He said out loud what others had whispered or completely repressed. He seemed sincere, perhaps even reckless. And in a political culture jaded by doublespeak, that honesty has proven appealing.
Hadi didn’t stop at criticism. He continued to establish the Inquilab Cultural Center using public funds, in a clear attempt to build an alternative cultural infrastructure. The mission was clear. It is about promoting a cultural idiom rooted in Bangladesh, based on Islamic values, and one that resonates with the social instincts of the majority rather than the parochial, urbane, secular aesthetic that has long been amplified by elite organizations. For many Bangladeshis who saw the dominant version of Bengali cultural expression as exclusive or imposed, the Inquilab Center felt more like a provocation than a corrective.
However, post-uprising Bangladesh was not just a testing ground for cultural experiments. Under the caretaker government, the country teetered from economic instability to political instability, with the national mood increasingly drawn to a single demand: electoral stability. Hadi understood this immediately. He concluded that cultural resistance will remain fragile unless it is entrenched in formal political power. Congress was a place of lasting influence.
His decision to contest the Dhaka central seat in the upcoming elections elevated his status almost overnight. Hadi, who ran without the backing of any major political establishment, was pitted against experienced and well-funded candidates from parties widely expected to return to power. Asymmetry was noticeable. It was a David and Goliath race in a city and country hungry for destruction. The attention was inevitable.
What followed was not so much a media strategy as a studied refusal to have a media strategy. Hadi allowed the contest’s symbolism to grow organically. His campaign was noticeably barebones, handing out flyers instead of billboards and shaking hands instead of motorcades. He prayed Fajr with voters, roamed working-class neighborhoods, and spoke in the same unsophisticated language that first made him recognizable. Social media did the rest, amplifying what seemed unscripted and therefore authentic.
At the heart of Hadi’s case was a single belief in him, and it took hold with surprising speed. It was that he was immortal. After 16 years of Hasina’s government, sustained by alliances with crony capitalists, a pliant bureaucracy, and selective patronage, corruption has become a hallmark of her regime. Hadi presented himself as its antithesis. He did not promise technological innovation or institutional reform. He promised something simpler and, to many, more convincing. It was about acting with the courage to stand up to authority without flinching.
In the early days after the July Uprisings, the same faith was briefly instilled in the student leaders who sparked a 21-day mass movement against systemic discrimination. They too were seen as clean and fearless. But that credibility was quickly eroded as politics reasserted old customs. Almost by default, the onus shifted to Hadi to uphold that belief and prove that integrity can survive close to power.
Interestingly, Hadi was never an architect of the July Uprising. But in its aftermath, he became one of its most important successors. Hadi in the TV debate occupied people’s hearts, but Hadi in the election campaign reached deeper.
This explains why his killing evoked a palpable sense of loss, and why many ordinary Bangladeshis felt, not out of cynicism, that something important had been taken from them.
After his death, Hadi grew larger, but whether he became stronger remains an open question. History offers no guarantees. His killing has already created an opportunity for others to speak in his name, capitalize on his image and turn sacrifice into political currency. Martyrdom has always been an easily available asset.
Still, it would be a mistake to think that Hadi will eventually become irrelevant once the grief fades. Popular sentiment will inevitably decline, but the unfinished struggle will not. His ideas – to take back the Agency for Cultural Affairs, to fight corruption without favors, to deny permission to elites – are still not resolved, much less defeated.
Hadi’s project remains unfinished. That is the real source of his persistence in the national imagination. And anyone who believes otherwise misunderstands both the moment and the person.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial stance of Al Jazeera.
