📷 Newsman Collage

Sharif Khiam Ahmed, Dhaka

Tens of millions of Bangladeshis, shut in under curfew, were cut off from the outside world. It was the fourth straight day of an internet blackout. International news agencies were still reporting a death toll capped at 151. At that moment, from London, a thousand miles away, Tarique Rahman leveled a direct accusation of genocide against Sheikh Hasina.

“As many as 500 people, including students, have been martyred in this genocide so far,” he said in a video message. “The protesters now have only one demand. The people of Bangladesh now have only one demand: the resignation of the murderer Hasina. That is why it is one point, one demand, Sheikh Hasina’s resignation,” Rahman added.

That is how the exiled opposition leader, now Bangladesh’s prime minister, put it 13 days before Nahid Islam, the leader of the Students Against Discrimination that spearheaded the July uprising, formally announced the ‘one-point’ demand for the government’s resignation.

The message, posted on the night of July 21, 2024, to Rahman’s YouTube channel and the Facebook page of his Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), carried a lengthy title: “Hasina’s killer forces are murdering our children in the streets. Take to the field with everything you have to bring down Hasina. Starting today. Starting now.”

While Rahman called for the overthrow of the Awami League government from his political exile in London, Sheikh Hasina’s niece, Tulip Siddiq, was serving as a minister in the UK government in that same city.

At the opening of that seven-minute, 29-second message calling for the government’s final downfall, Rahman said, “Since July 18, our beloved Bangladesh has been cut off from the world. Genocide is underway as Bangladesh is isolated from the world. Police, the Rapid Action Battalion (RAB), the Border Guard Bangladesh (BGB), and Chhatra League and Jubo League (the Awami League’s student and youth wings) thugs are carrying out indiscriminate genocide. As many as 500 people, including students, have been martyred in this genocide so far. Countless people have been injured. The casualty count is rising every day. Bangladesh is now in a state approaching civil war. The country’s ‘controlled media’ cannot report the truth. The internet has been shut down.”

While the world’s leading news agencies, Reuters, AFP, and Al Jazeera, were still stuck in the 150s, how did the BNP leader arrive at a far higher death toll? How was ‘live data’ from every corner of a locked-down Dhaka reaching his desk?

The narrative was shared with One-man Newsroom by journalist Sayed Khan, also known as Hafiz Al Asad. He was arrested during the July uprising on charges of sabotaging the Dhaka Metrorail. Khan is the organizing secretary of the Pro-BNP faction of the Dhaka Union of Journalists (DUJ) and a director of the Ziaur Rahman Foundation, named after the BNP’s founder.

Behind how authentic information from Dhaka reached Rahman lies a story of daring journalism. Sitting in the same Maghbazar home in Dhaka from which he was arrested on the night of July 25, 2024, Khan told this reporter, on the afternoon of March 12, 2025, that the main reason for his arrest was that he had been feeding real, ground-level information directly by mobile phone to the BNP’s acting chairman during the internet blackout.

Through him, Khan claims, Rahman was also receiving internal police information at the time. “When the government thought it was controlling information, it was really living in a fool’s paradise. How many bodies were arriving at a given hospital morgue, or which police station had gone on the back foot for fear of running out of bullets, these details were reaching Tarique Rahman’s desk in London every two hours,” he said.

According to Khan, while many news outlets were starved of information as they waited on official, verified sources, Rahman, drawing on precise data lifted from the police’s own internal messages, obtained through a special arrangement, understood that the foundations of the regime were shaking. That, Khan says, is precisely why Rahman, without hesitation, called for all-out, final resistance.

What Was That Special Arrangement?

During the uprising, Khan, who was then the Bangladesh correspondent for Mirror Asia, an outlet based in Germany, established a risky yet strategic network to collect internal police information and accurate news. He placed a journalist inside the radio station at police headquarters, the hub through which wireless messages from across the country arrived.

Because this journalist’s family was from Gopalganj, Sheikh Hasina’s home district, police officers took him ‍as an Awami League loyalist, trusted him, and never grew suspicious. That trust gave him access to the radio receiver room, where he sat with a recorder and captured all of the police’s internal wireless traffic. Most of the time, he met Khan at the Dhaka Reporters Unity (DRU) to hand over the recordings.

To ensure his teammate felt secure at the police headquarters’ radio station, Khan allocated BDT 10,000 (USD 81.01) each day to provide meals for the on-duty officers. This way, they would feel comfortable with the presence of the Mirror Asia correspondent and maintain open communication. “I made that investment to purify the news and to get everything, first, as fast as possible,” Khan said. “Whether police admit it officially or not, their internal channels give the real death count.”

It was just as this strategy succeeded in surfacing the true toll the government was trying to conceal that Rahman established direct contact with him. “BNP’s acting chairman, Tarique Rahman, called me and said… give me an update directly, every two hours,” Khan told One-man Newsroom. “He gave me a phone number — his personal number.”

Describing how the conversation began, Khan recalled: “Rahman said, ‘A lot of people are calling your news rumors.’ I said, Sir, these aren’t rumors; they’re astonishing news, because the people calling it a rumor don’t have the reach to get that information.” From that day until the moment of his arrest, Khan says he risked his life feeding Rahman information, waging a daring campaign to challenge the Awami League government’s monopoly on the narrative.

Khan told One-man Newsroom that Dhaka’s mobile network was in dire shape that July. Coverage was unavailable in many places. To get an unbroken signal, he risked his life standing on rooftops or beneath cell towers to make his calls. On several occasions, he provided information from a tower next to the wall of the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO), an act for which he was later interrogated by the police Detective Branch (DB).

On the day of his arrest, before heading home, Khan stood beneath a rooftop tower on a building in Siddheshwari and spoke with Rahman for nearly 29 minutes. That day, Rahman voiced alarm over Hasina’s determination to cling to power. “The way Hasina has started killing children, killing ordinary people; she’ll kill two or three hundred thousand. Even then she won’t stop, she won’t give up power,” he told Khan.

Rahman also expressed concern for Khan’s safety and warned him to be careful. “He said, ‘Look, you’re speaking with me directly by phone, so be careful, you could be under tracking.’ … I said, ‘ Sir, if my arrest can bring about real freedom, I have no objection to being arrested,” Khan said.

Still, Rahman’s warning left him uneasy. Lying in bed, he called Rahman one last time from his wife’s mobile phone. “Sir, I can also reach you from this number,” he said. “This is my wife’s number, save it… I won’t be using my own phone from tomorrow.”

During that call, Rahman assigned him another sensitive task: to compile, by noon the next day, a complete list of how many people had died in which districts, which hospitals held the bodies, and how many each hospital had received.

Just as Khan agreed and was preparing to hang up, the joint forces entered his home. “I told him, ‘Okay, sir.’ I still hadn’t hung up the phone. By then, the law enforcement forces had already come into my home,” Khan said.

“My eldest son came and said, ‘Dad, the internet line people are here’… then my wife came and asked, ‘Who are these people? Come and see.’ I mean, a huge number of people, probably 10 to 15, had come right into the house,” the journalist-union leader added.

An Attempt to Frame Tarique Rahman

During interrogation, Khan says, he was asked repeatedly and in detail about Rahman. By his account, the questioning centered on his contact with Rahman and the content of their conversations; what instructions Rahman had given him and what plans the two had made. Khan says he answered that he had spoken with Rahman purely as a journalist.

He says he was pressured to admit that Rahman had sent him money, and that he had distributed it around the country to make bombs or set fires. Citing records of stringer-fee payments from Mirror Asia, the law-enforcement officers tried to force him to admit “this money came from Tarique Rahman.”

Even during five days of remand at the DB office, he was questioned about his relationship with Rahman; the subject came up even in a face-to-face session with Harun ur Rashid, the then-notorious head of the DB. Khan claims the questions were part of a political effort to recast his journalistic contact with Rahman as an act of sabotage.

Khan believes his newsgathering and regular contact with Rahman became a major concern for the government of the day, particularly his feeding of information from right beside the PMO’s walls, and his leaking, via a PMO official, of word that Hasina had clashed with the chiefs of the three armed services. That, he says, made him a direct target of the state.

In a lengthy conversation with One-man Newsroom, Khan said that besides his contact at police headquarters, he was especially grateful to Saifur Rahman Asad, a close aide of the businessman Giasuddin Al Mamun. When topping up a phone became almost impossible during the uprising, it was Asad who, through a special arrangement, recharged Khan’s number with 15,000 taka, restoring his ability to make international calls.

“When Abu Sayed was killed on July 16, the shape of the movement changed, and a kind of censorship descended on the media,” Khan said. Various state agencies began dictating precisely which news could run and which could not. As the death toll climbed, so did the pressure on journalists, meaning Khan was already under state pressure even before he began feeding information directly to Rahman.

“Direct pressure started coming from the Directorate General of Forces Intelligence (DGFI), from a couple of police intelligence units, and from RAB’s intelligence wing, telling us this news could not go out,” Khan said. The channels used to send news were also placed under surveillance, he added, “They were cloning our emails. Whatever we emailed, or said on the phone, on WhatsApp or any other platform, they were monitoring it.”

Objections to the ‘One-Point’ Demand

Poet and thinker Farhad Mazhar, an ideological mentor to leading figures of the Students Against Discrimination that started the quota-reform campaign, including Nahid Islam, now chief whip of the parliamentary opposition, believes the ‘one-point’ demand in Rahman’s July 21 message and the one declared by leftist theorist Professor Anu Muhammad at the August 2 ‘Droho Jatra’ (March of Defiance) ultimately served the same purpose: blocking structural change to the state while ensuring only a change of individuals.

In his view, the ‘one-point’ declaration was an Indian agenda, a defense of Delhi’s regional political interests that defused the revolutionary potential of the mass uprising. Hasina, he argues, had become a liability for Delhi, so it wanted her removed and safely relocated there. “By forcing Hasina to resign on the 5th and sending her to Delhi, agencies and certain groups took control of the movement into their own hands,” Mazhar said.

Nahid Islam and the young student leaders, Mazhar says, were initially fighting for the goals of ‘abolishing fascism’ and drafting a ‘new constitution.’ He believes the one-point resignation campaign was pushed forward precisely to overshadow that youth-led state-building politics. He also claims that the Americans sought to steer the student movement.

“While they were in the safe house, people from the United States made contact with them,” he told One-man Newsroom. Mazhar believes the Americans, too, wanted Hasina removed from power, but wanted to keep intact the very state structure the students were fighting against. Because the student leaders were very young and lacked political experience, he argues, they did not fully grasp this.

But Mahathero Muhammad, a writer, journalist, and activist, who took part in the July uprising as a student, said nothing was surprising about Farhad Mazhar calling these declarations an “Indian conspiracy.” Mazhar, he noted, is an ideological mentor to circles that also regard Bangladesh’s 1971 Liberation War as an “Indian conspiracy.”

“His theory feeds American imperialism,” the younger activist added. In Mahathero’s view, the ‘one-point’ declaration was not merely a political statement but an organic outcome of the students’ long-building understanding and the collective resistance of ordinary people; not something any single ‘mastermind’ or ideological leader can claim sole credit for.

“The July movement grew organically under Hasina’s rule… calling anyone a mastermind or theoretical leader denies the organic nature that emerged through the people’s struggle,” he said.

Mahathero noted that when some of the main coordinators announced from the DB office that the movement was being called off, ordinary people spontaneously declared themselves “coordinators” on Facebook and kept it going; an ‘organic’ popular awakening that, he argues, ultimately gave the one-point demand its final shape.

In his view, certain groups now want to inflate the significance of the August 3 declaration to present themselves as the movement’s ‘sole liberators,’ a strategy, he says, for manufacturing their own political power and legitimacy.

India viewed the July uprising as an internal matter for Bangladesh, also expressed concern over the violence and protection of religious minorities. External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar informed the Lok Sabha that India granted temporary asylum to Sheikh Hasina on humanitarian grounds after she urgently requested to escape due to fears for her life.

The United States views the student-led movement in July as a genuine expression of the Bangladeshi people’s desire for democracy and justice. The US Department of State dismissed claims from some Indian and local media suggesting US involvement in the movement or the government’s downfall as unfounded and fictional.

July 21, the day of the BNP’s and Rahman’s ‘one-point’ declaration, was one of the hardest days of the uprising. On the same day, the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court issued a historic ruling in favor of quota reform, establishing merit-based recruitment at 93% of government positions.

Although a legal victory was achieved on one front, the street leadership, specifically the coordinators of the Students Against Discrimination, faced extreme peril and were isolated from one another. Toward dawn, Nahid Islam was found dumped under a bridge in Dhaka’s Purbachal area, his hands and eyes bound, bloodied and unconscious.

His body bore marks of brutal physical torture. After regaining consciousness that morning, he took a CNG auto-rickshaw home and later admitted to Gonoshasthaya Kendra, a private hospital. He had been seized, blindfolded, by plainclothes men from Nandipara in Khilgaon at midnight on July 19.

Asif Mahmud and Abu Baker Majumder had also been missing entirely since July 19; as of July 21, their families had no idea where they were. They were later dumped, blindfolded, in Hatirjheel and Dhanmondi respectively on July 24, and were also admitted to Gonoshasthaya.

With block raids underway on every side and the internet down, all the movement’s leading figures; Sarjis Alam, Hasnat Abdullah, Rifat Rashid, Nusrat Tabassum and Abdul Qader among them, were in hiding amid extreme insecurity.

It was at this moment that Rahman, in his ‘one-point’ message, branded Hasina directly a ‘murderer’ and ‘the country’s top corrupt figure,” arguing that since she herself was ordering the killings, seeking justice for the murders from her was impossible.

Rahman urged the world to support Bangladeshis as it did during the 1971 Liberation War. He appealed to military personnel not to allow the army to turn against the public to protect Hasina. “Do not dishonor that uniform to satisfy today’s public enemy Hasina, killer Hasina’s hunger for illegitimate power,” he said.

Still, Questions Linger Over the BNP

Raising the question “What did Tarique Rahman want?” Mazhar said, “They weren’t part of the mass uprising.” Citing a remark by BNP Secretary General Mirza Fakhrul Islam Alamgir, he said the party had insisted at the time that the students were the ones protesting, and that the BNP was not part of it.

He claims that although many individual BNP and Chhatra Dal members took part personally, “Chhatra Dal’s organizational role was very minor,” and “Shibir (Islami Chhatrashibir) certainly played a role throughout the mass uprising.” Calling this the movement’s true history, he added, “You have to salute Shibir. Shibir didn’t do anything wrong.”

Khan, however, says Rahman instructed BNP leaders to blend in with ordinary people, without banners or signboards, so the movement would not take on a partisan color, and to help it succeed on those terms. Even from distant exile, Rahman kept round-the-clock watch on the situation on Dhaka’s streets. When the movement crystallized into the one-point demand for Hasina’s resignation, Rahman called on the party’s leaders, workers and supporters to take to the field with everything they had.

Answering that call, BNP activists, including Chhatra Dal and Jubo Dal members, mounted major resistance on the streets, which Khan says helped accelerate the movement’s final victory. “Now that the movement has succeeded, plenty of people are flinging mud at each other over sharing the credit,” Khan said.

Had it been clear, during that difficult stretch of the movement, that such a scramble for credit lay ahead, he believes, no one could have taken this achievement away from Rahman. He claims Rahman himself stayed out of the public frame and directed everything from behind the scenes; a strategic choice, in his telling, that let the movement take shape as a broad social movement, even as many now seek a share of the credit.

Earlier, on July 19, the day before the curfew, all around and the roar of sound grenades and bullets in the streets, the BNP, at that extreme moment, opened its central Nayapaltan office to the protesting students and citizens facing state repression. Anisur Rahman Talukder, a central party leader who witnessed the episode and is now a member of parliament, confirmed the account to this reporter, “We opened up the party office.”

Around the same time, Nasir Uddin, Chhatra Dal’s general secretary, said, “We believe that the ongoing democratic movement, this united movement of Chhatra Dal, Jubo Dal and the ordinary people of this country, will succeed.” He added: “No student movement in Bangladesh has ever failed, and this murderer Sheikh Hasina will never be able to hold onto power after killing students. We believe her murderous government will be forced out through this democratic student movement.”

Nasir’s prediction proved correct. After Hasina’s government fell, the judiciary, during the interim government’s tenure, cleared all of Rahman’s legal obstacles and sentences, including the case over the August 21 grenade attack and corruption charges. After 17 years in exile, he made a triumphant return home on December 25 of last year. When the BNP won an outright majority in the general election held on February 12 this year, Rahman was sworn in on February 17 as Bangladesh’s 11th prime minister.

Tulip Siddiq, who was serving as the UK’s Economic Secretary to the Treasury, faced significant political and ethical pressure after her aunt’s government fell amidst allegations of international embezzlement and corruption involving the Sheikh family.

Amid controversy, she was forced to resign from her UK ministerial position in January 2025, as investigations in Bangladesh raised concerns about a conflict of interest. However, she continues to serve as a member of the British Parliament.

Siddiq has dismissed the financial-irregularity and corruption allegations raised by Bangladesh’s interim government and Anti-Corruption Commission as entirely false and ‘politically motivated,’ noting that the UK’s Independent Adviser on Ministerial Standards found no evidence, after investigating, of financial irregularity or a breach of the ministerial code.

On her resignation, she was unambiguous with reporters: she stepped down out of a sense of duty, so the controversy over her family ties would not ‘distract’ from the work of Keir Starmer’s government. Describing herself as British by birth, she said she holds no property or business interests in Bangladesh and has always operated transparently, within UK government rules.