Anonymous graffiti artists faithfully copied Debashish Chakrabarty’s iconic red-and-yellow poster near Dhaka University (2024) | Courtesy of Ayesha Humayra Choudhury and Debashish Chakrabarty
Inspired by a popular insurrection against Sheikh Hasina’s increasingly autocratic 15-year tenure as prime minister of Bangladesh, in July 2024, US-based Bangladeshi artist Debashish Chakrabarty produced and circulated online more than 100 posters illustrating the symbols, martyrs, and demands of the movement. He urged protesters around the world to copy his images freely in order to express solidarity with the students and their revolutionary demands.
Chakrabarty designed each poster in a bold, graphic style, with the same vibrant red and yellow featured on the flag of the Chinese Communist Party, along with typography and imagery immediately recognizable as part of the lineage of Bengali political messaging. Despite the Bangladeshi government curfew, a nationwide telecommunications blackout, and the designer himself living thousands of miles away, these digital images took hold. Dissident graffiti artists throughout the country swung into action. All one needed was spray paint and a wall.
After the regime fell in early August, detailed reproductions of the Chakrabarty posters appeared beside the hasty graffiti scrawls that spurred the revolutionary movement. These included “Killer Hasina” and “Why did you kill my brothers?” and “We are free 8.5.24.”
Large painted murals with future-oriented messaging also appeared amid the chaos following Hasina’s resignation on August 5, 2024. They lined the walls opposite the nation’s sprawling parliament building, the Jatiyo Sangsad Bhaban, which for a long time was inaccessible to the public. Some of the murals show anime-style characters defending democracy. Some demand rights for tea plantation workers, or for indigenous groups. Others reproduce one of the slogans of the popular uprising, such as “Desh ta karo baaper na” (“This country doesn’t belong to anyone’s father”).
By the end of the July uprising, protestors saturated the walls of Dhaka, Bangladesh’s capital, with images and words of defiant revolt. They bore testament to Gen Z’s contagious and self-referential meme language such as “Oi mama na plz” (“Hey dude, please don’t do it”), which was marshaled as a satirical retort against the blatant party oppression. It was young people’s contributions that managed to escape the monitoring of the government—spreading online on screens, then spilling offline onto concrete.
The anti-government uprising began in July 2024, when security forces and pro-government groups responded to university students’ protests against discriminatory civil service quotas with unprecedented violence. A turning point was the murder of Abu Sayeed, a 25-year-old scholarship student from Rangpur, a city in northern Bangladesh. A video of his final moments circulated widely on television and social media in mid-July. In it, he has his arms outstretched in front of advancing police. His face bears a look of disbelief as they shoot him once in the chest before spraying him with bullets. He had just given a television interview earlier that day.
At the time, Prime Minister Hasina was the world’s longest-serving female head of state. Under her leadership, her father’s Awami League party transformed into a monolith more aligned with her interests than with any national or democratic cause. The last plausible free election was held in 2008. In the years after, Hasina jailed her main opposition leader, banned the country’s third-largest party, expanded draconian “cybersecurity” laws to criminalize free speech, and presided over a violent police state that routinely threw journalists, minorities, and opposition leaders into secret prisons.
More people outraged by the government’s murder of Abu Sayeed joined the students in the streets. During a five-day nationwide internet shutdown—the longest in the world since the Arab Spring—the public coalesced around a single demand: the resignation of Prime Minister Hasina. In response, Hasina’s government massacred hundreds of protestors, including children as young as four. According to one UN estimate, more than 1,400 people were killed.
Notable for its urban focus, This uprising was notable for its urban focus and cross-class, cross-coalition appeal. Private university students protesting in upscale neighborhoods brought the urban elite into the fold. On August 2, rickshaw pullers gathered in solidarity with the students, blocking the road in front of the Shaheed Minar, a national monument in Dhaka. By then, the student protestors had large numbers of citizens on their side, and the protests had evolved into a largely nonviolent civil resistance movement that forced the prime minister to flee the country.
After a brief constitutional crisis that led to the creation of an interim government led by Bangladeshi Nobel laureate and economist, Muhammad Yunus, a degree of calm returned to the streets of Dhaka.
But the graffiti and street paintings remained—and people quickly recognized their importance. In a rare show of unity between grassroots organizers and the new regime, activists, archivists, and artists began carrying out preservation campaigns and exhibitions to capture the living history on the walls before it disappeared. These were community-driven efforts, but at the same time, they participated in a narrative authorized by the new regime.
Yunus gifted foreign dignitaries rapidly assembled graffiti photobooks in September, only a month after this historic revolution. That fall, multinational corporations and the World Bank sponsored street art exhibitions.
At the same time, authorities and citizens alike began painting over and crossing out the July slogans. One of the larger-scale organized efforts was done by a group called Colours for Reform, which sought to replace the most offensive expressions of revolt that used violent or sexist language against Hasina with forward-looking artwork and slogans meant to promote “social harmony and democratic values.”
In December 2024, city workers removed a grotesque rendering of Hasina’s face from a metro rail pillar near Dhaka University, a historic center of protest and movement organizing. This prompted swift protest from student groups. Authorities issued an apology, and a new cartoon was drawn.
There is no current consensus in Bangladesh about what should be preserved of the graffiti and street art that brought about the July 2024 uprising.
This new Bangladesh is struggling on many counts: increased mob violence, a worsening macroeconomic crisis, and the continued persecution of journalists. Military and business stakeholders pressured the interim government for an election as soon as possible. On the one-year anniversary of the revolution, Yunus announced the elections would be moved up to February 2026.
More than a year later, the interim government has not brought about the change the graffiti artists envisioned. The opaque and contradictory constitutional reform process has neglected protestors’ demands for the removal of problematic language held over from the previous government’s repressive cybersecurity act.
A gulf has formed between the public’s current apprehension and the revolutionary possibility that still lives in the art on the city walls. Both the desperate slogans of the revolt and colorful collaborative murals painted after Hasina fled the country tell the story of a bloody youth-led uprising and the tensions in public remembrance that remain. The contradictory narratives form a palimpsest on city walls. To peel it back is to retrace a rough post-revolution timeline of hope, even as the future remains uncertain.
