The July Declaration: Mass Uprising, Revolution, and the Struggle for People’s Aspirations

The July Declaration of 2024, composed of 28 articles, has already been elevated to the status of a “historic document” in Bangladesh’s political landscape. According to Article 27, the declaration will be annexed to the schedule of the revised constitution once a new government is elected. By doing so, it provides official recognition of the July Mass Uprising—the popular movement that culminated in the fall of Sheikh Hasina’s authoritarian regime on August 5, 2024. Article 28 goes further, describing the declaration as the embodiment of the “aspirations of the people” who won the uprising.

Yet, the passage raises an unavoidable question: does the declaration truly reflect the aspirations of the people, or does it fall short of their revolutionary demands? The tension lies in the language, framing, and silences embedded in the text.

Perhaps the most contentious issue is not what the declaration explicitly says, but what it refuses to say. By consistently describing the events of July 2024 as a “mass uprising” or a “democratic struggle,” and not as a “revolution,” the declaration sets a deliberate interpretative boundary.

Revolutions imply radical ruptures that include systemic transformations that dismantle entrenched hierarchies of power, class, and exploitation. Uprisings, in contrast, often suggest moments of popular energy that may be absorbed back into an existing framework. By choosing the softer terminology, the drafters of the declaration seem to be signaling an unwillingness to break decisively with the old order. This is not merely semantic nitpicking. Article 21 explicitly speaks of building a state free from fascism, corruption, and discrimination and objectives that are inherently revolutionary in scope. If the intent is genuinely to eradicate the authoritarian structures that sustained Sheikh Hasina’s 15-year fascist rule, then why avoid the word "revolution"? The omission cannot be dismissed as accidental. It reveals a preference for continuity under the guise of democratic reform, rather than a bold commitment to systemic transformation.

To call it a revolution would have been to declare war not only on the immediate past regime but also on the deeper foundations of Bangladesh’s state structure: the entrenched bureaucracy, the compromised judiciary, the crony-capitalist nexus, and the culture of party-based authoritarianism. By restricting the vocabulary to uprising and democratic struggle, the declaration consciously reins in the revolutionary potential of the movement.

Article 16 describes the protests as taking “the form of a mass uprising.” Article 17 insists it was “a democratic struggle of the people.” Nowhere is it described as revolutionary. This exclusion is not a neutral choice; it reflects a deliberate alignment with Western neoliberal discourse, where “democratic struggle” is celebrated only so long as it reinforces existing global economic and political arrangements.

Democratic struggles within this framing rarely challenge the architecture of global capitalism, the stranglehold of international financial institutions, or the exploitative role of regional powers. Instead, they become celebrated episodes of orderly transition and moments where authoritarian excess is curtailed, but the structural inequalities remain intact.

By adopting this vocabulary, the July Declaration risks entrenching Bangladesh within the orbit of Western liberal orthodoxy. It narrows the horizon of transformation, confining the people’s aspirations to a procedural democracy that leaves untouched the geopolitical dominance of regional actors like India.

If one of the deepest aspirations of the uprising was freedom from both domestic oppression and foreign domination, the declaration falters gravely in addressing this demand.

Article 12 acknowledges the “injustice, domination, exploitation, and surveillance of foreign states.” Article 6 mentions “domestic and foreign conspiracies” that disrupted democratic processes. Yet the language remains vague, cautious, and deliberately non-confrontational.

The document fails to name the most obvious external actors: India, which for decades exerted political and intelligence control over Bangladesh’s affairs, and Sheikh Hasina seemed to be playing like a puppet government of India in this context. The Bangladesh Awami League led the country through the lens of India and, most importantly, executed their shadow agenda. As a regional power, India’s dominance over Bangladesh was vividly clear and constant. Most strikingly, it avoids any direct reference to India’s imperial strategies in Bangladesh, which have consistently intersected with Bangladesh’s political crises.

By sidestepping these realities, the declaration avoids articulating the people’s deepest grievance: that Bangladesh cannot achieve genuine sovereignty while trapped in the orbit of global capitalism and subjected to regional hegemony. The uprising was not only against Sheikh Hasina’s domestic repression but also against the system of dependency that her regime embodied. The declaration’s silence here is more than a gap; it is a betrayal of people’s aspirations.

Another troubling omission is historical. Article 1 anchors the July Uprising within the legacy of the 1971 Liberation War, citing the struggle against Pakistani exploitation and genocide. But the declaration erases the preceding 190 years of British colonialism.

From the famine of 1770 to the Great Bengal famine of 1943, and other catastrophic episodes of British misrule cost millions of lives, and these horrific events qualify as colonial genocides. British colonialism institutionalized the practices of exploitation, monopoly capitalism, and authoritarian governance that later regimes from Pakistan to post-1971 Bangladesh would inherit.

By ignoring this colonial legacy, the declaration fragments the historical consciousness of the nation. It reduces the genealogy of oppression to 23 years under Pakistan while leaving the much longer and formative colonial experience unaddressed. Without acknowledging the colonial roots of exploitation, the struggle against it in contemporary Bangladesh becomes incomplete and ahistorical.

The declaration rightly honors the martyrs of the uprising and promises legal protection for their families, as well as trials for crimes against humanity (Articles 23 and 24). Yet even here, omissions undermine its credibility.

Notably absent is any reference to the Shapla Chattar massacre of 2013, where madrasa students were killed in a state-sanctioned crackdown, and the Peelkhana massacre of 2009, where 57 army officers were brutally killed during the BDR mutiny. These events, central to the nation’s collective trauma, are excluded from the justice framework of the declaration.

To exclude them is to selectively interpret justice. It undermines the very aspiration of building a society free of impunity. If the promise of justice is filtered through political convenience, it risks perpetuating the same cycles of selective accountability that defined the previous regime.

Perhaps the most glaring absence in the declaration is any roadmap for reforming Bangladesh’s political parties.

The uprising was not merely against a ruling individual or a ruling party; it was against the entrenched authoritarian culture that pervades all major political organizations in Bangladesh. Corruption, clientelism, dynastic leadership, and violent suppression of dissent are not unique to Sheikh Hasina’s Awami League. They are structural features that cut across the political spectrum.

Yet the declaration is silent on this. Article 22 vaguely mentions preventing the recurrence of fascist rule but offers no mechanism to achieve this. Without democratizing political parties themselves, fascism will return in a new dimension. The absence of any commitment to internal party reform exposes the limits of the declaration’s vision.

Article 25 envisions constitutional reforms through free and fair elections. At first glance, this may appear promising. But by restricting the horizon of change to constitutional processes, the declaration confines itself to the very structures that facilitated authoritarianism in the first place.

The people demanded not just procedural reforms but a new political order that includes an end to systemic corruption, exploitation, and foreign dependency. To insist that these aspirations will be met solely through constitutional reform is to dilute their revolutionary content. It suggests a return to the old cycle of parliamentary politics, rather than the birth of a new political order.

The July Declaration was intended to immortalize the aspirations of a people who toppled one of the longest-serving authoritarian rulers in Bangladesh’s history. It has succeeded in memorializing the courage of students and ordinary citizens and in recognizing the uprising as a milestone in the nation’s democratic struggle.

Nevertheless, in its silences and evasions, it betrays the radical energy of the movement. By framing the uprising as a democratic struggle rather than a revolution, it reduces a transformative moment into a manageable episode. By avoiding confrontation with foreign domination, it sidesteps the question of sovereignty. By neglecting colonial history, it fragments national memory. By omitting references to critical massacres, it weakens the pursuit of justice. And by ignoring the need for party reform, it leaves the door open for fascism to reemerge.

The declaration, therefore, reflects not the full aspirations of the people but a selective, diluted version of them. It embodies the tension between revolutionary possibility and liberal containment. It is a historic document, yes, but one that reveals as much about what the state wishes to suppress as about what the people fought for.

The task ahead is clear: unless these limitations are addressed, the promise of July 2024 will remain deferred. The uprising will be remembered not as a revolution fulfilled, but as a revolution postponed.