In the early nineties, Shahbagh dawned pale and mysterious. It rose like an ancient city from rice-washed waters. Streets glistened as if inked with dust from Nawabi bakharkhani and ashes. Stalls at crossings exhaled jasmine, tuberose, marigold. Restaurants thickened the air with parata, paya, dim vaja, and dal vuna. Rickshaws and cars rattled past like iron insects. From the crossing, standing before PG Hospital toward TSC, you saw the Northern Road slip toward Bangla Academy and the Science Building. It carried students, teachers, people — and the hushed footsteps of history itself. By nine o’clock, rickshaws jostled for space. The campus pulsed with the life of a nation anchored at Shahbagh. Dhaka University and Shahbagh bore history’s cruelty. They witnessed resistance, oppression, survival, and pride. Shahbagh was never just a marketplace for flowers, food, books, and medicine. It was also an altar of ideas and creative dreams. Writers and thinkers debated over tea, killing kings and generals with words. The tar on the streets around TSC drank blood every decade — not of clerics’, but
of young dreamers’. Socialist Student Union members, Student League, Secular bloggers, DU professors bled on its pavements, etching a red chapter in the history the city could not wash away. Assassins silenced voices one by one. When they struck my teacher, Dr. Humayun Azad, they carved permanent hatred into his face. He survived but lived only half in this world, until death claimed him in a German twilight, six months later. DU Student Union's 2025 election became a theatre. Rigged stages allowed supporters of Avijit Roy’s killers to take their seats. Since July 2024, 761 armed zealots, along with Jamaat-Shibir and the Islamic Alliance, have been roaming freely in the country, plotting a Caliphate on soil that had chosen freedom a hundred years earlier. A sharp question remains: why did no cleric fall to these assassins? Silence answers. It shows whose hands guided the knives and who threw the bombs and grenades. Many forces contended for Bangladesh’s soul, but none gnawed like the venom of religious politics led by Moudusit, Salafist Jamat E Islam, Islamic…
