Osman Hadi and the Limits of Political Imagination in Bangladesh

The death of Osman Hadi, following an attempt on his life, should not be approached merely as another episode of political violence in Bangladesh. It occurred in the aftermath of the 2024 student- and mass-led uprising that brought an end to nearly fifteen years of authoritarian rule—an uprising that was met with a lethal state crackdown, resulting in the deaths of an estimated 1,400 people. Hadi emerged during this period as a cultural activist, lecturer, and independent political aspirant associated with the movement, yet neither party cadre nor cultural functionary.

His death therefore marks a moment when a certain kind of political actor became suddenly visible and then abruptly extinguished. The more intriguing question is not simply why he was attacked, a matter still under investigation, but why his presence proved so difficult to classify. How did a figure with no formal party affiliation become intelligible to large crowds while remaining persistently unintelligible—and at times suspect—to the institutions that ordinarily manage political meaning?

Hadi mattered less as a symbol than as a disturbance in Bangladesh’s established political grammar. He did not fit comfortably into the dominant oppositions—Islamist versus secular, nationalist versus “communal,” ruling party versus opposition—through which public legitimacy is typically sorted. His short public life therefore offers a diagnostic case. It throws into view the limits of a political imagination that can accommodate many forms of disagreement but struggles to recognize ethical, non-aligned aspiration when it appears outside sanctioned vocabularies.

For decades, the moral grammar of Bangladeshi nationalism has been shaped by a relatively narrow cultural consensus. Institutions such as Chhayanaut and Udichi have played an important role in sustaining secular nationalist traditions. Yet their aesthetic and ideological orientation has also come to function, in practice, as an informal boundary of legitimacy. Cultural expression aligned with this framework tends to be normalized as patriotic; expressions that fall outside it—particularly those drawing on Islamic ethical idioms—are frequently rendered ambiguous or suspect. Hadi unsettled this hierarchy not by rejecting culture as such, but by questioning who gets to define the nation’s cultural center.

This cultural hierarchy did not emerge in isolation. It was historically shaped in relation to Indian regional dominance (ādhipatyobād), through which certain Bengali–Rabindric forms acquired the status of universal culture while other Bangladeshi sensibilities were rendered parochial or suspect. Hadi’s cultural critique, articulated through platforms such as Inqilab Mancha, was therefore inseparable from his opposition to Indian hegemony—not as a matter of foreign policy rhetoric, but as a challenge to how cultural authority itself had been imported, normalized, and institutionalized within Bangladesh.

This cultural hierarchy reflects what sociologist Irfan Ahmad has described as Hindu Orientalism: a structure of perception in which Hindu-derived cultural forms appear universal and secular, while Muslim ethical and political expressions are rendered excessive, suspect, or in need of discipline—even when they operate outside formal Islamist politics.

It is crucial to note that Hadi emerged first as a cultural actor. Through platforms such as Inqilab Mancha– a cultural center, through which Hadi’s primary intervention was not electoral but symbolic: a challenge to the dominance of imported and elite secular aesthetics in defining Bangladeshi national culture.

What distinguished Hadi was his refusal of inherited binaries. He was neither aligned with Islamist parties nor integrated into leftist or secular organizational networks. His articulation of patriotism did not rest on party loyalty, on a singular reading of 1971, or on geopolitical alignment. Instead, it drew on a moral vocabulary of justice, equity, and accountability—one that spoke to religious sensibilities without confining itself to sectarian politics. This refusal to be categorized made him politically illegible, and in a political field that depends on legibility for regulation, illegibility itself becomes destabilizing.

His decision to contest the Dhaka-8 constituency as an independent candidate transformed this cultural critique into an institutional challenge. Campaigning without large sums of money—offering muri and batasha rather than spectacle—was not an exercise in moral romanticism but a deliberate rejection of Bangladesh’s monetized electoral culture. It inverted the prevailing assumption that political participation must be purchased. In a political economy where legitimacy flows through patronage and capital, Hadi’s insistence on persuasion over payment exposed the fragility of that arrangement rather than its alternatives.

Hadi’s rapid resonance among young people, particularly those who had long claimed to “hate politics,” is sociologically revealing. This was not a sudden politicization of an apathetic generation, but the articulation of a latent discontent. Many young Bangladeshis had withdrawn from formal politics not because they lacked moral concerns, but because politics had come to appear as a closed and repetitive cartel. Hadi did not promise power or access; he offered coherence. His presence suggested that politics might once again be practiced as an ethical activity rather than a purely transactional one.

For many, his critique of Indian dominance resonated not as abstract geopolitics but as an explanation for their own cultural dislocation—the sense that national life was being narrated through borrowed idioms in which they could not fully recognize themselves.

The response of mainstream “secular” media and political parties to Hadi followed a familiar pattern. Despite the absence of organizational affiliation, he was frequently framed through insinuations of Jamaat or Shibir. His madrasa background and visible piety were treated as sufficient indicators of latent extremism. What is notable here is not misinformation but method—a method shaped by a secular-nationalist common sense that treats visible Muslim ethics as politically latent and therefore governable only through suspicion. Secularism functioned less as a worldview than as a sorting mechanism—distinguishing acceptable religion from dangerous religion, visible piety from political threat. In this sense, “Islamist” operated not as an empirical description but as a stigmatizing label, disciplining forms of religiosity that challenged cultural monopoly while remaining politically unaffiliated.

Hadi’s authority did not emerge from party machinery but from pedagogy. As a lecturer, poet, and public speaker, he treated civic life as a space of moral instruction. This form of authority—rooted in speech, example, and ethical consistency—cannot be easily regulated by institutions designed to manage party actors. It bypasses bureaucratic mediation and speaks directly to moral intuition. Such authority is difficult to co-opt, and precisely for that reason, unsettling to established power.

The scale and social diversity of the crowd at his funeral signaled more than personal attachment. It reflected a collective recognition that something uncommon had been lost: the possibility of entering politics without moral compromise at the point of entry. Yet even this moment of shared grief was quickly reabsorbed into familiar binaries, as slogans and geopolitical anxieties threatened to eclipse the ethical substance of Hadi’s intervention. The rapid translation of mourning into recognizable political scripts underscored the narrowness of the available interpretive frames.

Osman Hadi’s significance, then, lies not in the office he might have held, but in the question he forced into public view. Why has Bangladesh’s political imagination become so constrained that ethical independence itself appears subversive? His death does not simply indict violence; it exposes the brittleness of a political culture that can accommodate corruption, patronage, and ideological conformity, yet struggles to recognize non-aligned virtue. Whether this form of politics can endure without being absorbed or erased remains an open question. Equally open is whether our analytical frameworks are capable of recognizing it when it appears.

Hadi’s case is not unique to Bangladesh; it reflects a broader South Asian pattern in which postcolonial states struggle to accommodate ethical, non-aligned political actors who fall outside inherited secular–nationalist and Islamist frameworks.

If figures like Osman Hadi remain analytically unintelligible, the risk is not only political exclusion but conceptual repetition: in which scholarship and public analysis may end up reproducing the same classificatory limits that power enforces. The question, then, is not merely whether Bangladesh can accommodate ethical, non-aligned political life, but whether our existing analytical vocabularies are capable of recognizing it when it appears.