Can a Revolution Become a Party? Bangladesh's Student Generation and the Test of Hegemony

“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.” — Antonio Gramsci In July 2024, something rare happened in Bangladesh. A movement with no single leader, no party symbol and no settled manifesto pushed out a prime minister who had ruled for fifteen years. Its most significant feature was that it was not organised by a politburo, nor funded by any known patron. At first, it was simply angry students protesting against the expanding quota system. Then it became something larger: angry citizens filling the streets until Sheikh Hasina had nowhere left to stand. For a few weeks, it felt as though the country had rewritten its rules overnight. But politics does not work like that. Politics is slow. It consists of committee meetings, coalition arithmetic and the careful management of local strongmen. It is about knowing whom to accommodate, whom to ignore and whom to keep close enough not to become dangerous. Now, nearly two years on, after the first post-uprising election concluded in February 2026, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) holds power from a highly advantageous position. The real question is no longer whether a mass uprising took place. Everyone agrees that it did. The more difficult question is whether that event retained political significance once the situation settled. The National Citizen Party (NCP), born directly out of the student movement, entered the election carrying the moral authority of 2024 on its back. Yet the result was not a student-led government. It was the BNP: an old party with old networks and a leader, Tarique Rahman, who represents continuity more than rupture.

The NCP won seats and drew considerable attention, but the machinery of the state appeared to return to the familiar logic of two-party politics — or perhaps now, one-and-a-half-party politics. The gap between what the streets demanded and what the ballot delivered is worth dwelling on.

Gramsci and the problem of absorption

This is where an old Italian Marxist becomes unexpectedly useful. Antonio Gramsci spent years in fascist prison thinking about why revolutions often fail to endure, even when they appear to succeed in the moment. His answer was not primarily about tanks, guns or the formal institutions of coercion. It was about something quieter: hegemony. Power, Gramsci argued, does not reside only in the police, the courts or parliament. It also lies in the things that come to feel like common sense: what is said on television, what religious leaders preach on Fridays, what businessmen assume when they hire, and what a voter considers normal while standing in a queue. A ruling class does not rule by force alone. It rules by persuading people — including many of its opponents — to accept its version of reality as simply the way things are. And this is the trick a capable ruling bloc can pull off: it does not always fight challengers head-on. It absorbs them. It borrows their language. Suddenly, everyone in power is talking about ‘reform’, ‘accountability’ and ‘the spirit of July’. The words survive. The teeth do not. One can see how quickly BNP figures began invoking the uprising in their speeches, even while retaining many of the patronage structures, local committees and business ties that had been rejected so emphatically in 2024. This is not quite hypocrisy. It is how hegemony works. A system does not need to silence its critics if it can speak their language back to them.

The struggle over common sense

The issue becomes particularly sharp around religion and secularism, because the student movement was never politically uniform. Some of the young people who occupied Shahbagh and university campuses leaned towards a secular, liberal vision of a modern civic republic. Others were drawn to a more religiously grounded political order. Meanwhile, Jamaat-e-Islami has re-entered the public sphere with greater confidence since Hasina’s fall. These are not minor differences that can be papered over with a shared hashtag. They are genuine political fault lines. And they are precisely the kind of divisions that a dominant bloc can exploit — not necessarily by crushing either side, but by allowing them to exhaust one another while it governs largely undisturbed. Gramsci described this as a prolonged struggle over what becomes accepted as ‘common sense’ within a society. As he put it: “Common sense is a chaotic aggregate of disparate conceptions, and one can find there anything that one likes.” — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (New York: International Publishers, 1973), p. 422. For Gramsci, this was a war of position: not one decisive battle, but a slow siege fought in schools, newspapers, mosques, universities and family dinner tables. Whoever wins that war may not even need to win an election outright, because they have already shaped what voters regard as reasonable to want. That war is wide open in Bangladesh. Nobody has won it. Secular civil-society groups, Islamist parties and the NCP — with its still unsettled ideological identity — are all contesting the meaning of the ‘spirit of July’.

The danger of institutional weakness

For a movement such as this, the central risk is absorption. Gramsci warned that counter-hegemonic forces broadly face two paths. Either they build durable institutions of their own — unions, media platforms, intellectual networks and civic organisations capable of outliving the emotional intensity of the protest — or they are gradually pulled into the system they set out to overturn. Leaders are offered ministries. Spokespeople are offered columns, airtime and invitations into elite circles. The language of revolt is borrowed, softened and mainstreamed until revolution comes to mean little more than a slightly altered cabinet reshuffle. There are already traces of this process in Bangladesh. Some student leaders now sit closer to power than to the streets from which they emerged. That is not necessarily betrayal. It is simply what often happens when a movement has not yet developed institutional legs strong enough to stand independently. The question, then, is whether July 2024 will become Bangladesh’s newest founding myth: an event every future government invokes, much as they invoke 1971, reduced to a symbol that everyone salutes but few are required to live up to.

Or is there still time for it to acquire real institutional weight — its own unions, its own schools of thought, its own durable political culture, and a civic imagination that does not depend on a single charismatic moment in the street? Nobody can say yet. That uncertainty may be the only honest conclusion. Bangladesh has rewritten its politics before. In 1971, a moment of radical national possibility was eventually absorbed into state ceremony long before its unresolved promises had been fulfilled. Whether July 2024 follows the same path — or whether this generation builds something that outlasts the moment — is still being decided. Not only in parliament, but in the smaller, quieter places where common sense is made.