For those of us labelled Gen-Z, July 2024, was not a chapter from a history book or a half-remembered slogan shouted by older generations. It was lived, walked and bled into our streets. Hundreds of thousands of students took to the streets for one selfless cause. At that time, July meant standing against injustice- against a regime that had hollowed out institutions and crushed freedom of speech and thought.
That is why the vandalism of the offices of Prothom Alo, The Daily Star, Chhayanaut and Udichi following the death of Osman Hadi in the month of December 2025, feels not just tragic, but profoundly disorienting. Prothom Alo and The Daily Star are among the country’s most prominent newspapers.
At the same time, cultural institutions like Chhayanaut and Udichi are vital to the preservation and practice of our collective identity. To see them attacked in the name of “July” forces an unsettling reckoning.
Osman Hadi passed away on December 18, 2025, after being shot in the head on December 12, 2025. He was widely remembered as a brave July warrior, and even after the uprising, he was quite vocal about the issue of our national sovereignty and unity. His death deserves mourning, accountability and justice.
But what followed was a series of violent mob attacks on media houses and cultural centres, institutions which were not even remotely responsible for his death. This forces us to confront an uncomfortable question: What exactly did we fight for in July? What exactly did we achieve through all that bloodshed?
“I saw my peers being beaten by Chhatra League goons simply for expressing an opinion,” said Razequzzaman Jewel, a student at Dhaka University. “I felt the need to do something about it. That’s why I took to the streets last July. For me, July was about resisting violence and systemic injustice.”
Yet in the immediate aftermath of Osman Hadi’s death, certain groups exploited public grief and anger to redirect rage toward unrelated institutions. While the perpetrator remains at large, the first collective reaction was not an uncompromising demand for justice, but vandalism and intimidation aimed at journalists and cultural workers.
What we are witnessing is a dangerous confusion in public discourse, the belief that rage itself is resistance, that violence automatically equals revolution. Mob violence is steadily becoming normalised. But when anger replaces the rule of law, it accelerates social collapse rather than reform. Violence without accountability ends up resembling the very system we rose against in July.
“This incident reflects our collective moral decay as a nation,” said Ramisa Aniqah Arpa, a student of Brac University who was active during the July protests. “It is an attack on independent journalism, on freedom of speech, on art, on our cultural values. July was about freedom of expression, equality and justice. Invoking the spirit of July to justify such actions is deeply hypocritical.
Criticism of the media is not illegitimate. Journalism must always be questioned, scrutinised and challenged- especially in a country where power has often shaped narratives. But there is a categorical difference between critique and coercion. Between debate and destruction.
Burning down newsrooms with people inside is just a plainly heinous act. It only signals that force has replaced dialogue- that intimidation has become an argument. And that is precisely the logic that fascist regimes thrive on.
Those of us who marched in July did not do so to replace one form of suppression with another. We did not chant for freedom so that it could later be selectively applied. Free journalism is not journalism that comforts our anger or mirrors our grief. It is journalism that remains free even when it unsettles us.
This attack is not just an attack on buildings or organisations- it is an attack on the fragile idea that truth, art and expression can exist outside the control of mobs or the state.
What makes this moment especially painful is that it erodes moral clarity. When acts of vandalism are framed as emotional reactions or justified through revolutionary language, the line between justice and revenge blurs. And once that line disappears, everyone in the country becomes vulnerable.
Even Osman Hadi himself was vocal about condemning these acts of violence and vandalism. He never endorsed these. If the legacy of Osman Hadi is to mean anything lasting, it cannot be reduced to a justification for violence. His courage should remind us why freedom of expression matters- not why it should be threatened.
This is a decisive moment for our generation. What we choose now will determine not only how July is remembered, but whether its ideals survive at all. The choice is stark: we either protect the values July stood for, or we hollow them out while invoking its name. History, as it always does, will remember the difference.
