Northeast News first contact with Abu Hossain took place over Facebook Messenger: an introductory message requesting that he share his WhatsApp number. This was at 7:01 on Tuesday morning.
Hossain messaged back nine minutes later with a polite “kemon achhen” (how are you?). He did not take the call on Messenger but returned the call at 7:15 am. That call lasted an hour and seven minutes.
In the span of that time, he poured his heart into how the leadership of the Anti-Discrimination Students’ Movement had not invited his younger brother’s – Abu Sayed, the so-called first martyr of the movement – family to the formal launch of the National Citizen’s Party (NCP) on February 28.
A student at Begum Rokeya University, Abu Sayed, who hailed from Pirganj upazila in Rangpur district, was hit by pellets (allegedly fired by a policeman) before he succumbed to the injuries in a Rangpur hospital on July 16.
Abu Sayed’s death ignited a massive students’ movement that pushed the Awami League regime to abdicate before the then Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina fled to India on August 5.
“My brother (Abu Sayed) was the first martyr of the movement and yet the other well-known figures such as Nahid Islam and Sarjis Alam simply did not care enough to invite at least one member of my family,” Abu Hossain, 28, said – slowly, deliberately and with a lump in his throat.
Abu Hossain said he married in 2019 just before Covid-19 struck.
Deeply hurt by the cold shoulder from the NCP leadership, Hossain, who went to an aliya madrassah (for the first 12 years of his education) for being an alim (scholar), said that on February 28 he wrote a post on his Facebook page that reflected a lingering ache.
This post was a consequence of a phone call that he received from a Kurigram-based student, Shamsuzzaman Shamim, who expressed his emotional wound at Abu Hossain’s being left out of the list of invitees to the party launch programme in Dhaka.
Shamim, Abu Hossain said, pleaded with “me to say something and give vent to his feelings. So, I wrote the Facebook post”.
However, Hossain deleted the post after the NCP’s newly elected convenor, Nahid Islam, who is among clutch of students elected to the party’s top-level leadership, pleaded with him to do so.
“I removed the post when Nahid called even though I still feel that as a mark of recognition for Abu Sayed’s martyrdom, at least one of his family members should have been invited to the occasion,” Hossain said.
Abu Sayed was 23 when he died in that Rangpur hospital.
He went to Zafarpara Government Primary School in Pirganj for the first five years before he moved to Khalashi Secondary School. He then completed higher secondary school in Rangpur before enrolling himself in an undergraduate English course at Begum Rokeya University.
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Rangpur and Pirganj are 40 kms apart. “When Abu Sayed was still there, we were six brothers and three sisters. Five of the children were born to our father’s first wife. The other four were given birth by my father’s second wife after he turned a widower,” Abu Hossain said.
Without going into too many familial details, Abu Hossain said, “We have 40 decimals of agricultural land, which is one-fourth of an acre. I am a farmer but since Aby Sayed’s death I have been managing a small provision store owned by an elder half-brother”.
Abu Hossain agreed that the “law and order situation in Bangladesh is bad” and that there “are some kattor-panthi (extremist elements) people who have infiltrated the students’ ranks. I do not support such elements and the incidence of mob justice across the country. Also, if elections are delayed, the law and order situation will take a turn for the worse”.
Abu Hossain went to a madrassah but has a keen sense of Bangladesh politics and the Indian establishment’s “close ties with the successive governments led by Sheikh Hasina”.
“I was in class 6 or 7 when the 2008 elections took place. That election was relatively clean. But the next three elections were highly questionable as Hasina tinkered with the constitution to ensure that only the Awami League would win elections. I was eligible to vote in 2018 but stayed away from casting my ballot in the general election that year,” Abu Hossaid said with a tinge of anger in his voice.
