Dr. Mustofa Munir
History often forges its most enduring parallels not through chronology, but through conscience. Across different eras, languages, and battlefields, certain spirits rise with the same fire—to resist tyranny, to speak for the silenced, and to demand justice at any cost.
Poet Kazi Nazrul Islam and Shahid Osman Hadi belong to that rare lineage. Though separated by a century, they stood on the same moral ground, fought the same kind of oppression, and, in a striking convergence of fate, now rested side by side in the same soil.
Shahid (Martyr) Osman Hadi, one of the most prominent youth leaders of the July 24 Revolution and a fearless political reformist, was assassinated in a point-blank shooting on 12th December, 2025 by a masked gunman on a motorcycle in Dhaka, Bangladesh. His death was not merely the silencing of a young leader; it was an attempt to extinguish a rising voice of resistance. Hadi had emerged as a central figure in the July revolutionary movement against the authoritarian regime of Sheikh Hasina and her party collaborators—accused by many of systematic killings, enforced disappearances, and torture amounting to crimes against humanity. Following the collapse of the regime, the key figures of the Awami League government, including Hasina, fled to India, where they found shelter from the Indian Government, leaving behind an invigorated nation with utter hope and a dream to build a new country by reforming its old constitution and thus establishing democracy, justice and equality in the land.
On 20th December 2025, a day overwhelmed by a melancholic ambience, Shahid Osman Hadi was laid to rest on the grounds of Dhaka University Mosque, in front of thousands of people and millions more from all over the country and the world, beside the grave of the rebel poet Kazi Nazrul Islam. This physical proximity of two great talents is more than a coincidence. It is a silent dialogue between two revolutionaries who challenged power in their own tongues: one through poetry and song, the other through uncompromising political resistance.
Nazrul Islam, the “Rebel Poet” of Bengal, shattered the inertia of tradition. At a time when literature bowed to a thousand-year-old decorum, he infused Bengali poetry, music, and lyrics with defiance, equality, love and spiritual rebellion. He rejected submission—whether cultural, religious, or political—and wrote with a thunder that awakened the oppressed.
Osman Hadi, by being a rising incandescent in the political arena, brought about a rhythm and revolutionary fervour in the hearts of the people of Bangladesh within a short time. With his group ‘Inqilab Mancha’, he broke away from other parallel political parties of the youths of the July revolution’24. Like Poet Nazrul, he was driven by his own individuality.
He refused to compromise with the Interim government on many issues, particularly on the issue of the slow-paced progress of Hasina’s case on the crimes against humanity in the court of the International Crimes Tribunal (ICT), Dhaka. Standing alone, he confronted the Interim government’s Advisers, bureaucrats, segments of the military establishment, and India’s overarching hegemony and enmity. Hadi demonstrated his bravery, honesty, and sincerity in his speech and actions during the 36 days of July 24 and the last sixteen months after July till the day he died.
What binds Nazrul and Hadi most profoundly is their shared intimacy with the suffering of ordinary people. Nazrul lived through the brutalities of British colonialism, witnessing famine, disease, and death, as well as the catastrophic aftermath of the First and Second World Wars. Those experiences are deeply etched into his verse, making his poetry a vessel of collective pain and resistance.
Under the fascist Hasina regime, while still a student a few years back, Osman Hadi saw his own generation and the older generation suffering and subjected to enforced disappearance, mass arrests, torture, and extrajudicial killings. Neither Poet Nazrul nor Osman Hadi has chosen comfort over their conscience.
In the end, their lives converged in death by a divine decree. Buried side by side, the poet and the martyr share not only a resting place but a legacy—a testament that the struggle for justice transcends time and method. One wielded words like weapons, the other wielded truth in the face of bullets. Both paid a price.
Nazrul lingered on, but the poet within him had fallen silent long before his final breath. Similarly, the sudden death of Osman Hadi caused his unbloomed talents to remain in a complete pause forever. In that sense, their death was an unfinished song to be sung again.
Like poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who died at the age of thirty, poet Nazrul and Osman Hadi departed before their genius could gain a full blossom, leaving behind not a completed garden, but scattered seeds of brilliance that continue to haunt and inspire the world.
Two revolutionaries—Poet Nazrul and Shahid Osman Hadi—fought for one cause: Justice. And in a land still searching for its moral compass, their shared silence speaks louder than tyranny ever could.
(Dr. Mustofa Munir is a Nazrul Researcher and published author of Nazrul’s poetry and lyrics).
