The Bangladesh’s Unfinished July Revolution Must Also Liberate Nature
- M. Zakir Hossain Khan
- 2 days ago
- 8 min read
Two years after the historic events of 5 August 2024, Bangladesh faces a deeper question than who governs the country, what kind of state, economy and relationship with nature should emerge from the sacrifices of the July Revolution?
The student-led uprising began over discrimination in access to public employment, but it rapidly became something much larger. The United Nations Human Rights Office later concluded that the protests were rooted in broader grievances arising from “destructive and corrupt politics and governance” that had entrenched economic inequality. Its fact-finding report estimated that as many as 1,400 people may have been killed between 1 July and 15 August 2024, while thousands were injured. The UN found reasonable grounds to believe that serious violations were systematically committed to suppress the protests.
Seen from the perspective of Natural Rights Led Governance (NRLG), July was therefore more than a political uprising. It was fundamentally a struggle over natural rights: the right to life, liberty, dignity, equality, property, participation, justice and freedom from arbitrary domination.
But there is another dimension of the revolution that Bangladesh has barely begun to confront.
A political system that monopolizes power often also facilitates the monopolization of land, rivers, forests, wetlands, energy, mineral resources and public wealth. Political fascism and natural resource fascism can therefore become mutually reinforcing systems. And unless Bangladesh dismantles both, the July Revolution will remain incomplete.
When political power becomes ownership
Political authoritarianism begins when the state ceases to regard citizens as rights-holders and starts treating them as subjects to be controlled.
Natural resource authoritarianism begins in almost the same way, nature ceases to be regarded as a living foundation of society and becomes an inventory of assets available for allocation, extraction, occupation and profit.
By natural resource fascism, I do not mean a formally established category of international law or political science. I use the term to describe a specific form of concentrated power, a system in which politically connected actors gain disproportionate control over natural commons and resources, while communities and future generations bear the ecological, economic and social costs, and institutions that should prevent such exploitation are weakened, captured or silenced.
Academic literature already identifies closely related phenomena through concepts such as the political resource curse, rent-seeking, resource capture and environmental authoritarianism. Research has shown that large resource rents can, under weak institutions, encourage corruption and rent-seeking around political power, although the relationship between natural resources and authoritarianism is neither automatic nor universal. Recent scholarship on environmental authoritarianism similarly highlights repression, co-optation and political legitimization as tools through which concentrated political systems may exercise environmental power.
Bangladesh is not a classical petroleum rentier state. Yet the same political economy can operate at sectoral and local levels through land, rivers, sand, forests, wetlands, infrastructure contracts, energy projects and access to public resources.
This distinction is important.
The problem is not nature's abundance. The problem is the political architecture governing access to it.
A regime that silences people can also silence rivers. Consider Bangladesh's rivers.
Long before July 2024, courts,journalists, and environmental organizations repeatedly documented encroachment, pollution and destruction of rivers and wetlands. Encroachment of rivers, water bodies, forests and other natural resources had become a major cause of environmental deterioration and warned of the normalization of environmentally destructive occupation by influential interests in the name of industrialization and urbanization.
This is more than an environmental-management failure. When a politically influential person can occupy a river, destroy a hill, extract sand, fill a wetland or pollute a waterbody while an ordinary citizen cannot stop it through public institutions, we are confronting a rights and governance failure.
Nature loses its ability to exist and regenerate.
Communities lose water, fisheries, agriculture, livelihoods, and protection from floods.
The public loses common property.
Future generations inherit ecological debt.
And politically privileged actors privatize the benefits.
This is precisely where natural-resource capture meets political capture.
The Supreme Court of Bangladesh has linked environmental protection with the right to life, observing that the right to life encompasses essentials such as water, clean air and food, and emphasizing the necessity of protecting rivers.
Natural Rights Led Governance takes the principle one step further, nature itself must be recognized as a rights-holder rather than merely an asset whose destruction becomes unacceptable only after humans suffer measurable economic losses.
Natural resource fascism has a recognizable architecture.
Political and ecological authoritarianism tend to reproduce through similar structures.
First comes concentration. Decisions over public institutions, natural resources and economic opportunities are moved into increasingly narrow networks.
Then comes privilege. Access to land, contracts, extraction permits, licenses or state-supported commercial opportunities become easier for those closest to power. Then comes institutional weakening. Regulators, local governments, environmental agencies, law enforcement bodies and oversight institutions become unable, or unwilling, to challenge powerful beneficiaries.
Then comes silencing. Journalists, affected communities, environmental defenders, researchers, and opposition voices face pressure when they question projects or expose ecological destruction.
Finally comes socialization of damage. Profits remain private while pollution, displacement, fiscal liabilities, biodiversity loss, public debt and disaster risks are transferred to society.
Political fascism concentrates on political power.
Natural resource fascism concentrates on ecological power.
One controls citizens' ability to speak.
The other controls their ability to survive.
Eventually, the two become difficult to separate.
Energy provides another warning.
Bangladesh's energy sector demonstrates why governance matters as much as engineering.
The country urgently needs reliable power and energy sovereignty. But when planning is dominated by expensive fossil-fuel dependence, overcapacity, contractual obligations and imported fuels, citizens can be left carrying enormous fiscal risks.
Renewables account for only around 5 percent of Bangladesh's power generation, while costly peaking plants, capacity payments and fossil-fuel dependence continue to increase the system's financial burden. In FY2024-25, according to its analysis, private oil- and coal-fired plants received capacity payments equivalent to approximately Tk9.5 and Tk5.9 per kilowatt-hour respectively.
The deeper lesson is not simply “fossil fuels bad, renewables good.”
A renewable-energy project that dispossesses communities, destroys agricultural land, occupies forests or concentrates benefits in another politically privileged group would reproduce the same injustice under a green label.
A Natural Rights Energy Transition towards Nature Smart Energy must therefore decentralize both energy production and economic power, through circular economy based rooftop solar, community energy, storage, efficiency, competitive procurement and transparent investment, while respecting land, ecosystems and community rights.
The transition must change the structure of power, not merely the source of electricity.
July was fundamentally about equality of rights.
The original quota protest contained a remarkably powerful philosophical idea-public opportunities cannot legitimately become inherited privileges.
Natural Rights Led Governance asks Bangladesh to apply the same principle much more broadly.
If government employment cannot be monopolized by privileged groups, why should rivers?
Why should wetland?
Why should hills?
Why should beaches, forests, sand, public land or common water sources?
Why should public contracts or energy rent?
A revolution against discriminatory political privilege cannot coexist comfortably with ecological privilege.
The July generation challenged the proposition that proximity to power should determine opportunity.
The next stage must challenge the proposition that proximity to power should determine access to nature and public wealth.
From people's sovereignty to shared sovereignty
Conventional political theory places sovereignty primarily in either the state or the people.
But ecological civilization requires a more mature understanding. Neither governments nor generations created Bangladesh's rivers, soil, forests, biodiversity, atmosphere or coastline. They inherited them.
Ownership therefore cannot be absolute.
The state is not the owner of nature. I am a trustee. Governments are temporary.
Nature is intergenerational.
Natural Rights Led Governance consequently begins by recognizing nature as a rights-holder and placing human governance within ecological boundaries. Economic development remains necessary, but economic activity loses legitimacy when it destroys the ecological systems upon which life itself depends.
This interpretation also radically changes the meaning of development.
A river destroyed for GDP growth is not development.
A forest removed and replaced with concrete may increase measured investment while destroying natural wealth.
A project generating revenue today while imposing climate, pollution, health or disaster costs on future generations cannot be called economically efficient simply because its conventional financial return is positive.
Under natural-rights economics, prosperity must operate within the regenerative capacity of nature rather than against it.
Nature Justice must become July's next frontier
The July Revolution raised an essential question, who carries the burden when power becomes unaccountable?
Natural Rights philosophy asks the same question about environmental destruction.
It is rarely the politically powerful who first suffer when wetlands disappear, groundwater declines, rivers become polluted or coastal salinity increases.
The costs fall disproportionately on farmers, fishers, informal workers, indigenous peoples, women, children, poorer urban communities and generations not yet born.
This is why environmental protection cannot simply be the work of the Ministry of Environment.
It is a question of Nature Justice.
Budgeting, infrastructure, energy, industrialization, housing, agriculture and urban development must therefore pass a natural-rights test-
Does the decision protect life?
Does it respect ecological integrity?
Who receives the benefits?
Who carries the risks?
Can nature regenerate after the intervention?
Are affected communities able to participate?
Are future generations left with ecological or financial liabilities?
And can powerful actors be held accountable when these principles are violated?
Without these questions, development easily becomes extraction wearing the clothes of progress.
A revolution cannot legitimise revenge
There is another lesson from natural rights that Bangladesh must remember.
Rights are universal precisely because they cannot depend upon political identity.
The UN report documenting the former government's repression also recorded retaliatory killings and revenge violence against Awami League supporters, police and media personnel, as well as abuses involving Hindu, Ahmadiyya and indigenous communities. A revolution claiming justice cannot replace one system of arbitrary power with another.
Natural rights belong to political opponents too.
Protection of life and property cannot depend on party affiliation. Justice requires evidence, due process and accountability, not collective punishment.
Peaceful grievance resolution is therefore not a sign of weakness after revolution; it is one of the most important safeguards preventing liberation from reproducing the architecture of oppression it sought to destroy.
The unfinished promise of July
The greatest danger facing Bangladesh is not simply that the old political order might return.
It is that the habits of the old order could survive under new political names.
Parties can change while patronage remains.
Leaders can change while institutions remain captured.
Slogans can change while rivers continue to disappear.
Governments can change while politically connected interests continue accumulating land, contracts and natural resources. That would turn revolution into rotation. Bangladesh needs transformation instead.
The July Revolution must therefore evolve from a movement for political liberation into a constitutional, economic and ecological transformation founded upon natural rights.
Its ultimate promise should be a republic where no ruler stands above the citizens, no corporation stands above the community, no generation stands above its descendants, and humanity itself does not stand above the laws of nature.
The fundamental struggle is the same whether the victim is a silenced citizen or a dying river: it is the struggle against unchecked power.
Political fascism tells people: you have no voice against power. Natural resource fascism tells nature and communities, you have no rights against profit.
The July Revolution challenged the first proposition.
The historic task of the next generation is to defeat the second.
Only then can Bangladesh move from a change of government to a change in the philosophy of governance, from domination to stewardship, from extraction to regeneration, from privilege to shared rights, and from temporary political sovereignty toward an enduring civilization founded upon the natural rights of people, nature and generations yet to come.
July must therefore remain more than a memory of resistance. It should become Bangladesh's declaration that neither human beings nor nature will ever again be treated as expendable instruments of concentrated power.
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