A New Chapter for Bangladesh? | Ikhtisad Ahmed

The Awami League has dominated Bangladeshi politics since independence. It led the Liberation Battle towards Pakistan in 1971 and, following a interval of army rule that lasted till 1990, alternated governing duties with the Bangladesh Nationalist Celebration (BNP) for near twenty years. After successful the 2008 basic election by a landslide, nonetheless, the Awami League dragged the nation towards one-party rule, retaining workplace in three more and more rigged votes. Neither celebration has ruled democratically. But acquired knowledge held that, in such a partisan surroundings, there have been no different choices. The favored rebellion of the summer season of 2024 proved acquired knowledge improper.

“The Monsoon Revolution,” because it has come to be recognized, was sparked by employment quotas. Public sector jobs make up simply over 3 p.c of whole employment in Bangladesh. However they’re extremely sought-after: oases of secure pay and advantages in a desert of precarity. Traditionally, 15 p.c of state jobs have been reserved for ladies, hijras (a transgender neighborhood), and Adivasis (non-Bengali, non-Muslim indigenous teams). That is certainly a case of sturdy affirmative motion. However throughout its first post-junta tenure (1996–2001) the Awami League put aside an extra 30 p.c of state jobs—together with as much as 80 p.c of entry-level positions—for the prolonged households of “freedom fighters,” or veterans of the Liberation Battle. It launched these reservations as a brief measure, then expanded and codified the system after 2008, successfully utilizing it to buy loyalty. A small cottage trade even emerged to forge or in any other case illegally procure “freedom fighter” certificates. 

In 2013, forward of a pivotal election, sporadic protests towards the liberty fighters reservations coalesced right into a small motion. However the grassroots effort was overtaken by a maelstrom of political violence: cadres of the BNP and its coalition associate, Jamaat-e-Islami, the biggest Islamist celebration, instigated clashes towards state forces through which over 5 hundred folks have been killed. In 2018 demonstrations towards the liberty fighter quota rekindled in Dhaka College and unfold to different campuses. Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, who’s famously temperamental, unleashed the police, Fast Motion Battalion (RAB, a paramilitary outfit which the US authorities just lately sanctioned), and Chhatra League and Jubo League (the celebration youth wings, which function as de truth militias), on the protestors. Then she abolished all the quota system by fiat, which was manifestly unlawful. 

This was a well-recognized transfer. Within the face of public strain, Hasina typically pretended to yield, passing unconstitutional decrees that may very well be reversed in court docket later. (As an illustration, in 2011, to appease conservative supporters, she retained Islam as a state faith after the Supreme Court docket had deemed that motion unconstitutional; a problem to this transfer has been in judicial limbo since.) The ploy has the additional advantage of creating her appear to face with the widespread folks towards a recalcitrant judiciary.    

Six descendants of freedom fighters—all affiliated with the Awami League—duly petitioned the Excessive Court docket, which this June reinstated the quotas. The ruling got here amid file ranges of youth unemployment and within the aftermath of high-level corruption scandals involving a former police chief, a former military chief, and a number of other Awami League leaders. College students took to the streets once more, with higher willpower. The liberty fighter reservations, in different phrases, grew to become a lightning rod for broader discontent. 

Hasina once more responded truculently, calling the scholars enemies of the state and ordering the Awami League youth wings to harass and assault them. Issues took a drastic flip for the more severe in mid-July, when she declared curfews and ordered the police, paramilitary forces, and finally the military to assault protesters. Over twenty-two days, in maybe the worst occasion of state violence since independence, greater than seven hundred folks have been killed and tens of 1000’s injured. (Each numbers are prone to rise as data is available in.) 

By late July it appeared that the motion had been smashed. However the college students endured within the face of incessant brutality and protracted telecommunications shutdowns. The tide slowly turned towards Hasina. As ever extra civilians joined the motion, the military retreated. On August 5 she fled to India; on August 8 an interim authorities assumed energy.

How did the unthinkable occur? Over the previous fifteen years Hasina had captured the state equipment, outlawed opposition events, co-opted the intelligentsia, and neutered civil society. There gave the impression to be no house left for dissent. But this summer season it grew to become clear that she had did not pacify the youth. Understanding Hasina’s fall requires revisiting the historical past of Bangladeshi nationalism. Having monopolized the legacy of the liberty motion, she had all however claimed a divine proper to rule. However when the protestors challenged that narrative, her grip on energy unraveled. 

The Bangladeshi conflict of independence started in March 1971, after the Awami League secured a easy majority in Pakistan’s basic elections, successful 167 of 300 seats (and 160 of 162 in East Pakistan). When Islamabad rejected the outcomes, a civil disobedience motion broke out; the following clashes between the military and protesters snowballed right into a full-scale guerilla conflict. The army killed as many as three million Bangladeshis in a genocidal marketing campaign of counterinsurgency earlier than the brand new nation secured independence in December 1971. The Awami League’s chief, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, affectionately referred to as Bangabandhu (pal of Bengal), had been imprisoned in West Pakistan throughout the battle however now returned to change into prime minister. He marginalized different members of the celebration management—like Tajuddin Ahmad and Syed Nazrul Islam, who had overseen the conflict effort—and dominated till 1975, when army officers assassinated him and most of his household as a part of a coup. Solely his daughter Sheikh Hasina and her youthful sister, Sheikh Rehana, survived.

Navy rule of 1 type or one other adopted till 1990, when the Anti-Authoritarian Motion, led by Hasina and Khaleda Zia, head of the BNP, restored parliamentary democracy. They fought towards one another in kind of aggressive elections till 2006, when violent clashes between supporters of the 2 events prompted President Iajuddin Ahmed to declare a state of emergency, after which the military stepped in. Elections resumed in 2008, and Hasina took workplace decided to seize state and civilian establishments. She exploited the quota system, filling the paperwork, judiciary, and legislation enforcement companies with apparatchiks. On the identical time, she launched a smear marketing campaign towards the BNP and Jamaat, branding them as traitors. (Jamaat management had collaborated with the Pakistani army in 1971.) Below the duvet of preventing terrorism and anti-state actions, the Awami League disappeared, extrajudicially murdered, and indefinitely detained opposition cadres, activists, employees, and college students. The BNP and Jamaat have been organizationally hollowed out; they have been conspicuously absent throughout this yr’s protests. 

Hasina additionally arrange a bespoke propaganda establishment, the Centre for Analysis and Data (CRI), which her nephew, Radwan M. Siddiq, helmed. Her son, Sajeeb Wazed, oversaw its Younger Bangla youth initiative. CRI crafted a PR technique to rewrite the story of Bangladesh’s independence round a deified Mujibur. It co-opted a once-rebellious underground music scene by inviting artists to carry out at annual Pleasure Bangla live shows commemorating a well-known Bangabandhu speech; commissioned cartoonists to adapt his autobiography; invited filmmakers to shoot a biopic about him and a documentary on Hasina; showered writers and teachers who praised the regime with prizes, analysis grants, and educating positions. This cohort of artists and intellectuals have been despatched out to thrive within the media, a lot of which is managed by conglomerates with shut ties to the Awami League.

A revolving door opened between the CRI and the nation’s two main NGOs, the Constructing Assets Throughout Communities (BRAC) and the JAAGO Basis. BRAC’s govt director, Asif Saleh, and JAAGO’s founder, Korvi Rakshand Dhrubo, appeared by Hasina’s facet at each alternative and labored intently together with her administration on its Sustainable Growth Targets. Even native branches of overseas organizations have been defanged. Below the management of Kazi Anis Ahmed—the writer of the Dhaka Tribune and Bangla Tribune and the brother of a former Awami League parliamentarian—PEN Bangladesh was largely solely silent about Hasina’s despotism. (The group didn’t reply to requests to remark.)

Hasina’s rule was predicated on an in depth if profoundly unequal relationship with India. Prime Minister Narendra Modi unconditionally supported her at worldwide boards and in return burdened her administration with extortionate commerce and infrastructure insurance policies. (He secured his pal, the billionaire Gautam Adani, a deal to promote electrical energy at inflated charges to the Bangladeshi state.) Following Modi’s reelection this Might, Hasina visited Delhi twice for bilateral summits. The Bharatiya Janata Celebration’s demonization of Bangladeshis as terrorists and infiltrators was not on the agenda. Nor was an equitable water-sharing settlement. As a substitute Hasina invited Modi to ascertain a rail community by her nation’s sovereign territory, connecting mainland India with its politically restive northeastern states, which lie on the opposite facet of Bangladesh. (Opposition events denounced her transfer.) She then visited Beijing, reportedly to safe a $5 billion mortgage, however returned residence early and with solely $140 million.

By then the quota protests have been gathering steam at public universities. On July 14, at a press convention about her China journey, making an attempt to distract from her overseas coverage failures, Hasina turned her ire on the scholars, labelling them “progenies of Razakars”—a derogatory time period for individuals who collaborated with the Pakistani army in 1971. Usually such pious slander would assist delegitimize protests within the eyes of civilians. However this time it didn’t work. The scholars took the time period and ran with it, chanting within the streets of Dhaka, Rajshahi, Chittagong, Sylhet, and Khulna: “Who am I? Who are you? Razakar. Razakar. Says who? Says who? The dictator. The dictator.” That evening they expelled the Awami League youth wings from public college campuses. 

The Awami League propaganda machine rumbled into motion. The celebration’s basic secretary, Obaidul Quader, solemnly proclaimed that its youth wings would strike towards anybody insulting the Liberation Battle and conducting anti-state actions. Between July 16 and July 18, the Chhatra League and Jubo League militias, police, and RAB put the protesters underneath siege. The Border Guard Bangladesh (BGB) quickly joined them, with shoot-at-sight orders from Quader. 

All this was broadcast reside on social media. Movies of homicide went viral. Twenty-three-year-old Abu Sayed, his arms raised in give up, was gunned down at point-blank vary with birdshot; the police First Data Report solely reported {that a} “student was seen falling to the ground.” Twenty-five-year-old Mir Mugdho, who was distributing meals and water to the protesters, was shot within the head. The physique depend mounted throughout these seventy-two hours, prompting legislation enforcement to strain households and hospitals to misreport. (The Bengali day by day Prothom Alo highlighted one significantly egregious case: when battling protestors on the streets of Dhaka, the police fired a bullet right into a residence, killing Safqat Samir, a fifth-grade scholar. Officers later pressured his father to not press fees.)  

On July 18 a somber Hasina addressed the nation, recounting the lack of her father, as if this private tragedy—and the cult of Mujibur—overshadowed what her forces have been doing to the scholars. No sooner had her temporary handle ended than a nationwide Web shutdown minimize Bangladesh off from the world. A curfew was imposed, and the army rolled out in armored automobiles marked with the UN insignia. Home tv channels within the Awami League’s pocket reassured viewers that every part was all proper, however nobody was about to overlook the pictures that had been circulating on-line. Moreover, helicopters have been flying overhead and there was fixed gunfire. The worldwide neighborhood was largely silent, with some exceptions: PEN Worldwide referred to as for journalists to be protected and the Web to be restored, and the UN Excessive Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Turk, took umbrage that UN peacekeeping automobiles have been used to assault civilians, raised considerations over human rights violations, and referred to as for a sturdy investigation. 

In a public assertion, the scholars mentioned that they organized horizontally as a result of the Awami League had co-opted and focused dissenting leaders up to now. However, as state violence intensified, spokespeople like Nahid Islam and Asif Mahmud emerged. In an interview on July 19 with Netra Information—an impartial Bangladeshi outlet based mostly in Sweden, the place I work because the managing editor—Islam recounted the indiscriminate slaughter, opposed the curfew, demanded that safety forces and Awami League cadres withdraw, and affirmed that the anti-discrimination motion would proceed. Most significantly, he refused to barter with the federal government at gunpoint. Doing so, he mentioned, would insult the reminiscence of those that had fallen. 

Non-public college college students joined their public college counterparts at this vital juncture, bringing the city center class firmly into the fold. Certainly, civilian assist saved widening. Rickshaw-pullers saluted the protestors and turned their automobiles into advert hoc ambulances. Graffiti artists painted the cities with expletive-ridden witticisms and anti-government sketches. The rappers Shezan (“Kotha Ko,” “Speak up”) and Hannan (“Awaj utha,” “Raise the noise”) wrote soundtracks for the motion. Expatriate Bangladeshis demonstrated in solidarity throughout Asia, Europe, and North America. Migrant employees protested in Qatar and, risking arrest, within the UAE.

In the meantime the Awami League’s terror equipment chugged on. Its cadres piled into hospitals with spears, machetes, and weapons to assault college students receiving remedy. (The Day by day Star revealed video footage of 1 raid.) Police raided university-adjacent neighborhoods, abducting and detaining college students. Upwards of 450,000 anonymous arrest warrants have been issued, to be stuffed later for retroactive punishment. 

On July 24, with telecommunications nearly totally restored, Hasina appeared in official press images crying right into a tissue in entrance of damaged laptop screens at a authorities workplace. Wazed—her son, data and communication expertise adviser, and the top of Younger Bangla—and Mohammad A. Arafat, minister for state and knowledge broadcasting, clarified that the shutdown had been in response to a “terrorist attack” at a authorities knowledge heart, insinuating that the protesters had set it on fireplace. (There is no such thing as a proof in any way that such a factor occurred.) Arafat additionally speculated that the scholars have been protesting underneath the affect of unlawful narcotics. Awami League apologists flooded the airwaves and social media proclaiming their timeless belief in Hasina and mourning the broken state property. Nahid Islam was kidnapped, tortured, launched, then kidnapped once more and compelled to pose for images having afternoon tea with police chiefs. Below duress, he launched an announcement calling for the protests to finish.

It appeared the motion was on its final legs. Then, on July 27, a fresh-faced new trio of scholars—Abdul Hannan Masud, Mahin Sarker, and Rifat Rashid—held a fastidiously guarded on-line press convention from an undisclosed location. They in contrast the Awami League’s response to Operation Searchlight, the Pakistani army’s bloodbath of civilians in 1971—thereby turning the Razakar label on its head—and promised to proceed the motion till its calls for have been met: the resignation of Quader and the house and legislation ministers; the removing and investigation of safety officers on energetic obligation throughout the protests; indemnity from prosecution for protestors; the resumption of courses; the everlasting expulsion of the Awami League youth wings from campuses; and an apology from the prime minister. Hasina held two conferences with enterprise leaders and heads of safety forces however refused the scholars’ calls for. 

On August 3 Waker-uz-Zaman, the military chief and husband of Hasina’s cousin, commanded the troops to implement order however chorus from firing on protesters. He had good cause to be nervous. By then the variety of civilian casualties had grown too excessive to hide or brush off. There was a menace of overseas sanctions, to not point out that the military may very well be barred from taking part in profitable UN peacekeeping missions overseas. Moreover, his troopers have been tiring after three weeks of all-out conflict towards the citizenry. 

The motion then narrowed to a single, new demand: that Hasina resign. On August 3 folks scaled the Shaheed Minar—erected on the location in Dhaka the place the Pakistani army gunned down activists of the Language Motion in 1952—holding aloft the pink and inexperienced flag. Under them, manufacturing unit employees, faculty college students, white-collar staff, and even celebrities milled about, singing patriotic songs, dancing, portray, and above all chanting towards Hasina. 

Web and telecommunications have been shut down once more on August 4. State forces killed over 100 residents that day, the bloodiest because the rebellion started. However this proved to be the final gasp of a misplaced trigger. On August 5 the protestors ready to march on Hasina’s residence. As the group constructed at Shaheed Minar, information broke that the prime minister had resigned and fled to India underneath the duvet of a army coaching train. Zaman waited for the plane carrying her and her sister to enter Indian airspace earlier than making a nationwide handle. This was a cue for a extra brazen revolt towards the Awami League. Statues of Mujibur—erected throughout the nation at the price of tens of hundreds of thousands of {dollars}—have been defecated on, toppled, and smashed to items. His residence was set ablaze. 

Now in politically uncharted waters, the president and army leaders met scholar coordinators to debate appointing an interim chief. They agreed on Muhammad Yunus, an eighty-four-year-old Nobel laureate who based the microfinance establishment Grameen Financial institution. Yunus is admired by the likes of the Clintons and The Gates Basis however considered extra skeptically by progressive economists, who imagine his financial institution traps the poor in a cycle of debt with high-interest loans.

Much less typically famous is that Yunus has an ambiguous relationship with the Bangladeshi army. Through the 2006–2008 political disaster, when the army briefly took energy, it honed the practices of enforced disappearances, indefinite detentions, and extrajudicial killings—practices that the Awami League later deployed. But in 2007, as he thought-about launching his personal political celebration, Yunus assured The Washington Submit that the military was “cleaning up” the nation by detaining corrupt officers. 

Yunus was sworn in as the top of an interim authorities on August 8. Saleh and Rakshand are a part of his advisory workforce. His motley crew of ministers embody the scholar leaders Nahid Islam and Asif Mahmud, retired military officers, and a number of other Islamist ideologues, however just one indigenous consultant, Supradip Chakma, whom activists from the neighborhood view as an Awami League stooge. Rani Yan Yan, chief advisor to the Chakma Circle—one among three hereditary chiefdoms within the Chittagong Hill Tracts—publicly opposed his appointment. 

The early days of the Yunus regime haven’t been promising. JAAGO’s volunteers painted over revolutionary graffiti with anodyne messages pinched from self-help books. The members of civil society Yunus appointed as ministers have repeated acquainted homilies about accountability and justice however not acted to dismantle the Awami League patronage system. Moderately than return to the barracks, the military flexed its muscular tissues on September 17 by assuming magistracy powers—the authority to supervise civilian legislation enforcement—for the subsequent sixty days. Aside from the token arrest of Ziaul Ahsan, a very infamous military officer, the safety forces haven’t been investigated for his or her actions throughout the protests. Evading accountability for its position in propping up the Awami League, the mainstream media runs day by day paeans to the interim authorities and stays silent in regards to the army.¹

In the meantime Islamists, celebration cadre, and a few college students have loved an orgy of violence towards minorities—destroying Sufi shrines, vandalizing Hindu temples, and harassing girls and the LGBTQ+ neighborhood. Over a dozen folks have been killed, together with a minimum of 4 in army custody. In mid-September, in two separate pogroms in Khagrachhari and Rangamati within the Chittagong Hill Tracts, Bengalis murdered 4 Adivasis, injured near hundred, and set fireplace to some fifty retailers. Conscientious residents have mobilized towards the hate, however the state has not lifted a finger, apart from retaining the Awami League’s draconian legal guidelines towards freedom of expression. 

The scholars resumed their research on September 22. That they had come collectively throughout strains of sophistication and beliefs, not in search of energy however merely performing on their conscience. But they ousted a dictator. Opposition events, cautious of the scholars’ vast assist, are actually attempting to discredit the motion by holding it solely liable for the violence that has flared up in its aftermath. That is to be anticipated. Among the scholar organizers have proven curiosity in going into politics; the outdated guard absolutely fears that the motion would possibly develop a unified ideology and coalesce into an electoral power. In the event that they observe that path, the scholars will discover formidable challenges mendacity forward. Although momentarily discredited within the eyes of the folks, the dominant events won’t disappear so simply—and nor will the army.