‘Fear of Hasina gone’: How the student agitation has shaken up Bangladesh’s authoritarianism

For much of July, the world watched as Bangladesh, a country of more than 170 million, was swept up by protests. Initially led by its students, demanding jobs, and then joined in by common citizens, the agitation was one of the largest seen in the country’s history. Faced with this upsurge, the country’s government took to violent repression, using lethal force on largely unarmed protesters. In spite of this violence, however, the protests show little sign of dying out, with massive crowds turning up in the capital, Dhaka as well as in other cities on Saturday.

Scroll spoke to Ali Riaz, a professor in the Department of Politics and Government at Illinois State University, who has studied Bangladeshi politics in great detail. He explained that the roots of the upsurge lie in the Awami League’s authoritarian rule, with several elections seen as fixed, and that this presents a major challenge to Prime Minister Shaikh Hasina’s hold on power.

We have seen some incredible and tragic scenes from Bangladesh over the last few weeks. Can you explain the reason for this quota agitation: both the immediate causes but also the background causes?

What led to this explosion suddenly?

First of all we need to understand that there are two strands that have happened over the last few weeks. The first that you have referred to is the quota reform movement, which we have seen since the first of July. And I will come back to that.

Since July 16, there is another dimension to the protests :a more popular uprising against the current regime in Bangladesh. So these two strands converged at one point: from July 16 onwards. But before the convergence, we need to understand what we are talking about when we talk about the quota reform movement.

In the Bangladesh civil service, for a long time, there was a 56% quota. That is, 56% of civil service jobs were based on quota while the rest, 44%, were based on merit. Out of this 56%, 30% was reserved initially for freedom fighters. Then over time, we saw that change into freedom fighters who fought against the Pakistani army in 1971 and their descendants.

In 2010, it was extended beyond the second generation, to the third generation of the descendants of freedom fighters. The remaining 26% quota is for women, for indigenous communities, underdeveloped regions of Bangladesh, differently abled persons and so on.

In 2018, there was an agitation by students to reform the quota system since it was seen as discriminatory. The 30% freedom fighters quota is seen as politically partisan. That is, it benefits those who support the regime.

So in 2018, responding to the student’s agitation, the prime minister suddenly announced that the entire quota system will be scrapped. A few years later, some of the descendants of freedom fighters moved court, demanding restoration of the freedom fighters quota. In June of this year, the high court gave a ruling that that the 2018 government order abolishing the quota system is null and void. That is what triggered the agitation on July 1. Students across Bangladesh started peaceful demonstrations against the court order.

However, they faced obstacles as they tried to protest. The ruling party’s student wing started to attack these protestors. Despite that it remained largely peaceful, because the students chose not to retaliate against the ruling party’s violence.

Suddenly the theme changed on July 12 when the prime minister held a press conference and made scathing remarks against those demonstrating for quota reform.

She called them razakars or Pakistani Army collaborators?

Yes, pretty much. That is what the student protestors considered highly derogatory and offensive. Subsequently that night, the ruling party’s activists attacked them. The next day, the protest spilled out onto the street. Then the police got involved. Police firing killed six students. That became the turning point. They [students] practically turned against the government.

At this moment, long-standing simmering discontent within Bangladeshi society burst through. Many young people came out and joined the students.

What were there grievances? Lack of opportunity. Over the years they have seen that Bangladesh reportedly achieved high economic growth, yet the unemployment rate was very high. On the other hand, they saw widespread corruption. For example, they saw reports coming out of the former chief of police had amassed huge wealth. The United States government imposed sanctions on the former army chief for corruption.

So on the one hand, there is a small group of people who are benefiting from this economic growth whereas the larger population is not even getting jobs.

So the quota reform movement acted as a focal point for anger against the Awami government’s long spell of authoritarian rule?

Absolutely. What happened is that this quota reform movement became a spark for other political and economic grievances. Three elections have taken place in Bangladesh which were completely fraudulent. So people have no way to vent their anger. So when the quota reform movement spilled over to the streets that is when this convergence took place. Younger Bangladeshi and people from other walks of life joined in. That is the mass upsurge we have seen.

Around 200 people have been killed. And even that is a very conservative estimate. We don’t know the actual total. So the spark became a wildfire because massive discontent was there against the government’s economic policies and Hasina’s authoritarian rule.

Do you think Hasina has managed to control the situation?

No, I don’t think so. The internet has been restored but not totally. Social media is not available, for example. Telephone lines have been restored since the 10 million-strong Bangladesh diaspora couldn’t talk to their families back in Bangladesh. This diaspora actually contributes to the Bangladesh economy so they could not be ignored.

With respect to cooling off of the agitation, six student leaders had been picked up by the police [on July 27]. Two of them were taken from the hospital. The police are claiming it is for protective custody. But the families were not initially allowed to see them [student leaders]. The student leaders, therefore, do not have the opportunity to talk openly. So any student leader that has called off the agitation, that is being seen as a coerced decision. And other leaders are saying they are going to continue this movement.

The students had a nine-point demand: an apology from the prime minister, dismissal of major ministers who made derogatory comments, resignation of vice chancellors who failed to protect students etc. So there are a host of demands that have not been met. So when some student leaders made the statement calling off the agistion, it was apparent to everyone that it was not made voluntarily.

Even after they called off the movement, there have been sporadic clashes. Students in many cities came out onto the streets wherever they could. While the curfew has been relaxed, we know the night-time curfew has been used to raid houses and arrest people. Already more than 10,000 people have been arrested and most of them are young. So despite the fact the government seems to be claiming that everything is normal, actually normalcy has not returned.

How do you think this will affect Hasina’s power going forward till now? She’s used economic development as a sort of master narrative. Do you think that would be more difficult going forward?

Yes, the narrative of “development before democracy” has fallen flat. In fact, it fell even before this movement started. In fact, that is one of the reasons behind this movement.

Over the last two years, issues such as inflation, dwindling foreign reserves, and increased borrowing – government debt has never been higher in the history of Bangladesh – has shown that Hasina’s development narrative was a hollow claim. Anger exists because most people are not getting any benefit from this so-called development. Only a small group of people are.

That is why the development narrative is gone. This cannot be a legitimising ideology for Hasina any longer. Since 2014, this government has lost its moral legitimacy because elections have been stage-managed and transparently fraudulent. To make up for this, they tried to draw legitimacy from economic performance. But it soon became clear that common people were not benefitting. The government was not delivering.

Bereft of moral legitimacy and performance legitimacy, we can see the outcome on the streets of Dhaka today. They have to have the police, the military, curfew to claim normalcy. I doubt that going forward, this government can claim that it is business as usual.

The more repression the government uses, the more public anger it will create. And already this movement has shaken the core of this regime. Whether that creates a transition [of power], we don’t know yet. But that possibility cannot be ruled out.

Explain to us what is Hasina’s power base within Bangladesh? How does she remain in power in spite of apparently being very unpopular?

She has created a coalition of beneficiaries made up of a small group of people within the business class and a small group of people within the bureaucracy. But most important in this coalition is the police and military.

The entire police force has become a henchman of the ruling party rather than an apparatus of the state. And to control these protests, she relied on the army.

So Hasina rules through an environment of fear. Fear has become the instrument for keeping everyone in control. Remember, in the past decade, the Bangladeshi state has accumulated enormous capacity to monitor people and has been using various kinds of repressive measures, including extra judicial killing and disappearances So all these things create a climate of fear that seems to be the way she continued her rule.

Now, however, the dam is broken. The fear of Hasina seems to be gone. Because young Bangladeshi took to the streets and challenged her. Until this movement it was a taboo to criticise the prime minister herself. Everyone would criticise the regime, the electoral process, the ruling party. But people avoided talking about her. That is gone now. That is the major achievement of this movement. People can challenge her by name, calling her an autocrat – something previously people would refrain from.

Bangladesh for the last few decades has had incredible economic growth which has caught the attention of the world. Do you think this sort of instability can now endanger that?

See, the claim that Bangladesh has made an enormous economic progress needs to be revisited. This for two reasons. Number one, in many instances, economic data has been cooked up. The government, like any other autocratic regime, tried to project that they are responsible for economic growth. As we know, autocrats like statistics.

Does that mean there wasn’t any progress? No, that’s not true. There has been. economic growth. But that economic growth was not distributed equally. As a result, economic disparity has increased under Hasina.

We saw unbridled corruption, we saw capital flight, we saw people connected with regime defaulting on their loans and not returning money, massive infrastructure projects have skyrocketed in terms of cost.

So it seems what you are saying is that Bangladesh’s authoritarianism seems to be economically holding back the country in some ways.

That has been the case. They [the Awami League] tried to project economic growth as their success But what happened is that they actually allowed Bangladesh’s economic resources to be plundered.

When people say this movement will undermine economic growth, they are wrong. It’s actually the other way round. This economy has not provided the people with opportunities and what’s why we are witnessing this massive upsurge and discontent.

Do you think the international community has done enough to push democracy in Bangladesh?

No, I don’t think so. Here they have left democracy behind. Let us take for example the United States. From 2021 onwards, they have been speaking about democracy in Bangladesh. We have seen this extensive rhetorical pressure on Bangladesh government. But eventually, when it came to the election, they became silent. Same with the European Union. Despite their commitment to human rights, they haven’t actually done anything that is punitive. There has been no stick, only carrot.

The West’s thinking on this has been to not push Hasina too much on the question of democracy because then she would ally with China. I think this is a folly. If you look at the last 10 years, despite the West’s reticence to push Hasina, she has become closer to China. Beijing’s economic footprint has increased significantly in Bangladesh.

The most disturbing aspect of the international community’s inaction – and I include India in that – is that it is offering unqualified support to an undemocratic regime despite the fact that they know what was going on. India’s business interests and their ambition to become a regional hegemon has driven their policy with respect to Bangladesh. But, in my opinion, India’s policy towards Bangladesh. has been very myopic since it has contributed to anti-Indian sentiment in the country.

You’re seeing the West has only delivered rhetoric. Are you saying, for example, that the 2021 sanctions against the Rapid Action Battalion, Bangladesh’s elite paramilitary force accused of human rights violations, did not much affect Hasina?

The RAB sanctions were the the only policy that worked. It reduced the number of extra judicial killings and enforced disappearances, which clearly showed that if punitive measures are taken they do have an impact on the behaviour of the ruling party.

But they didn’t go beyond that.

In the short term to medium term, over the next few years, how do you see Hasina going forward? Will she become more authoritarian? Will she be forced by this agitation to share power with her opponents?

How do you see Bangladesh’s political future in the next few years?

I am more concerned about the next few months, as a matter of fact. In the past few weeks, the regime has crossed the Rubicon. Going forward, there is no other tool in their tool box other than coercion. Can a regime sustain based exclusively on coercive mechanisms? That is the question.

Going forward, in the coming months, how the street agitation develops, that would determine the fate of the regime. Politically, it would be much more repressive than what we have already witnessed. And already we have witnessed an unprecedented atrocity. So imagine what may come in future.