The Fall of an Autocrat: Dawn of a New Era in Bangladesh?

Protests are staple of political life in Bangladesh. Yet the student protests that began as a call for quota reform in the beginning of July, and later morphed into a national movement that have resulted in the fall of a 15-year old regime in a matter of weeks, are unprecedented in the nation’s living memory. While the country is no stranger to massive student or opposition protests, Sheikh Hasina, who has been in power for a total of two decades now, had always managed to come out on top, often resorting to tried and true tactics of intimidation with armed Bangladesh Chhatra League (BCL) student cadres, or employing riot police and all manner of security personnel to quell protests, followed by arm wrangling protesters with the courts.

And till now, Sheikh Hasina and her coterie have repeatedly managed to control such instances of unrest, projecting an image of stability that has kept confidence in her government high amongst international circles. This image was bolstered by a recent election in January 2024, which though touted as unfair by several Western governments, nevertheless was quietly accepted by the international community due to the government’s ability to keep the situation under control. But all that ended after a student-led national uprising, with zero foreign support, ousted her government on August 5, 2024 – Hasina tended her resignation and fled the country towards neighbouring India, a day after violent bloodshed and protests that claimed almost 100 lives.

Why did this movement succeed when others had failed? This time, there was something new under the sun. Young people, most of them within the age range of 20-25 years old, and who have known nothing but the Awami brand of governance till date, had been protesting for weeks against what they see as an unfair imposition coated in the name of respecting the legacy of Bangladesh’s proudest sons, its freedom fighters. According to protesters, the old quota system, awarding 30 percent of government jobs to families of freedom fighters, was both unfair and discriminatory. And they were perhaps right in more ways than one.

Leaving aside the absurdity of offering 30 percent of government jobs to 0.01% of the population, there are also serious concerns and drama surrounding compilation of the official list of freedom fighters – the Awami League government during its rule did not publish a complete list of freedom fighters, but at least three partial lists in installments; observers allege the current ‘revised’ lists consist mostly of supporters of the Awami League, or those who allegedly were able to pay hefty bribes to have their names included.

The decisive tipping point in the protests was Sheikh Hasina’s offhand remarks in the initial days of the movement that the young protesters were “Razakars,” a derogatory term identifying the protesters as being against the independence of Bangladesh and as pro-Pakistanis. These remarks incited never before heard slogans from protesters of “Tumi ke, ami ke, Razakar! Razakar! Ke boleche Ke boleche? Shoirachar shoirachar” (Who are You, Who am I? We are Razakars! Who says that? The tyrant!)” This belittling attitude by the head of the government, along with the heavy handedness of the measures, are the main reasons behind these students not stopping their protests even after the government courts appeared to acquiesce to their demands by scaling back the quota system from 30 percent to a mere 5 percent.

As the protests spread and continued, the government response betrayed a sense of recklessness to say the least. Communications and internet were totally shut down during that weekend; social media videos showed shooters in police helicopters raining bullets on protesters in the streets, as the army enforced an indefinite curfew with ‘shoot at sight orders’. The scale of unrest reached the point that the Bangladeshi army resorted to the use of highly advanced Turkish Bayraktar TB2 drones for surveillance, as per social media posts.

In the meantime, as the country emerged out of a media blackout, news sources spoke of nearly 200 protesters killed, and thousands injured and arrested, while unofficial sources claim death numbers were in several hundreds. After news of the massacre came to light, many on the international arena started asking questions – diplomats questioned the deadly response by Bangladeshi authorities, asking why United Nations (UN) marked APC’s and helicopters were used to suppress the protests. Millions of expatriate Bangladeshis demonstrated in front of Bangladeshi embassies abroad, echoing local demands for Hasina to step down.

While putting on a stern face in front of the cameras, her hold on power was slipping fast – remittance from abroad, a vital source of government income, was drying out, leaving the economy in tatters, and as evidenced in statements from Volker Türk, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, as well as a European Union representative, Bangladesh’s image at the UN and the international stage was fast eroding as well. However, instead of backing down, Hasina’s government went even more hardline, carrying out a brutal campaign of mass detentions, carrying out open massacres in broad daylight, and banning opposition parties Jamaat-e-Islami and its student wing Islami Chhatrashibir. The moves are reminiscent of the authoritarian one-party era in the early 1970s, which only ended with the gruesome assassination of Sheikh Hasina’s father, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, in 1975. Following all this, the student protests then morphed into a national movement with one demand – Sheikh Hasina must step down immediately, which is what ultimately happened.

Historians, however, will find more to say when they get around to studying the impact of these massive student-led national protests, whenever that may be. The Awami League, with the help of secular Bengali intellectuals, has been a proponent of a national history that rarely seeks to look beyond the pivotal moment of 1971, focusing instead on the 1971 civil war as being a pivotal ‘Holocaust’ style origin moment for Bengali nationalism. This has contributed to rather simplistic narratives within Bengali national history, making it easy to glorify heroes and demonize alleged villains – this especially came in handy in 2010’s when Sheikh Hasina’s Awami League government was easily able to tap into raw public sentiment using a black-and-white narration of events of 1971, with a backdrop of the controversial figure of 3 million deaths, to execute its political opponents in the name of war crimes trials.

For long, the ‘Other’ of the Bengali nationalists of the Awami League have been Islamist political parties such as the Jamaat-e-Islami, and its sympathisers from within other opposition parties such as the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), something that the Awami League has effectively been able to use to maximum advantage. But employing the same trope against general student protesters in the present, and effectively making them the new ‘Other,’ seems to have backfired spectacularly. With the backdrop of Awami mis-rule vivid in public memory, this trope had galvanized public opinion against the Awami League, to the extent that many young protesters were seen not backing down in the face of repeated police firing. In relation to this, it is mentionable that the Awami narrative of protesters being ‘Razakars’ also explains the unspeakable brutality and inhumanity inherent in the government response, echoing the spirit of the genocidal sentiment of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and his ministers when they labelled Palestinians as ‘human animals.’

One often comes by the famous quote from L.P. Hartley’s 1953 book, The Go-Between, “The past is a different country; they do things differently there.” The dynamics of the student-led national protests have opened the doors to what it means to be a Bengali today – is there more to the history of 1971 than as a tool of condemnation? In today’s Bangladesh, why is there more of a nationalist black-and-white narrative of 1971 and less of colourful tapestries of 1947-71, the long colonial period, and the rich pre-1757 Turk, Afghan and Persian Muslim history? I, for one, hope that more young Bangladeshi students, having ensured the fall of tyranny, and are currently still on the streets fighting for the restoration of democracy and basic human rights, will also begin to ask themselves these questions, and break walls of historical taboo to seek a more nuanced understand of the past, an endeavour that can be highly rewarding to both the individual and the Bangladeshi society. I believe that thought process has already begun, as seen in the toppling of statues of Mujib and his daughter, but the process should accelerate. Only through such fearless ventures into the past, in a society that rewards merit and helps nurture it, can one truly begin to seek better futures.