by VIJAY PRASHAD
If the students are unable to build a historic bloc with the unions, they may be pushed to the side and they might have to surrender their efforts to the military and an elite that has merely changed its jersey
On Monday, 5 August, former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina boarded a Bangladesh Air Force C-130J military transport in a hurry and fled to Hindon Air Force base, outside Delhi.
Her plane was refuelled and reports said that she intended to fly on either to the UK (her niece, Tulip Siddiq is a minister in the new Labour government), Finland (her nephew Radwan Mujib Siddiq is married to a Finnish national), or the US (her son Sajeeb Wajed Joy is a dual Bangladesh-US national).
Waker uz-Zaman, who only became Army Chief six weeks ago and is her relative by marriage, informed her earlier in the day that he was taking charge of the situation and would create an interim government to hold future elections.
Sheikh Hasina was the longest-serving prime minister in Bangladesh’s history. She was the prime minister from 1996 to 2001, and then from 2009 to 2024 – a total of 20 years. This was a sharp contrast to her father Sheikh Mujib, who was assassinated in 1975 after four years in power, or General Ziaur Rahman who was assassinated in 1981 after six years in power.
In a scene reminiscent of the end of Mahinda Rajapaksa’s rule in Sri Lanka, jubilant crowds of thousands crashed the gates of Ganabhaban, the official residence of the prime minister, and jubilantly made off with everything they could find.
Tanzim Wahab, photographer and chief curator of the Bengal Foundation, told me: “When [the masses] storm into the palace and make off with pet swans, elliptical machines and palatial red sofas, you can feel the level of subaltern class fury that built up against a rapacious regime.”
There was widespread celebration across Bangladesh, along with bursts of attacks against buildings identified with the government – private TV channels, and palatial homes of government ministers were a favoured target for arson.
Several local-level leaders in Sheikh Hasina’s Awami League have already been killed (Mohsin Reza, a local president of the party, was beaten to death in Khulna).
The situation in Bangladesh remains fluid, but it is also settling quickly into a familiar formula of an “interim government” that will hold new elections.
Political violence in Bangladesh is not unusual, having been present since the birth of the country in 1971. Indeed, one of the reasons why Sheikh Hasina reacted so strongly to any criticism or protest was her fear that such activity would repeat what she experienced in her youth. Her father, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman (1920-1975), the founder of Bangladesh, was assassinated in a coup d’état on 15 August 1975, along with most of his family.
Sheikh Hasina and her sister survived because they were in Germany at that time – the two sisters fled Bangladesh together on the same helicopter this week.
She has been the victim of multiple assassination attempts, including a grenade attack in 2004 that left her with a hearing problem. Fear of such an attempt on her life made Sheikh Hasina deeply concerned about any opposition to her, which is why up to 45 minutes before her departure she wanted the army to again act with force against the gathering crowds.
However, the army read the atmosphere. It was time for her to leave.
A contest has already begun over who will benefit from the removal of Sheikh Hasina.
On the one side are the students, led by the Bangladesh student uprising central committee of about 158 people and six spokespersons. Lead spokesperson Nahid Islam made the students’ views clear: “Any government other than the one we recommended would not be accepted. We won’t betray the bloodshed by the martyrs for our cause. We will create a new democratic Bangladesh through our promise of security of life, social justice and a new political landscape.”
At the other end are the military and the opposition political forces (including the primary opposition party Bangladesh National Party, the Islamist party Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami and the small left party Ganosamhati Andolan).
While the army’s first meetings were with these opposition parties, a public outcry over the erasure of the student movement forced the army to meet with the student central committee and listen to their primary demands.
There is a habit called polti khawa or “changing the team jersey midway through a football match” that prevails in Bangladesh, with the military being the referee in charge at all times. This slogan is being used in public discourse now to draw attention to any attempt by the military to impose a mere change of jersey when the students are demanding a wholesale change of the rules of the game.
Aware of this, the military has accepted the student demand that the new government be led by economist Muhammad Yunus, Bangladesh’s only Nobel Prize winner. Yunus, as the founder of the microcredit movement and promoter of “social business”, used to be seen as primarily a phenomenon in the neoliberal NGO world.
However, the Hasina government’s relentless political vendetta against him over the last decade, and his decision to speak up for the student movement have transformed him into an unlikely “guardian” figure for the protesters. The students see him as a figurehead, although his neoliberal politics of austerity might be at odds with their key demand, which is for employment.
Students
Even prior to independence and despite the rural character of the region, the epicentre of Bangladeshi politics has been in urban areas, with a focus on Dhaka.
Even as other forces entered the political arena, students remain key political actors in Bangladesh. One of the earliest protests in post-colonial Pakistan was the language movement (bhasha andolan) that emerged out of Dhaka University, where student leaders were killed during an agitation in 1952 (they are memorialised in the Shaheed Minar, or Martyrs’ Pillar, in Dhaka).
Students became a key part of the freedom struggle for liberation from Pakistan in 1971, which is why the Pakistani army targeted the universities in Operation Searchlight, which led to massacres of student activists.
The political parties that emerged in Bangladesh after 1971 grew largely through their student wings – the Awami League’s Bangladesh Chhatra League, the Bangladesh National Party’s Bangladesh Jatiotabadi Chatradal, and the Jamaat-e-Islami’s Bangladesh Islami Chhatra Shibir.
Over the past decade, students in Bangladesh have been infuriated by the growing lack of employment despite the bustling economy, and by what they perceived as a lack of care from the government.
The latter was demonstrated to them by the callous comments made by Shajahan Khan, a minister in Sheikh Hasina’s government, who smirked as he dismissed news that a bus had killed two college students on Airport Road, Dhaka, in July 2019.
That event led to a massive protest movement by students of all ages for road safety, to which the government responded with arrests (including incarceration for 107 days of the photojournalist Shahidul Alam).
Behind the road safety protests, which earned greater visibility for the issue, was another key theme. Five years previously, in 2013, students who were denied access to the Bangladesh civil service began a protest over restrictive quotas for government jobs.
In February 2018, this issue returned through the work of students in the Bangladesh Sadharon Chhatra Odhikar Songrokkhon Parishad (Bangladesh General Students’ Rights Protection Forum).
When the road safety protests occurred, the students raised the quota issue (as well as the issue of inflation). By law, the government reserved seats in its employment for people in underdeveloped districts (10%), women (10%), minorities (5%) and the disabled (1%), as well as for descendants of freedom fighters (30%).
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