One muggy summer night two years ago, I met with members of the Communist Party of Bangladesh at a cafe in Dhaka. The cramped space was roofed in corrugated steel panels and wedged in a narrow alley behind party headquarters. A chai wallah poured red tea while young men smoked cigarettes and talked of an upcoming election they knew would be rigged against them.
They did not tell me this directly, but in a roundabout way that made their meaning clear. There was good reason to be cautious about criticizing then-Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina in public. A year before, the writer and activist Mushtaq Ahmed had died in a Bangladeshi jail after being arrested for comments he made about Hasina’s government on social media. Just one of many silenced critics.
At the time, I didn’t realize the country was sitting on a powder keg. Most of the Bangladeshis I met carried their discontent quietly. Perhaps the magnitude of the situation had been lost in translation; perhaps they were afraid to discuss it. Or maybe they were waiting for what finally happened this summer.
In early June, thousands of students and young Bangladeshis swarmed Dhaka’s streets in what began as a protest for jobs. In a matter of weeks, the movement erupted into an all-out revolt. Everyone from bricklayers to lawyers seized the moment to challenge Hasina’s oppressive regime. By August, they had ended the prime minister’s 15-year reign and sent her fleeing to India.
In a matter of weeks, the movement that started as a protest for jobs had erupted into an all-out revolt.
Before this summer, Hasina appeared to hold an unyielding grip on Bangladesh. By proving otherwise, the students shocked the world. Now, they confront the daunting task of rebuilding a ruptured country.
It’s fitting that students led this revolt; the movement that won Bangladesh its independence also began on a college campus. In 1971, teachers and students at Dhaka University rose up against their Pakistani rulers in pursuit of the right to govern themselves in their own language, Bangla. They achieved victory in just nine months, but it took a war that veered horrifically into genocide and mass rape and claimed the lives of 3 million people.
The first president of independent Bangladesh was Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, a beloved and charismatic leader who was assassinated along with most of his family in a coup in 1975. The only members of his family who survived were two daughters, one of whom was Sheikh Hasina.
In 2009, Hasina ascended to power in the light of her father’s heroic mythos on the strength of promises to modernize a Bangladeshi economy dependent on farming and fast fashion. At first, she seemed to be delivering. The country entered a period of staggering gross domestic product growth punctuated by the construction of gleaming infrastructural megaprojects and power plants. But new wealth for the country did not equate to wealth for working Bangladeshis, and the public soured on her increasingly autocratic government that festered with rampant corruption.
I saw this corruption plainly during reporting visits to the country for my book, “Over the Seawall: Tsunamis, Cyclones, Drought, and the Delusion of Controlling Nature.” Bangladesh spans a low-lying floodplain that is notoriously vulnerable to natural disasters and racks up billions of dollars in annual damages. Locals are locked in ceaseless contest with rising seas and shifting rivers, and, to make matters worse, must contend with official hands that skim off the top of foreign aid packages intended to rebuild levees and construct cyclone shelters. Contracts always seem to go to some government official’s friend or family member, and few in power seem to care whether the work is completed.
When the students began gathering in the streets in June, they marched with a straightforward appeal: jobs. Some 18 million young Bangladeshis are either unemployed or not attending school, and they want better options than working in garment or brick factories. Toward this end, they also called for an end to a nepotistic program that reserved well-paying civil service positions for relatives of veterans of the 1971 revolution. But it wasn’t long before a demand to work became a universal cry for freedom.
“We have been losing our dignity, good governance, justice and moral values,” Hafizur Rahaman, a graduate of Independent University, Bangladesh in Dhaka, told me flatly. “Our politics is of autocracy, not democracy.” Like so many of the students I met in Dhaka and elsewhere in Bangladesh, Rahaman railed against his government with a pragmatic coolness that made it seem as if all these troubles were standard operating procedure and underscored just how rotten the Bangladeshi government had become.
“Police and other law enforcement agencies are mere puppets who follow the ruling party’s command, even though [they are] wrong, unjust and unfair,” he told me.
Some 18 million young Bangladeshis are either unemployed or not attending school.
When the demonstrations escalated into calls for Hasina to resign, her administration only confirmed this criticism. By mid-July, police were firing birdshot and tear gas into crowds of protesters. Hundreds were killed. On July 17, in a move that dissolved any remaining semblance of democratic rule in Bangladesh, Hasina’s regime cut off the internet. The outage lasted 11 days and spurred Canada’s minister of foreign affairs to call for “a quick and peaceful return to a democratic and inclusive civilian-led government in Bangladesh.” After losing her people, Hasina had lost the world. On Aug. 5, after the deaths of more than 300 young Bangladeshis, she finally lost her power, when throngs of protestors poured into the prime minister’s palace and sent her fleeing.
Almost two months later, the adrenaline has worn off. Bangladesh’s new custodians must jumpstart its economy and rebuild nearly every facet of a functioning nation. Nobel Peace Prize laureate Muhammad Yunus has been named head of an interim government, but violence continues to flash across the country.
On Sept. 17, Yunus granted policing power to the military in a bid to restore order on the streets. This did little to mollify concerns that his undefined term will stretch into another period of autocratic rule. The country’s largest opposition party, the Bangladesh National Party, is demanding fresh elections.
When I heard from Rahaman last week, he said he was “hopeful for a better tomorrow.” Although there were still clashes in the country’s southeast, he described the situation in Dhaka as “quite stable.”
But he also noted that the interim government has yet to lay out its plans, and spoke of his wish for Yunus to heed calls for elections and hand power over to an elected government. “Otherwise,” he said, “things will be very difficult for them to manage.”
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