Last week, the Prime Minister of Bangladesh, Sheikh Hasina, was forced to resign from her position and flee the country. Throughout July, she had been cracking down on mass protests, led largely by college students, against her increasingly authoritarian rule. More than three hundred people were killed, and thousands were jailed. The protests continued to intensify, and Hasina soon lost the support of the country’s military and left for India. An interim government has been sworn in. It is led by Muhammad Yunus, an economist who, in 2006, won the Nobel Peace Prize, and includes some of the student protesters who had risen up to oppose Hasina; many of these same students can be seen directing traffic on the streets of Dhaka, the capital.
Bangladesh, formerly East Pakistan, achieved independence in 1971, after a bloody war during which the Pakistani military killed hundreds of thousands of Bengalis, who eventually prevailed with help from India. Prior to Hasina’s downfall, she had ruled Bangladesh for fifteen years. Her father, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman (known as Mujib), was the most prominent leader of the country’s independence movement, and became Bangladesh’s first Prime Minister, and then its first President.
I recently spoke by phone with Subho Basu, an associate professor of history and classical studies at McGill University, and the author of the book “Intimation of Revolution: Global Sixties and the Making of Bangladesh.” (He is currently writing a biography of Mujib.) During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed what led to Hasina’s ouster, the complicated religious and political dynamics behind the latest uprising, and Yunus’s vision for Bangladesh’s future.
Why was Sheikh Hasina overthrown now? What was the breaking point?
Well, there were a couple of breaking points. The first is that sham elections took place in 2014, 2018, and one recently, and in these elections the opposition either boycotted or they were reduced to a hopeless minority. And so people were getting impatient. The second most important thing is that Sheikh Hasina could remain in power because she was borrowing significant amounts of foreign money, primarily from China, but also from Japan. This has led to major infrastructure projects, and economic growth—despite plunder and massive corruption—but recently inflation became a very significant issue, and the rate of growth declined.
This was the background against which the current student rebellion took place. There was shrinkage in employment, and this is why the quota in the civil service, reserved for so-called descendants of the liberation fighters, actually became such an important issue to the students.
Yeah, this quota seems like it was the literal breaking point. But can you explain why?
In 1972, soon after the independence of Bangladesh, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman introduced a quota for jobs for liberation fighters. These were the young armed men who had been roaming around in the countryside, and they were to some extent refusing to surrender their weapons. Bangladesh was an independent country. It was devastated by the Liberation War, and so he assured them jobs. And then quotas were added for disabled people, for women, and for people from certain districts. However, from 1975 to 1990, when the military government was in power, it did not implement that quota seriously. In 2009, Sheikh Hasina came back to power after a landslide victory. [She first served as Prime Minister in the nineteen-nineties.] She basically started implementing the quotas. But many of these quotas were actually used as a kind of nepotistic recruitment of party loyalists. The government scrapped the quota system for several years, but Bangladesh’s high court reversed the scrapping in June because they said it was a constitutional obligation, and as a result, students started agitating. They came out in the streets, and the police behaved in a high-handed manner and there were a number of deaths. And then we saw the widespread mass uprising against the government. [At the end of July, in the midst of the uprising, the Supreme Court’s appellate division overruled the reversal, once again doing away with almost all quotas.]
Bangladesh achieved independence more than fifty years ago, but it seems like a lot of the divisions that we saw from the 1971 era have continued to manifest themselves in the contemporary politics of the country. Do you think that’s accurate?
Well, in 1970, the Awami League, the political party that Hasina now leads, was extremely popular and won an over-all majority in the first direct general election held in Pakistan, twenty-three years after the birth of the country. But the military decided not to hand political power to the elected civilian members. And then the military cracked down, and there were a significant number of deaths, and refugees went to India and established an exiled government in Calcutta.
Within the Awami League, there was factional fighting about the nature of the new government. When Sheikh Mujibur Rahman came forward, he coined a four-point slogan: Nationalism, Socialism, Democracy, and Secularism. Bangladesh suffered a famine in 1974, and gradually his popularity eroded. The following year, he decided to impose a one-party state, which was basically a dictatorship of the Awami League. And in that period, there were different camps, including the old Muslim leaders and Islamist groups who were opposed to the government.
Now, in these circumstances, there was a coup by junior military officers, and Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was assassinated. Then there was a counter-coup. And in the midst of this fighting, a military general, Ziaur Rahman, rose up. He wanted to distance himself from the Awami League, so he brought all the pro-Pakistani elements under an umbrella called the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, which followed the old Pakistani military dictatorship’s policies—a restoration of a certain kind of popular façade, a moderate dose of Islamism, and followed a kind of privatization of the economy and removal of state control.
So B.N.P. and Awami League emerged as two different trends within Bangladeshi politics. The Awami League claims that it inherited the mantle of Sheik Mujib and the so-called secular-liberation struggle. And then there was the B.N.P. and Ziaur Rahman, which was not about secularism, and they clearly saw nationalism through the prism of Bengali Muslims, who make up more than ninety per cent of the population now. He also made an alliance with Jamaat-e-Islami, the party which formerly collaborated with the Pakistani military regime. And then the Awami League leader’s daughter came back from India to run the country, starting for the first time in 1996. The B.N.P. was led by the widow of General Rahman.
You have the Awami League, which has its roots in the independence movement from Pakistan, which I think a lot of people saw as a very heroic thing. And then you have the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, which has its roots more in the dictatorship that came after the independence movement, and represents a more hard-line Islamist politics. But Sheikh Hasina really was an authoritarian, and I assume that you feel like the opposition to her is much more widespread and is not some sort of right-wing Islamist—
Yeah, opposition to her rule came from the students and not, frankly, from the Bangladesh Nationalist Party. It came primarily from the students, and those who are in the civil-society movement, including N.G.O.s, who constitute a powerful bloc in Bangladesh, and people like Muhammad Yunus, who was marginalized and then even threatened with a prison sentence by Sheikh Hasina. He had nothing to do with Islamism, that’s for sure. Those who have formed the interim government have very little to do with Islamism. What they want is to restore a kind of democracy, because in the past fifteen years, the Awami League had established a certain kind of authoritarian rule. The police and military and judiciary, et cetera, were packed with Awami League people. The protesters wanted to reform the state. They have not banned the Awami League from participating in an election when it does happen.
