Hard Choices for Hasina

NO STRANGER TO CRISES in its 53-year history—assassinations, coups, counter-coups, violent political agitation, flawed elections—Bangladesh is today caught up in new difficulties. As many as 147 people, perhaps more, have died in the agitation by students over the quota system which reserved a high percentage of places for descendants of the freedom fighters of the 1971 War of Liberation. What had been a peaceful movement for quota reform ended up in civil disorder, leaving the country paralysed, its economy on a nosedive, and its politics in a state of uncertainty.

The movement for a reform of the quota system was set off by students of Dhaka University and other educational institutions in the country when the high court struck down a decision by the government, a decision made in 2018, to do away with the system. The 2018 move was a response to agitation similar to the one in 2024, with the government led by Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina convinced that a restoration of stability and peace on university campuses was dependent on the withdrawal of the quota system.

The quota system, on which the Supreme Court has now delivered its own opinion in light of the disturbances which have seized the country of late, envisaged as much as 30 per cent of government jobs for the children of freedom fighters. And altogether 56 per cent of jobs, including those for indigenous groups and others, came under the quota system. Since 2018, however, circum­stances had remained peaceful. It was only when a few relatives of freedom fighters filed an appeal with the high court for a restora­tion of the quota system that the situation began to look ominous. And when the high court a few weeks ago moved to declare illegal the abolition of the quota system by the government in 2018, the universities erupted in noisy protests.

Note, though, that even as the protests reached a crescendo, with the students demanding a withdrawal of the high court decision, the agitation remained peaceful. All across the country, students engaged in peaceful processions and other programmes to argue the case that the restoration of the quota system militated against the principle of merit being applied in the matter of the young coming by government jobs, especially in the coveted Bangladesh Civil Service. The students made it known that reserving government jobs for the children and grandchildren of freedom fighters clearly precluded taking into account the matter of merit in recruitment in government services.

In its response, given the intensity of the anti-quota movement, the government appealed to the Supreme Court for a reconsid­eration of the high court decision. The government move clearly did not satisfy the students, a large section of whom suspected that the decision to restore the quota system had the backing of the government. The situation turned for the worse when, at a press conference, Sheikh Hasina rhetorically raised the question of whether she was expected to deny the descendants of freedom fighters the right to a quota in government jobs and instead ensure such jobs for the children of razakars, a pejorative term applied to the Bengali collaborators of the Pakistani occupation army during the 1971 war.

The prime minister’s comment was seized upon by the students as an assault on their patriotism by the head of government. They loudly and emotionally began disseminating the slogan that they were razakars and that it was none other than the country’s prime minister who had laid the charge at their door. Matters were certainly not helped when Obaidul Quader, the general secretary of the ruling Awami League and a senior minister in the Hasina government, publicly proclaimed that the Chhatra League, the students’ wing of the Awami League, would be enough to quell the anti-quota agitation.

That was a clear invitation to trouble, given the negative reputation the Chhatra League has in recent years earned through its high-handed behaviour at different levels of society. The organisation has been accused of influencing decisions at universities and engaging in illegal toll collection on the high­ways. Its activists have prevented other student organisations from carrying out their activities on the campuses.

Quader’s incendiary words unleashed violence on the campus of Dhaka University, with elements of the Chhatra League pounc­ing on the anti-quota movement activists in a decidedly violent manner. Students involved in the movement, including women, were brutally beaten up. It was a trend which soon spread to other campuses in the country. Shockingly, the university authorities made no effort to step into the situation and prevent conditions from escalating further. This too was a new development.

Where in the past vice chancellors took steps to contain violent protests at the universities, when the anti-quota students came under assault from the Chhatra League, no voice of protest was raised by the authorities of the universities. Meanwhile, supporters of the ruling party, both on campus and outside, began propagating the untenable idea that the anti-quota students were anti-national elements out to undermine the ideals of freedom as they were espoused in 1971.

It was from then on only a matter of time before the anti-quota movement would spiral into a bigger crisis that would draw extremist and rightwing elements into the chaos. There can be little question that the violence which followed had much to do with the entry of unruly elements into the picture.

 

To blame the students for the violence would be unfair, for at a certain stage the anti-quota activists were in clear retreat, with space passing into the hands of forces violently opposed to the government. Not even the Chhatra League remained in the picture after all the terror it had unleashed on the students.

And so what followed was a well-timed and well-organised pattern of violence by elements suspiciously linked to forces ar­rayed against the Awami League. Add to that the pent-up anger of the population over rising prices, an absence of the rule of law as observed in the massive corruption indulged in by such function­aries of the government as a former inspector general of police, a commissioner of police, a senior official of the national board of revenue, a chauffeur of the chairman of the country’s public ser­vice commission, and even a peon on the prime minister’s staff.

A terrible flaw of the government has been its propensity to look away from corruption, so much so that in recent times many of those accused of coming by vast wealth beyond their known sources of income have not only not been taken into custody but have been given safe passage out of the country. And that is not all. Prior to the general elections of January this year, wealth state­ments made before the Election Commission by candidates for parliament, most of whom were from the ruling party, showed a massive rise in their levels of property over the past five years.

None of them was asked any questions about this accumulation of wealth and everyone was permitted to take part in the elections. The agitation which proliferated in light of the anti-quota movement can therefore be observed as an expression of discontent by those among the troublemakers who have been exercised by this inability or reluctance of the authorities to bring the corrupt to justice.

In these past many days, Bangladesh’s infrastructure, which for the government as well as the population is a matter of pride, has taken a battering of the worst sort. Scores of public buses have been torched; the structure housing the government-controlled Bangladesh Television was set on fire. Similar was the situation with Shetu Bhaban, the government department responsible, in recent times, for overseeing the construction of the prestigious Padma Bridge. Toll plazas on the newly built national expressway were burnt to ashes. A significant section of the Metro rail, which has greatly assisted in an improvement of commuter movement in Dhaka, was set on fire. Metro rail services, which will take at least a year to be restored, remain suspended. The jail in Narsingdi, a town away from the capital, was broken into, making it possible for 826 prisoners to flee.

IN STARK TERMS, Dhaka has virtually been a warzone in these past couple of weeks. The disturbances have affected the entirety of the country, with an embattled government com­pelled to call in the army to restore order on the streets. In condi­tions never seen since the times of Bangladesh’s two military regimes in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the authorities imposed a curfew all across the country. The disturbances, coupled with such restrictive acts of the government, effectively clamped a ban on industrial activity, education, day-to-day business, and indeed the free movement of citizens. Schools, colleges and universities remain shut, impeding all manner of normal classes and examinations.

The crisis has naturally aroused concern in the international community, with Bangla­deshi students and non-resident Bangladeshis abroad taking part in demonstrations against the harsh measures adopted by the govern­ment. A good number of the leading individu­als in the anti-quota movement have been picked up by the country’s detective agency, though there does not seem to have been any action against the Chhatra League elements or the police and other forces which took violent action against the university students.

The scale of the crisis, unprecedented for the ruling Awami League, has left the government stunned and weakened in large measure. It has been in power without interruption for the last 15 years. Its opponents have regularly accused it of suppressing legitimate opposition and presiding over a shrinking space for debate and dissent. What has left observers surprised is the fact that this crisis has exposed the gov­ernment’s failure to restore the principles of democratic secularism, as enshrined in Bangla­desh’s constitution. The opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), formed by the country’s first military dictator General Ziaur Rahman, remains strong and clearly hopeful that the cur­rent agitation will topple the government.

The Jamaat-e-Islami, though de-registered as a political party over its pro-Pakistan role in 1971, has always lurked in the bushes. Ad­ditionally, extremist Islamist forces have been gaining ground, the blame for which must lie largely with the government, which has in recent years sought to contain such fundamen­talist forces as Hefazat-e-Islam through what has been seen as appeasement. The govern­ment has in a grandiose manner gone into building 630 model mosques in the country—a move considered by critics as a negation of the secularism outlined by Bangladesh’s 1971 lead­ership in the course of the War of Liberation.

For people who have laid faith by the principles of liberalism, the surprise has been in knowing that the Sheikh Hasina government has taken hardly any step towards analysing the situation which has unquestionably brought it almost to its knees. There have been no ministe­rial resignations, no official statement of regret, save for some perfunctory remarks by the prime minister, on the young people killed by government forces or arrested and taken into remand by the police. The government observed a day of mourning on Tuesday, July 30, for those who have died in the violence. But none of this is any sign that the government has recovered the ground it has lost in its botched handling of the situation. Indeed, the fact that the army has been called in to restore stability testifies to the vulnerability of the government at this point in time.

An irony for the government, indeed for Bangladeshis as a whole, is the swift slide in the fortunes of the ruling Awami League. The country’s oldest political party, which was instru­mental in leading the movement for the country’s independence and which in the aftermath of the assassinations of its leaders in 1975 suffered badly at the hands of military and quasi-military regimes, celebrated the 75th anniversary of its founding only in June this year. Barely a month later, it was battling forces which it had antagonised through its arrogance and misplaced approach to the issues and at the same time came under assault from ele­ments of chaos one had thought had been forced into the woods.

Sheikh Hasina will now clearly hope that the international community will sympathise with her as she goes about trying to restore order in Bangladesh. Governments in the West have kept watch on the situation. India, with which Bangladesh and especially its government have historically enjoyed excellent ties, certainly remains worried about the violence rocking the country. But New Delhi has maintained a diplomatically discreet silence and has carefully been observing the situation, which the Hasina government will certainly have appreciated.

So where does the government go from here? It will obvi­ously need to sit back and reflect on where things have gone wrong, to a point where such a massive outbreak of violence threatened its hold on authority. The prime minister, who has met family members of some of the dead, will be expected to do more through reaching out to the country and convincing people that governance will be an exercise her government will engage in better than it has thus far.

A crucial task for Sheikh Hasina will be one of re-evaluating the performance of her ministers and at the same time build a tier of leadership on which she can depend to take decisions in future. She might take a leaf out of the book of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the nation’s founding father, who left a qualified leadership to shape the War of Liberation even as he faced trial for sedition in Pakistan in 1971.

The priorities for the government are plainly out there. To restore its authority, it will need to go for an unfettered application of the rule of law. It will be required to give space to the political opposition; it will be expected to bring to justice all those involved in the killings of the students and others in a swift manner.

Bangladesh is at a crossroads. Wisdom on the part of its lead­ers will be an imperative if the country, humbled and wounded, is to emerge from its predicament, ready to look to the future with renewed confidence.

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