Bangladesh: Has politics hijacked a legitimate students’ movement now?

The bhasha andolon (language stir) of 1971, which culminated in the birth of Bangladesh, had famously started on the terraces of Dhaka University. The strains of Bangladesh, sung by Joan Baez, resonated with the youth across the border strongly but more than half-a-century later, the times have changed. 

As over 100 lives have been lost in the last three weeks  – with the visuals of Abu Sayed of Rangpur’s Begum Rokeya University being shot dead in cold blood becoming an iconic one of the largest public protest in the country since 2018. As the Supreme Court suspended the high court order on Sunday, 21 July, and directed that 93 per cent of government jobs should be open to candidates on merit, there is now hope that the thorny issue of reservation for the descendants of their freedom fighters can be diffused for the time being. 

The question is: will it bring an end to the tension? There is a growing perception that while the students’ community had been the face of the countrywide stir against the quota system, the agitation has quickly degenerated into a battle of muscle power between the Awami League and it’s students’ wing and the opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP). The simmering issue of reservation of as much as 30% of civil jobs for the families of the Muktiyoddhas, at a time when unemployment has hit a new high there and inflation has reached double digits, is but a springboard that any opposition would pounce upon and that’s what is apparently unfloding there.    

A throwback into the chronology of anti-reservation protests says that in 2018, the Hasina government had bowed to the students’ agitation and scrapped the quota system (then an overwhelming 56%) which had been in place since 1972. The status quo continued since 2021 when a group of petitioners went to the high court and appealed to resurrect the reservation to 30%. 

After hearing the case for three years, the high court reinstated the 30% quota on 1 July – which immediately sparked the first round of protests. The attorney general approached the Supreme Court right after the order and a petition was filed on 16 July as the former suspended the high court order for four weeks. The chief justice appealed to the protesting students to return to the classes, saying that the court would arrive at a decision soon – which came on Sunday where the reservation has been whittled down to seven per cent (five for the next-to-kin of freedom fighters and the remaining 2% for members of ethnic minorities, transgender people and and disabled people).  

The flare-up of the protests despite the chief justice’s assurance had been worrisome to say the least – leading to the loss of young lives, some of whom being teenagers. The tenor of any students’ agitations, as history shows, is often anger than reason and one gets a feeling that they have been used as pawns. The speed in which the protests spread across the major cities of the city, including planned attacks of vandalism on government properties like TV stations, raises questions of whether there is more to it than what meets the eye.  

Did the Hasina government, which was re-elected for the fourth term in January this year and is faced with a strong anti-incumbency wave, handle the fomenting protest with enough sensitivity? Not quite as the prime minister referred to the protesters as Razakars, a historic reference to groups of people of then East Pakistan who had sided with the Pakistan Army during the 1971 struggle. A sombre Sheikh Hasina later addressed the nation with an appeal to keep calm but the damage has been already done. 

‘’There are artworks, memes, rap songs and slogans circulating on social media calling Sheikh Hasina a dictator. It was unthinkable previously. But now those cultural works are being shared by thousands of people on social media platforms,’’ Mubashar Hasan, a Bangladesh expert and post doctoral researcher at University of Oslo, Norway, said in an interview.   

Taslima Nasreen, the long exiled Bangladesh writer, pulled no punches in a X-post last night. ‘’It’s not a fight between the pro-ouota and anti-quota anymore. It’s now a free-for-all between Awami League and it’s goons versus BNP and their goons...It is nothing but Civil War.’’ 

The Awami League government has quite a job on their hands now!