Sheikh Hasina’s last hours in Dhaka, per local news reports

Former Bangladesh prime minister Sheikh Hasina was reluctant to leave her home and her country till the very end, suggests a report published by Bangla news site Prothom Alo on Tuesday, 6 August.

She wanted the police and the army to use force and stop people from storming Ganabhavan, the prime minister’s residence, and reminded the army chief that she had picked him over others.

General Wakar-uz-Zaman, the ‘mild-mannered’ army chief, is married to a second cousin of the former prime minister. He had agreed with junior army officers that the army would not use force against the masses. Sheikh Hasina, according to the report, insisted that the army was duty-bound to protect the elected government and the prime minister.

As people defied curfew on Monday, 5 August, to come out on the streets in their thousands, the writing on the wall was clear.

The prime minister’s sister, Sheikh Rehana, was with her and urging her to step down; but Hasina refused. Even when she was informed that a huge mass of people had started marching towards the prime ministerial residence from Shahbagh, the former PM would not relent. Her aides requested Sheikh Rehana to meet them separately so that they could convey to her the gravity of the situation. After listening to them, Rehana returned and pleaded again with her sister; but Hasina wouldn’t agree to leave.

One of the officials then called up her US-based son, Sajeeb Wazed Joy, to explain that the marchers would be at the gate in less than an hour-and-a-half. Urged to speak to his mother, Joy had a conversation with her — and Sheikh Hasina finally relented.

She wanted to record an address to the nation before she resigned, however. But she was told that there was no time — she had just 45 minutes to pack up and leave.

The former prime minister had miscalculated, it seems, on many counts — but most of all, she had underestimated the people's anger and discontent.

She had antagonised students with her insensitive comments, describing them as criminals, terrorists and ‘razakars’ who collaborated with the Pakistan army during the country’s war of liberation in 1971. It angered the students enough for them to call for her resignation and make it their solitary demand on Saturday, 3 August, as the nation's youth staged what people say was the largest mass rally in the country’s history.    

And eventually, turfed out like a leaf before the storm, so abrupt was Hasina's departure that her cabinet colleagues and party functionaries had no inkling of what was happening. Even on Sunday evening, 5 August, most of them felt the prime minister was in iron-clad control and braced to weather the storm. Stunned by her sudden flight to India, most of them went into hiding on Monday. However, their houses and property were targeted by angry mobs.

As the rage spread, several business establishments — a hotel, a TV channel’s office and studio owned by key persons — were vandalised, looted or torched. Several people were burnt to death in a hotel in Khulna.

So, with nobody left in charge and nobody to direct and shape the people's frustration and fury, mobs stormed the PM’s house, the parliament building and the Mujib memorial museum. They met with no resistance.

People took away whatever they could lay their hands on, including expensive saris, pillows, cushions and fish from the kitchen. Many feasted on the rice and mutton cooked for employees. Some bathed in the pond in the compound and took away what fish they could catch. One of the intruders draped himself in a sari when he found his hands too full of things to carry away.

The prime minister's abrupt de-facto resignation has certainly left a vacuum, and a four-way power struggle is on, suggested the Prothom Alo report, between the army, the centre-right BNP, right-wing Islamists and the students.

There is an agreement among the parties and students that the army should play only a secondary and supportive role until democracy is restored. Some sections of the students have called for a secular constitution. They have appeared on primetime TV to reject any form of army rule.

Since then, there have been unconfirmed reports of Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus being called upon by the students to lead an interim government. Parliament has formally been dissolved by President Mohammed Shahabuddin. Meanwhile, Britain's new prime minister Keir Starmer has made a cautious and clever statement seeming to gently repudiate Hasina's bid for asylum in the UK, even as UK calls for an UN probe (one was mooted ahead of the last Bangladesh elections as well).

So, for now, it's a waiting game all round, with everyone on tenterhooks — Bangladeshis, Indians, and Sheikh Hasina herself.