State of Southasia #07: Ali Riaz on how Bangladesh’s mass protests have already transformed the country
The Bangladesh government has been at war with its people. The protests in July against quotas in public-service jobs, which began on university campuses and spread after violent repression by the government and ruling party, have come to symbolise Bangladesh’s deep discontent with the rule of Sheikh Hasina and the country’s slide towards single-party autocracy. Hasina’s government, which had already shown its unwillingness to brook any dissent, retaliated first with scorn and disregard for protesters’ demands and then with brute force. Several hundred are believed to be dead and thousands injured in clashes between protesters and government forces, including the military.
In January this year, Hasina controversially came to power for a fourth consecutive term. In 2008, her party, the Awami League, was elected with a huge and genuine popular mandate. Since then, Hasina has managed to hold on to power through numerous undemocratic measures, from getting rid of a provision to have caretaker governments running elections to arresting opposition party members en masse. The Awami League government also passed the draconian Digital Security Act, which has been used to silence its critics and has now been replaced with the no-less-severe Cyber Security Act. Along this slide towards authoritarianism, officials in Hasina’s government have been implicated in several scams and instances of corruption. All of this has inflamed a citizenry that has been battling high inflation and high rates of unemployment. The quota protests became a turning point and people came out to express their unhappiness with their government even in the face of a bloody reprisal.
After the protests and violence escalated, the Supreme Court of Bangladesh heard an appeal against the system of job quotas and scaled it back. The country has settled into an uneasy peace but the reasons for the mass uprising are far from being resolved. In this episode of ‘State of Southasia’, Nayantara Narayanan speaks to Ali Riaz, distinguished professor at Illinois State University, who studies democratisation, violent extremism, political Islam, and Southasian and Bangladeshi politics. Riaz details how, after the government displayed absolute disregard for people’s lives, it has further lost legitimacy and seen the political ground shift in Bangladesh.
State of Southasia releases a new interview every four weeks.
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