The big news out of Bangladesh is that a week long violence-filled protest has led to a shutdown of that country with the army called out to stamp out a movement that was ostensibly started by college students against job reservations for children of ‘Mukti Joddhas’ or freedom fighters who liberated the country from Pakistan in 1971.
The Supreme Court in a judgement on Sunday finally scrapped a high court order pronounced earlier this month which had brought in reservation for nearly a third of all government jobs and allowed reservation of only 5% for veteran relatives and another 2% for various disadvantaged groups in a bid to quell the violence which has cost more than a 100 lives.
Curiously, the job quota which came about in the wake of Bangladesh’s war of independence had ceased to exist since 2021 when that country’s premier Sheikh Hasina scrapped it.
So how does one view the movement which has turned Bangladesh into a bloody battlefield? And what does it portend for South Asia, especially its closest neighbour India?
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The protests against a non-existent quota had quite some days back transformed from a normal student protest into a pan-Bangladesh mass movement against the ruling party, which came back to power for a third time in an election earlier this year. So questions will also arise whether the apex court’s judgement will be enough to quell it permanently, especially since more than a 100 people have died and a large number have been affected by the crackdown.
The democracy deficit which came to the fore in the election held this year, which was boycotted by the main Opposition BNP and from which the radical Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami, accused of complicity in war crimes in 1971, was banned, has obviously helped fuel the larger protest. But that is not the whole story.
Earlier this month, when the Dhaka high court ruled that the scrapped quota system could come back with more jobs reserved for veteran children, protests started in almost all universities in an unplanned manner. Attempts to calm the situation with Bangladesh’s Supreme Court suspending the order did not help and the protests soon snowballed with sections of the populace disgruntled with the Awami League and the Opposition joining in.
A tactless statement on the quota issue by Sheikh Hasina, on her return from a state visit to China, only added fuel to the fire. She had sarcastically asked whether there should instead be reservations for the sons and daughters of ‘Razaakars’, a fundamentalist militia which had aided the Pakistani army murder millions of unarmed civilians in a horrific genocide between March and December 1971.
The Awami League government has for some time been in a tight spot combatting high youth unemployment rates which now stand at 15.7%, a slowing economy, a falling Taka and a sudden dip in Bangladesh’s main export – garments.
Its love affair with China too has soured and Hasina, who was seeking a US $5 billion soft loan from that nation, came back from Beijing last week with a commitment for just US $139 million in loans.
China which had earlier given huge loans totalling more than US $7 billion to build ports, highways and other infrastructure projects in Bangladesh has been reeling in debt repayments, placing tremendous pressure on Dhaka’s foreign exchange reserves which have fallen by 60% between August 2021 and June 2024.
The sharp dip in exports ever since the Red Sea crisis made transporting goods to Europe and the US costly, has also added to Dhaka’s balance of payments woes and seen the Taka falling from TK 105 to the dollar in March this year to TK 117 to now. While inflation has been hovering over 9% in the last one year.
The Opposition, which saw the student protests as a lifeline in their flailing struggle to oust Hasina, jumped in with their student wings, many of whom came out with arms, to turn the riots into an existentialist crisis for the Awami League demanding Hasina’s resignation.
Popular resentment against economic woes and the ruling party’s high handedness suddenly coalesced, and the discontent over the non-existent quota became secondary in the high tide of public angst.
When a call by the Opposition including Islamist groups to intensify the agitation which had already claimed dozens of lives turned the streets of Dhaka into a bloody war zone on Friday, with scores more being left dead, Hasina called in the army.
This happened despite the fact that her party does not fully trust the country’s military which has a long history of coups and counter-coups and assassination of leaders including Hasina’s father and founder of Bangladesh Sheikh Mujib-ur-Rahman and his entire family, except for two daughters who were abroad on the fateful morning of August 15, 1975.
How this latest twist in Bangladesh’s troubled political history will play out, only time will tell. Social media is already awash with fake news of a purported statement by junior officers of the country’s military coming out against the government and in favour of the students. But then fake news in South Asia often has a bad habit of coming true at a later date.
While these events are enough to set alarm bells ringing in Delhi and chancelleries of the “democratic world”, what is more disturbing is the blatantly communal and anti-India slogans and posters which cropped up during the protests.
One of the milder posters read “Chhatra Jodi Razakaar, Desh Kar? Indiar?” Which roughly translates into ‘if students are Razakaars, who owns the country – India?’, implying that the Sheikh Hasina-led government is an Indian creation, a false allegation which the opposition BNP and radical Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami has been voicing for years.
The Taliban had recruited large numbers of fighters from Bangladesh in the 1990s who on their return from Afghanistan had formed the core of extremists who plagued Dhaka in the last two decades. The extremist outfits formed by these returnee-Bangladeshi Taliban carried out strikes both in Bangladesh and India.
The last spectacular one was in 2016 at a café in Dhaka were 22 people were slaughtered in cold blood by terrorists. After that a crackdown by Hasina saw most modules busted and jihadists arrested or killed.
The current movement’s slogan “Amra Kara, tomra Kara, Razakaar, Razakaar” (Who are we? Who are you? Razakaar, Razakaar) sounds eerily familiar to a slogan coined by these Taliban returnees in the early 2000s and used in street demonstrations then — “Amra sobai hobo Taliban, Bangla hobe Afghanistan” (We will all join Taliban, Bangladesh will turn into Afghanistan).
After Mujib’s death in 1975, till the 2000s when BNP’s Begum Khaleda Zia was in power, Bangladesh had also become a safe haven for not only Islamist terror groups but also for rebels from India’s Northeast.
Ministers in the BNP led government and army officers were found complicit in the illegal arms trade that was suspected to have originated in south-west China and involved the intelligence agency of another South Asian nation to channel weapons to these Northeastern militants.
Bangladesh has always had a silver of its population supporting fundamentalist causes and another equally strong section supporting moderate Islam and a secular polity. The vast majority of its population usually stays neutral but, at one point of history or the other, veers to the right or the left and that causes catalytic changes in the nation’s polity.
In 1947, the Muslim League won the perception battle and goaded East Bengal into joining Pakistan, while in 1971, the vast majority of that same country supported the left-of-centre Awami League in opting for a secular, democratic Bangladesh.
If the movement to topple Hasina succeeds, the danger for India is that those who come to power — a BNP-Jamaat-backed alternative or a military cabal of young officers — will be heavily influenced by Bangladesh’s burgeoning tribe of radical Islamists and pro-China elements.
This does not mean India should be a blind supporter of the Awami League. A true friend needs to point out mistakes when committed and help in corrective actions. And Hasina has been making many mistakes in her quest to consolidate her rule — side-stepping democratic elections, allowing corrupt party apparatchiks more power, sidelining old loyalists and encouraging pro-Islamist factions by giving in to their demands.
However, both New Delhi and other powerful nations with interest in the region should realise that a Bangladesh hosting Chinese interests, possibly naval assets, would be a direct military threat not only to India but also to the US which is locked in mortal combat with Beijing over control of the Indo-Pacific region.
Bangladesh’s Jamaat and BNP are also believed to have retained live contacts with Pakistan, especially its military intelligence agency ISI. If Dhaka were to again become a part of the growing axis between Beijing and Islamabad, for South Bloc it would also mean a situation where there “are thorns on both sides” of its border with a “dragon breathing fire from above”.
The writer is former head of PTI’s eastern region network
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