A month ago, no one in Bangladesh could ever have imagined that the country’s authoritarian prime minister Sheikh Hasina could be forcibly removed from power and sent by military helicopter out of the country to India. Least of all Hasina herself, as her party, the Awami League, controlled the police, the judiciary, and all other state institutions. But that is exactly what happened today.
Sheikh Hasina, the aunt of the Labour MP Tulip Siddiq, had been in power for a 15-year stretch. Though the 2008 elections which first made her prime minister were free and fair, all three subsequent elections in 2014, 2018 and earlier this year were beset with allegations that they were rigged.
When she became prime minister in 2008 she was the darling of human rights organisations and the West, but as time went on she turned against the main opposition, Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), arresting thousands and preventing them from functioning. Observers and human rights groups say that extrajudicial killings increased and a new form of human rights violation in the country – enforced disappearances and secret detentions – became common. Hasina has denied these allegations. Dissent was not tolerated and the media were forced increasingly to toe the government line. Corruption in Bangladesh did not start with the Awami League, but allegations of corruption have reached a peak never seen before under Hasina’s watch.
Throughout this period, however, Hasina did nonetheless continue to have significant popular support in the country. She is the daughter of Sheikh Mujib, the country’s independence leader, and the Awami League continued to hold the mantle of the party that created Bangladesh since it helped win a nine-month war against the Pakistan military. Hasina very effectively instrumentalised the party’s relationship with the independence struggle; during her period in office, the Awami League became a hyper-nationalistic party, with Hasina regularly calling opposition parties and dissenters anti-Bangladesh or indeed pro-Pakistan collaborators. There was only one narrative allowed about the 1971 war and it was the one decided by the Awami League.
There was another side to this hyper-nationalism. People became sick of Hasina always talking about her father and her party only giving employment and privileges to those seen as ‘pro-liberation’.
It was the party’s obsession with 1971 that eventually brought the prime minister down. The Awami League had established a quota system for government jobs that meant that 30 per cent of jobs went to grandchildren of those who fought in the 1971 war – with another 26 per cent going to other socially marginalised groups. This meant that most students had to compete for just 44 per cent of all government jobs, a situation that enraged the majority.
Following student protests in 2018, the government had removed this quota. But in early July, the High Court ruled that the government’s decision was unconstitutional. Students smelt a rat and thought that the government was really behind the judicial order. They started protesting in small numbers in the capital city and around the country.
Hasina then made a terrible error. In a press conference, she called the protesting students grandchildren of ‘razakars’, a term which refers to people who collaborated with the Pakistan military. This angered the students, who raised a slogan, ‘I am a Razakar. You are a Razakar. Who says so? The Autocrat says so.’ These slogans led to the student wing of the Awami League, incited by government ministers, to attack the protesting students, killing six people on 16 July. These deaths triggered much larger student protests, which the Awami League government sought to quash with brute force. Over a period of eight days, at least 200 student and other protestors were killed, including, according to Unicef, more than 30 children.
Clearly the normally very loyal army realised it had to step in to keep order and to fulfil the people’s demands
The government closed down the internet, declared a curfew and called the army to enforce it. More killings took place, but soon the country seemed to get back to normality and the army went back to their barracks. This could have been the end of it, but student leaders called for more protests; this time, people from all walks of life joined, including many who were otherwise natural supporters of the Awami League. They had a single demand: the resignation of Sheikh Hasina.
This looked like the end of the road for the prime minister but with one further throw of the dice, yesterday the party set the police and the party’s student wing back onto streets causing clashes which killed 95 people, including 13 police officers.
What exactly happened overnight we don’t know, but clearly the normally very loyal army realised it had to step in to keep order and to fulfil the people’s demands. The prime minister was then pressured to resign.
Army Chief, General Wakuz Al Zaman has now said that he is establishing an interim government which hopefully will comprise respected civil society members with a key task of moving the country towards free and fair elections. The new interim government will however face extraordinary challenges. All the institutions of the state are heavily staffed by Awami League loyalists, so it will be difficult for the new interim government to govern the country without facing obstacles. What’s more, with so many people victimised by the former Awami League government, there is a real risk of retributive justice being meted out, and law and order getting out of control. Already some Awami League politicians’ houses are being set on fire.
It will take a long time for the Awami League to recover from this, but the party’s links to the country’s independence will mean that it won’t wither. It will however take a very long time to recover from its complicity in the country’s largest massacre since the country’s independence.