Last week, the Prime Minister of Bangladesh, Sheikh Hasina, was forced to resign from her position and flee the country. Throughout July, she had been cracking down on mass protests, led largely by college students, against her increasingly authoritarian rule. More than three hundred people were killed, and thousands were jailed. The protests continued to intensify, and Hasina soon lost the support of the country’s military and left for India. An interim government has been sworn in. It is led by Muhammad Yunus, an economist who, in 2006, won the Nobel Peace Prize, and includes some of the student protesters who had risen up to oppose Hasina; many of these same students can be seen directing traffic on the streets of Dhaka, the capital.
Bangladesh, formerly East Pakistan, achieved independence in 1971, after a bloody war during which the Pakistani military killed hundreds of thousands of Bengalis, who eventually prevailed with help from India. Prior to Hasina’s downfall, she had ruled Bangladesh for fifteen years. Her father, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman (known as Mujib), was the most prominent leader of the country’s independence movement, and became Bangladesh’s first Prime Minister, and then its first President.
I recently spoke by phone with Subho Basu, an associate professor of history and classical studies at McGill University, and the author of the book “Intimation of Revolution: Global Sixties and the Making of Bangladesh.” (He is currently writing a biography of Mujib.) During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed what led to Hasina’s ouster, the complicated religious and political dynamics behind the latest uprising, and Yunus’s vision for Bangladesh’s future.
Why was Sheikh Hasina overthrown now? What was the breaking point?
Well, there were a couple of breaking points. The first is that sham elections took place in 2014, 2018, and one recently, and in these elections the opposition either boycotted or they were reduced to a hopeless minority. And so people were getting impatient. The second most important thing is that Sheikh Hasina could remain in power because she was borrowing significant amounts of foreign money, primarily from China, but also from Japan. This has led to major infrastructure projects, and economic growth—despite plunder and massive corruption—but recently inflation became a very significant issue, and the rate of growth declined.
This was the background against which the current student rebellion took place. There was shrinkage in employment, and this is why the quota in the civil service, reserved for so-called descendants of the liberation fighters, actually became such an important issue to the students.
Yeah, this quota seems like it was the literal breaking point. But can you explain why?
In 1972, soon after the independence of Bangladesh, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman introduced a quota for jobs for liberation fighters. These were the young armed men who had been roaming around in the countryside, and they were to some extent refusing to surrender their weapons. Bangladesh was an independent country. It was devastated by the Liberation War, and so he assured them jobs. And then quotas were added for disabled people, for women, and for people from certain districts. However, from 1975 to 1990, when the military government was in power, it did not implement that quota seriously. In 2009, Sheikh Hasina came back to power after a landslide victory. [She first served as Prime Minister in the nineteen-nineties.] She basically started implementing the quotas. But many of these quotas were actually used as a kind of nepotistic recruitment of party loyalists. The government scrapped the quota system for several years, but Bangladesh’s high court reversed the scrapping in June because they said it was a constitutional obligation, and as a result, students started agitating. They came out in the streets, and the police behaved in a high-handed manner and there were a number of deaths. And then we saw the widespread mass uprising against the government. [At the end of July, in the midst of the uprising, the Supreme Court’s appellate division overruled the reversal, once again doing away with almost all quotas.]
Bangladesh achieved independence more than fifty years ago, but it seems like a lot of the divisions that we saw from the 1971 era have continued to manifest themselves in the contemporary politics of the country. Do you think that’s accurate?
Well, in 1970, the Awami League, the political party that Hasina now leads, was extremely popular and won an over-all majority in the first direct general election held in Pakistan, twenty-three years after the birth of the country. But the military decided not to hand political power to the elected civilian members. And then the military cracked down, and there were a significant number of deaths, and refugees went to India and established an exiled government in Calcutta.
Within the Awami League, there was factional fighting about the nature of the new government. When Sheikh Mujibur Rahman came forward, he coined a four-point slogan: Nationalism, Socialism, Democracy, and Secularism. Bangladesh suffered a famine in 1974, and gradually his popularity eroded. The following year, he decided to impose a one-party state, which was basically a dictatorship of the Awami League. And in that period, there were different camps, including the old Muslim leaders and Islamist groups who were opposed to the government.
Now, in these circumstances, there was a coup by junior military officers, and Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was assassinated. Then there was a counter-coup. And in the midst of this fighting, a military general, Ziaur Rahman, rose up. He wanted to distance himself from the Awami League, so he brought all the pro-Pakistani elements under an umbrella called the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, which followed the old Pakistani military dictatorship’s policies—a restoration of a certain kind of popular façade, a moderate dose of Islamism, and followed a kind of privatization of the economy and removal of state control.
So B.N.P. and Awami League emerged as two different trends within Bangladeshi politics. The Awami League claims that it inherited the mantle of Sheik Mujib and the so-called secular-liberation struggle. And then there was the B.N.P. and Ziaur Rahman, which was not about secularism, and they clearly saw nationalism through the prism of Bengali Muslims, who make up more than ninety per cent of the population now. He also made an alliance with Jamaat-e-Islami, the party which formerly collaborated with the Pakistani military regime. And then the Awami League leader’s daughter came back from India to run the country, starting for the first time in 1996. The B.N.P. was led by the widow of General Rahman.
You have the Awami League, which has its roots in the independence movement from Pakistan, which I think a lot of people saw as a very heroic thing. And then you have the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, which has its roots more in the dictatorship that came after the independence movement, and represents a more hard-line Islamist politics. But Sheikh Hasina really was an authoritarian, and I assume that you feel like the opposition to her is much more widespread and is not some sort of right-wing Islamist—
Yeah, opposition to her rule came from the students and not, frankly, from the Bangladesh Nationalist Party. It came primarily from the students, and those who are in the civil-society movement, including N.G.O.s, who constitute a powerful bloc in Bangladesh, and people like Muhammad Yunus, who was marginalized and then even threatened with a prison sentence by Sheikh Hasina. He had nothing to do with Islamism, that’s for sure. Those who have formed the interim government have very little to do with Islamism. What they want is to restore a kind of democracy, because in the past fifteen years, the Awami League had established a certain kind of authoritarian rule. The police and military and judiciary, et cetera, were packed with Awami League people. The protesters wanted to reform the state. They have not banned the Awami League from participating in an election when it does happen.
One thing they have really talked about, in terms of reforming the state, is making the police far more accountable to the people, rather than to Sheikh Hasina. The police killed a lot of people during the protests, and the Awami League also kidnapped opposition politicians. Some of them were illegally arrested. People could not protest, and freedom of the press was curtailed. As a consequence, Sheikh Hasina became very unpopular, and there was a widespread perception within Bangladesh that this was India’s doing. India is now ruled by a Hindu Nationalist political party, the B.J.P., and that did not go very well with the Muslim-majority Bangladesh.
One of the crimes of the Pakistani Army in Bangladesh, in 1971, was specifically targeting Bangladeshi Hindus, many of whom fled to India, and many of whom were slaughtered. You see some roots of this in today’s politics. Sheikh Hasina fled to India; she’s been supported by the Modi government, which is obviously, as you said, a Hindu-nationalist government. And there have been reports and fears that this revolution (or whatever we want to call it) in Bangladesh, in the past several weeks, has targeted Hindus, and there are fears that there will be further violence against Hindus. How concerned are you about that?
Well, the basic thing is that in South Asia, wherever you go, the minority will always be targeted when there is upheaval. The Hindus remaining in Bangladesh make up around eight per cent of the population, where they were once around thirty per cent. They primarily migrated to India, and took shelter in India. But today, eight per cent remain, and a significant number of them are supporters of the Awami League and many of the Awami League leaders at the local level are Hindus. And so, when Awami League leaders are targeted and attacked, these Hindu leaders are also targeted and attacked. But beyond that, there were attacks against Hindu property and Hindu temples, et cetera, and this was because the Sheikh Hasina regime was identified with India, which to some extent appears to be a Hindu India. And some of the right-wing media in India magnified the attacks on the Hindus. So it’s a very complicated story, because the B.J.P.’s popularity is declining in India, and they are trying to capitalize on this moment to strengthen their popularity. But the interim government has been constantly issuing statements saying not to attack minorities.
I want to ask you about Muhammad Yunus, who I think is seen in the West as a sort of heroic, somewhat saintlike figure who cares about the poor. Without disputing that, I’m trying to understand what his place was within Bangladeshi politics before this appointment. What did he represent then and what does he represent now?
Well, in Bangladesh, I think Muhammad Yunus is associated with Grameen Bank and he’s the country’s first winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. So, he enjoys quite a lot of prestige and status. Grameen Bank is a massive experiment in removing poverty. [The bank, which shared the Nobel with Yunus, specialized in microfinance—making small loans to people with limited access to the traditional banking system, especially Bangladeshi women.] No one would say that he completely removed poverty, but no one would deny that he made certain impacts that helped with poverty reduction. He became an iconic figure. In 2007, he tried to organize a political party. This would have been a second not expressly Muslim party, and it would have cut into the Awami League’s support base. And so Sheikh Hasina became extreme about it. They were once very cordial, but Sheikh Hasina became extremely angry with this move. And there was probably a personal jealousy, and Sheikh Hasina started saying things like, You are sucking blood from the poor, et cetera. Money lending with interest charges has certain connotations in Islam.
Sheikh Hasina went after Yunus and tried to imprison him on charges of violating labor laws and not protecting the workers in his own institution, and she removed him from the directorship of Grameen Bank. The students and the opposition did not want everything to be dominated by two dynastic political parties, and so they had to approach somebody who could rally the people. They approached Yunus. These groups of students are not Islamist, and they’re also definitely not Awami leaders, so they represent a third kind of democratic force in the country.
How do you think Yunus sees his job? Is it to develop a third political force in the country? Or, do you think it’s more about being a caretaker, getting the country back on track and hopefully bringing about the return of a more democratic system, without an authoritarian leader like Sheikh Hasina?
The interim government is claiming that it’s a caretaker government, and that it wants to reform the state and prevent the authoritarian traditions, and later on, wants to introduce a free and fair democratic election and the handing over of political power. But the problem in Bangladesh is that it is not only Sheikh Hasina who is an autocrat. The people in power tend to not give much space to the opposition. That’s why I believe that the interim government wants to create an institutional structure, to strengthen the institutional structure and democracy, and to have transparent economic management so that they can create a more sustainable democratic political system. That is the goal. What could happen and how that could happen, nobody knows.
Yunus is eighty-four now, older than Joe Biden. He was born in colonial India, and then was a citizen of Pakistan, and then became a Bangladeshi citizen in his thirties. It’s been an amazing life, and to think that he could be part of another movement, another phase of his country, is kind of incredible.
Yes, some Bangladeshi newspapers have drawn parallels with Nelson Mandela. They see him as some kind of iconic unifying figure who could guide Bangladesh and bring it out of the current chaos and anarchy.
Did that strike you as overly romantic? Or do you have some hope that that will be the case?
At this moment, there is obviously euphoria; they gained freedom from authoritarian rule. There is also a resentment among Awami League leaders and followers. There is also a certain kind of apprehension among the religious minorities, and the Awami League is still a major political force even though they are much detested and much hated. In such circumstances, they need a certain kind of unifying administration to reform the structure and create a sustainable basis for democracy. So I am very cautiously optimistic, but there is no guarantee that they won’t fail. ♦
