Nusrat Sabina Chowdhury (bio) (muse.jhu.edu)
In July 2024, Bangladesh witnessed a historic uprising that led to the ouster of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina after 15 years of increasingly authoritarian rule. What began as student protests against discriminatory government job quotas transformed into a nationwide movement demanding regime change. The protests, marked by unprecedented violence and state repression, resulted in nearly a thousand deaths. The student coalition “Students Against Discrimination” emerged as a powerful political force, successfully mobilizing the masses and ultimately forcing Hasina to flee. The uprising highlighted the enduring role of student activism in Bangladesh’s politics and reignited hope for democratic reform under an interim government led by Muhammad Yunus.
In October 2024, near the official residence of the chief advisor to Bangladesh’s interim government, a simple sign stood out on a colorful, graffiti-splattered Dhaka wall. Written in English, the sign listed the country’s three largest political parties—the Bangladesh Awami League, Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), and Jamaat-e-Islami (Jamaat)—with a bright-red “X” next to each one, signaling clear disapproval of conventional politics. Below them was the word “New,” followed by a green check mark. This was the vision of the thousands of mostly young protesters who three months earlier had led an unprecedented political movement against Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina of the Awami League (1996–2001, 2009–24), the longest-reigning ruler in modern South Asia. They wanted a new Bangladesh, a Bangladesh 2.0.
This was not the only message vying for attention in the capital city. Nor was it the only wall bearing revolutionary sentiments. Seemingly every visible surface in cities and towns across the country had come to life with splashes of graffiti painted during and after the summer protests—demonstrations that at first had simply demanded reforms to government-job allocations but soon called for the prime minister to step down. “Would anyone like water?” (pani lagbe, pani?), read one of the slogans. These are the now-famous words of student-activist Mir Mahfuzur Rahman Mugdho, who was immortalized on video handing out bottles of water to weary, unarmed protesters victimized by tear-gas shells, rubber bullets, and gunshots fired by the police, paramilitary, and Awami League goons. Mugdho would be gunned down by the police on 18 July 2024. He was one of roughly a thousand people killed in Bangladesh in July and August before Sheikh Hasina’s ouster on August 5.1
Together, the sign rejecting the old order and the slogan memorializing [End Page 65] the martyred Mugdho captured the zeitgeist of this extraordinary turn of events—both the long-simmering dissatisfaction with politics-as-usual, exemplified most blatantly by the ruling Awami League in recent years, and the sacrifices of ordinary citizens at the hands of a violent state. Although the student movement, known as Students Against Discrimination, would eventually vow to radically reimagine government itself, it initially aimed simply to get the increasingly autocratic Hasina regime to listen and concede to its demands—or, as Lisa Mitchell puts it, to “hail the state.”2 According to Mitchell, holding mass demonstrations is the most common, and cost effective, way for people to “do” democracy in South Asia. Collective assemblies routinely broadcast political messages, hold officials accountable, compel dialogue, and recalibrate power. Publicly called out in this way, the state is obliged to give the people an audience.
In July 2024, Bangladeshi students’ agitation over the bread-and-butter issue of public-sector job quotas snowballed into a demand for regime change, as the state itself had lost their trust, however briefly, as an arbiter of justice and defender of the rule of law. These young protesters, disillusioned with politics and government, reclaimed and amplified their voice by bending the communicative norms of established politics. In so doing, the chhatra-janata (student-people) emerged, not for the first time in the country’s history, as a revolutionary political force.
“Politics Has Come Back”
Two months after Sheikh Hasina’s dramatic exit to India, where she remained in exile at the time of this writing, a core member of Students Against Discrimination summarized the group’s collective stance, saying “We are engaging with the political elite but do not seek roundtable discussions. We believe in addressing issues on the streets. Sheikh Hasina has evaded accountability on the streets, and it is there that decisions will be made.”3 Another activist, who had taken part in recent post-Hasina agitations to remove the Awami League–appointed president (a figurehead in Bangladesh’s parliamentary system), sent me a text message around the same time sharing similar sentiments: “It’s good [the situation] is tense again. Politics has come back. We’re back on the streets” (the italicized words were in English). Both comments offer clues into the form and content of the movement that deposed an increasingly authoritarian ruler—something few seasoned observers of Bangladeshi politics, let alone ordinary citizens, could have predicted.
The crisis began with the government-job quota system, which is almost as old as Bangladesh itself. The system was introduced in 1972 by Sheikh Mujibur Rahman (“Mujib”), the country’s founding leader and Sheikh Hasina’s father. Although the policy specifics have changed with each new regime, it was under Sheikh Hasina that veterans of Bangladesh’s [End Page 66] war of independence from Pakistan (1971) and their families were guaranteed a wide range of benefits including educational scholarships. In 2018, the share of public-sector jobs reserved for families of freedom fighters rose to 30 percent, angering public-university students, who were the main contenders for those jobs. As a result of public outcry, on 3 October 2018, the government issued a circular scrapping all quotas, including those for women, ethnic minorities, and differently abled groups.
Some of the outrage over the large veteran allocation can be explained by controversies surrounding the national list of freedom fighters. The list has been revised at least seven times since 1972, and the criteria for recognition as a freedom fighter—for example, age and the definition of “freedom fighter” itself—have changed eleven times. By mid-2024, Hasina’s government had identified at least eight-thousand people who had falsely claimed to be freedom fighters and planned to reclaim their allowances, with interest.4
But the students also asserted that the regime was cynically increasing the freedom-fighter allocation to benefit its own Awami League supporters and sympathizers. On 5 June 2024, in response to a petition filed by a group of veterans’ descendants, the High Court reinstated the quota system, including the 30 percent allocation for freedom fighters’ families. The Court described the government’s decision to scrap the quotas in 2018 as unconstitutional, illegal, and ineffective. The public response was angry and immediate. In early July, students at public universities in Dhaka and elsewhere began staging protests. In a sign of what was to come, private-university students as well as middle- and high-school students joined in. The coalition that emerged called itself Students Against Discrimination and prioritized members’ student status rather than political affiliations. On July 21, the Supreme Court slashed the freedom fighters’ quota to 5 percent and left 93 percent of government jobs to be allocated on merit with the remainder going to minority groups.5
This was not the first time a search for legal recourse metamorphosed into massive demonstrations in Bangladesh. In 2012 and 2013, an International Crimes Tribunal presided over war-crimes trials of suspected perpetrators and collaborators in the genocide that took place during the liberation war. In early 2013, the Tribunal announced a sentence of life imprisonment rather than capital punishment for a notorious Jamaat leader, Abdul Quader Molla, stirring suspicions of backdoor negotiations. The public erupted in protest, including a spectacular, weeks-long occupation (known as the Shahbag movement) of a busy street corner in Dhaka.6 Molla’s sentence was soon changed and he was hanged.
This time around, a combination of heavy-handedness, wide-ranging grievances, and the government’s refusal to recognize citizens’ outrage catalyzed the momentous shift. The agitations against the High Court’s decision began on 1 July 2024 with sit-ins. By the time the Supreme [End Page 67] Court reversed the High Court decision on July 21, protesters’ frustration and anger had already boiled over. At a July 14 press briefing, roughly two weeks into the protests, Sheikh Hasina mocked the protesters as razakars or, rather, the descendants of razakars. This Urdu word for “volunteer” is part of the Bengali vernacular and has particularly incendiary connotations. At one time, it was a label for Bengali civilians who had sided with and were trained by the Pakistani army during the 1971 liberation war. The word made a resurgence during the most recent tenure of the Awami League government (2009–24) as a political weapon used to “other” and silence the party’s political opponents.
The most cynical use of the word by the Awami League regime followed the 2013 Shahbag protests, when thousands of university students and activists demanded capital punishment for the alleged collaborators of 1971, and by extension, a moratorium on religion-based politics (seeing the Jamaat-e-Islami’s problematic role during the war of 1971 as reason to ban all Islamic parties). The Awami League managed to exploit the movement’s energy for its own political ends by hastening the judicial process and using it as an excuse to label Jamaat-e-Islami as a radical Islamist party with some alleged razakars among its senior members who were implicated in crimes against humanity. This was a canny political maneuver that threatened not only Jamaat’s political legitimacy but also that of the BNP, Jamaat’s strategic ally and the Awami League’s main opponent.7
Hasina’s use of the term in 2024 to dismiss the protesters added insult to injury, setting off a domino effect. Rather than trying to quell the public outrage, Hasina responded with characteristic mockery and anger, asking if one could logically deduce from the students’ demand that it was the razakars’ family and kin, rather than those of the freedom fighters, who should have been offered a leg up in the job market. This was more than just a flippant comment; it was an assault on the dignity of the students, whom Hasina and a number of her cabinet members now labeled traitors. It also brought into relief the divisive approach to politics that the Awami League had perfected.8 Part of this strategy entailed complete ownership of the country’s origin story, in which the Awami League had led Bangladesh to independence and established a secular democracy after years of military rule. Anybody critical of the government was labeled an Islamic radical or terrorist—in short, razakar.
The student protesters understood this well, summarizing the ruling elite’s strategy with the slogan “If you lick boots, you’re a friend; if not, a terrorist” (paa chatle shongi, na chatle jongi). The students’ counterstrategy was not only to push back but to reclaim and redefine the government’s insults; thus came about the most consequential slogan of the July uprising—”Who are you? Who am I? Razakar, Razakar!” (Tumi ke? Ami ke? Razakar, Razakar!). The political elite feigned shock at the apparent admission, when in fact the protesters had repurposed [End Page 68] and shifted the meaning of razakar from the “enemy within” to the “one who speaks in righteous indignation.” They soon made their meaning clear, adding: “Who said it? Who said it? Autocrat! Autocrat!” (Ke bolechhe? Ke bolechhe? Shairachaar! Shairachaar!) and “We went to ask for rights; instead, we became razakars.” (Chaite gelam adhikar, hoye gelam razakar.)
With these slogans, the students publicly denounced Sheikh Hasina as an autocrat who insulted citizens and denied their rights. This may have been the first time in more than fifteen years that the prime minister had been called out in such a way. But normal democratic politics and dialogue were no longer adequate for engaging with a power that, for all intents and purposes, had become authoritarian. Hasina’s arrogant response to a standard demand, that of equal distribution of state resources, made in a conventional way, propelled the movement toward radical political change.
This would not be the prime minister’s only blunder. A number of missteps at the highest level of the government helped to escalate the situation into a full-blown crisis. For instance, as the state unleashed violence on July 16, crowds vandalized state-broadcasting facilities and two brand-new metro-rail stations. The Dhaka metro rail had been an ambitious infrastructure project of the Hasina government that was credited to the personal vision of Hasina herself. What was striking about the metro-station attacks was not the crowd’s penchant for destructive violence, which is de rigueur in South Asian street politics, but the targeting of the metro rail. Inaugurated only in 2022, it was still a novelty and stood as a spectacular monument to development, a symbol of the kind of “infrastructural populism” mobilized by the Awami League.
On her visit to one of the targeted stations only ten days before she was forced to flee, Sheikh Hasina wept publicly, and declared once more that the people demanding her ouster were not students, but mobs and miscreants. This performance of shock and grief by a leader, who until then had neither mourned nor admitted to the killing of more than a hundred unarmed students by the police and Awami League cadres, was widely perceived as insincere. Hasina’s affective outburst generated rage and, predictably, viral memes and catchy puns, including a cartoon showing her sobbing and wiping her nose that was captioned “Enough with the drama, Darling!” (natok kom koro piyo!). The cartoon cropped up all over the capital city as the misspelled Bengali tagline added to its [End Page 69] comic effect and indexed a new reality in which the prime minister’s words and actions were open to ridicule. Soon, she would be referred to only as “fascist” or “killer” (khuni) Hasina.
The many mistakes of Sheikh Hasina’s government might have expedited her rapid fall from grace, but it was the police killing of Abu Sayed, an English student at a northern university, that changed the direction of the quota-reform movement. On July 16, the police shot Abu Syed with rubber bullets as he stood with his arms stretched out, carrying only a wooden stick (lathi). Numerous videos and photographs of the face-off showed Abu Sayed confronting the shooters, poised as if prepared to accept martyrdom. He eventually doubled over in pain and succumbed to his injuries on his way to safety. The youngest of nine siblings in a struggling rural family, Abu Sayed was considered one of the first martyrs of a cause that had brought Bangladeshi youth together beyond the familiar coordinates of affiliation, class, or ideology. In his final Facebook message posted the day before his murder, Abu Syed addressed his contemporaries: “You, too, will eventually succumb to death, according to the laws of nature. But as long as you live, live with a backbone.”9
Between the infamous July 14 press conference and the prime minister’s July 25 visit to one of the vandalized metro stations, the government deployed armed troops who killed more than a hundred people. To restrict political organizing, authorities shut down the internet; detained the student coordinators and tried coaxing confessions out of them; hunted down and arrested thousands of students and opposition activists; and eventually declared a nationwide curfew. Members of the Awami League’s student wing, the Bangladesh Chhatra League, played a supporting role in these efforts. Armed with guns, hammers, and knives, and often wearing motorcycle helmets for protection and to shield their identities, these thugs who were notorious for promoting a culture of fear and brutality on university campuses descended upon the protesters. As if to confirm what millions in Bangladesh and across the globe were seeing in their social-media feeds, the general-secretary of the Awami League, Obaidul Quader, publicly threatened the protesters with retaliation from its party youth activists.
On July 20, the student coalition issued a list of nine demands, including a public apology from Sheikh Hasina and justice for the murders. They also called for the resignation of Obaidul Quader as well as the home minister, high-ranking police officers, and the vice-chancellors and proctors of a number of public universities. But neither an apology nor accountability was on offer. Instead, the horrors on the streets continued to play out, impelling sympathetic teachers, parents, and ordinary citizens to join the demonstrations at great risk. At a certain point, police even resorted to shooting at protesters from helicopters, with stray bullets killing people inside their homes. For the students and their allies, there was no turning back. [End Page 70]
What had started as a movement against job discrimination now had only one goal—Sheikh Hasina’s resignation. Students Against Discrimination had planned a march to Dhaka on August 6. On August 4, so many casualties were reported that organizers moved the march up a day. On August 5, hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens, party activists, and students defied curfew and attempted to cross the barricades to enter the capital even as the police continued to heed an order to shoot on sight. Soon, the military retreated. With protesters outnumbering the police, the crowds marched toward Ganabhaban, the prime minister’s official residence. Sheikh Hasina was given 45 minutes by the army chief to flee to safety as the crowds, only a few miles away, headed in her direction.
A Culture of Authoritarianism
The powerful images of the July uprising are a testament to the tenacity of young Bangladeshis over those weeks as well as the jubilation of the protesters who stormed the National Parliament House and Ganabhaban after Hasina fled. What particularly stood out in the carnivalesque celebration of political freedom was rampant iconoclasm. Within hours of the regime’s fall, crowds had vandalized numerous statues of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, looted his historic house in Dhaka, which was also a museum, and set it ablaze, and defaced the portraits and placards of Sheikh Hasina on public buildings. These collective attempts at erasure make more sense when placed against the backdrop of a political cultism that shaped the Awami League’s gradual turn toward authoritarianism.
In a carefully crafted narrative that married a cynical understanding of secular patriotism and bombastic claims to democracy and development, the image of Mujib as the “eternal sovereign” was at the center of what Arild Ruud describes as a civil religion under the Awami League.10 Representations of the founding father could be found everywhere. From giant statues and portraits to his likeness on postage stamps and currency, Mujib iconography was not simply sacrosanct, it was protected by law.11 In 2011, the Awami League–led government amended the 1972 Constitution to acknowledge Sheikh Mujibur Rahman as the “Father of the Nation.” Section 5 of the Fifteenth Amendment Act added that his portrait should be preserved and displayed at all government and semi-governmental offices, autonomous bodies, statutory public authorities, educational institutions of all stripes, and Bangladeshi embassies and missions abroad. The controversial 2018 Digital Security Act also included provisions for punishing anyone caught spreading or instigating negative propaganda via digital devices about the liberation war or Mujib. The penalty could run as high as a fourteen-year prison sentence or a fine of up to roughly US$120,000. [End Page 71]
The regime’s obsession with representation was deeply embedded in a Realpolitik. The Awami League and the BNP had alternated power since the end of President Hussain Muhammad Ershad’s military dictatorship (1982–90) in 1991, with both parties routinely compromising democratic ideals to consolidate control. Yet the Awami League’s quest for political hegemony following its 2009 electoral victory surpassed its own previous efforts. The decade and a half leading up to the July uprising was scarred by the crushing of free speech, free media, and political dissent; the politicization of the police, the bureaucracy, and the judiciary; and state-sponsored violence meted out against political opponents through extrajudicial killings, forced disappearances, and torture—hence Sheikh Hasina’s rule being described variously as “one-woman rule,” “electoral autocracy,” or a “hybrid regime.”12
Elections had already lost credibility long before the summer of 2024. The 2011 Fifteenth Amendment Act also repealed a constitutional provision for nonparty caretaker governments. This reform passed without input from the main opposition party and paved the way for a number of elections of dubious integrity. The caretaker system had been introduced in 1991 after the fall of military rule. It aimed to ensure free and fair elections under a neutral government headed by the most senior Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and composed of civil society members. The 2014, 2018, and 2024 national elections, which tightened Sheikh Hasina’s grip on power, were notorious for either abysmally low participation and rigged ballots or Awami League–delegated “independent” candidates simulating competition in lieu of authentic political opposition. The hijacking of people’s basic right and ability to choose political representatives only deepened popular resentment.
Whither Development?
As Bangladesh was gearing up for another lopsided election at the end of 2023, a national newspaper called infrastructure the only “glimmer of hope in a perilous year.”13 The infrastructural achievements of the past decade happened in parallel with the consolidation of a Bangladeshi version of populist authoritarianism, a set of concurrent trends that Harry Blair calls the development-democracy paradox.14 With the construction of the Padma Bridge, the country’s longest river bridge, and the metro rail, the Awami League government was relying on expensive megaprojects to shore up political support. The prestige and political rewards of showy infrastructure projects are impossible to ignore in many postcolonial countries, and Bangladesh has been no exception. And yet, as I argued in early 2024, a country that successfully challenged years of military rule could ill afford to sacrifice its hard-earned democracy for the sake of flashy development. The attack on the metro stations at the peak of the 2024 uprising might have fulfilled the prophecy that no development [End Page 72] initiative, regardless of its populist appeal, could compensate for, or survive, the suspension of democratic ideals.15
In a March 2024 interview with the regime-friendly policy publication Whiteboard, Sheikh Hasina laid out her development vision: “A true representative of the people has the insights to develop a country, which an elite decision-maker is incapable of doing. Development is a political agenda. You cannot delink development from politics.” The last sentence describes the modus operandi of her government for more than fifteen years, though Hasina meant it in a very different way. She distanced her regime’s policies from those of the out-of-touch military rulers of the 1970s and 1980s, and asserted that “politics shouldn’t be about personal gains and power misuse.”16
Still, the corruption around Hasina’s megaprojects and many others has long been an open secret. It was widely believed that people close to Sheikh Hasina, through politics or kinship, were pocketing hefty kickbacks from signature projects. But journalists, news outlets, and even TikTokers were penalized for questioning the cost, quality, or timeline of the projects. The prime minister’s “dream project,” the Padma Bridge, came under early scrutiny when the World Bank withdrew funds due to credible allegations of fiscal malfeasance. The metro-rail project, too, cost more than comparable transit systems in Indonesia (one-and-a-half times more) and India (almost twice as much) and took considerably longer to complete.17
Furthermore, billions have been siphoned out of the country, especially to Canada and the United Arab Emirates, by loan defaulters and money launderers friendly with the regime. By mid-2022, the economy was in serious crisis. New loans from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) added to the existing burden of foreign debt, which surpassed $100 billion in late 2023.18 To reduce the number of nonperforming loans, something the IMF had urged, the country’s central bank forged the books and loosened its write-off policy. By doing so, Bangladesh Bank not only wiped out a large number of those loans, but it let the defaulters off the hook. By April 2024, the country’s foreign-exchange reserves had dwindled below the IMF-recommended $19.3 billion. The result was double-digit inflation. The price of daily essentials skyrocketed, exacerbating food insecurity and shortening life expectancy among the country’s most vulnerable.
Foreign-media investigations added credence to what most Bangladeshis knew either instinctively or through the vibrant rumor mill. “All the Prime Minister’s Men,” a 2021 Al Jazeera exposé, included undercover footage of high-level corruption that could be traced back to the very top of the country’s political hierarchy.19 Two brothers featured in the documentary belonged to the so-called Ahmed Clan, a onetime Dhaka street gang that provided security to Hasina when she was an opposition leader. The pair fled the country after killing a political rival in [End Page 73] the 1980s. Decades later, the brothers were rewarded for their steadfast loyalty: In 2018, the eldest, General Aziz Ahmed, became head of the military, and his younger brother received a presidential pardon. They eventually gained access to lucrative government contracts and were involved in the sale of senior government posts, including on the national police force, in exchange for cash and security. In secret recordings obtained by Al Jazeera, one Ahmed brother claimed that his work was sanctioned by the prime minister herself.
Blithely ignoring this and many other reports, leaks, and exposés, Hasina maintained that her government strongly opposed corruption. In July 2024, she publicly addressed a scandal brewing in her own household when news broke that one of her household servants had amassed a multimillion-dollar fortune through bribery and lobbying: “The man worked in my house, he was a peon, now he owns Tk 4 billion. He can’t move without a helicopter … How has he earned so much money? I took action immediately after knowing this.”20 For most Bangladeshis, these performances of transparency and accountability were just that—performances. They meant little in a country where greed and corruption were both blatant and rampant, while most people were struggling simply to afford basic necessities. It is in this context that students’ anger erupted over the suspected political calculus behind the quota system.
From Chhatra to Chhatra-Janata
South Asia witnessed vibrant student activism during the anticolonial struggles of the early to mid-twentieth century and later during Maoist insurgencies in Bengal in the 1960s and 1970s. Still, the student as a formidable figure in national politics has not always thrived amid mainstream political machinations—except in Bangladesh. Here, the chhatra, or student, has remained a powerful source of political hope. The 1969 people’s movement against the military dictatorship of Pakistan’s second president, Ayub Khan, had famously unified student activists from both West Pakistan and East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). The 1990 democracy movement against the Ershad dictatorship and the 2007 protests against a military-backed caretaker government both began as student-led movements and ultimately toppled regimes. Likewise, the 2018 quota-reform movement and road-safety protests the same year were also steered by young people—often teenagers—whose primary identity was that of a student.
Through sheer grit and impressive organizing, the student coalition that led the July 2024 uprising once again highlighted the political heft of the student as a sovereign political agent. This was acknowledged by the recruitment of some of the student organizers to serve as advisors to the interim government, a first in Bangladeshi politics. But the chhatra identity has also been mobilized cynically by those in power, including [End Page 74] in the summer of 2024. Authorities often questioned the protesters’ student identity and thereby dismissed their political agency when they took part in violent street protests or fought back against law enforcement. At times the student protesters would explicitly distinguish themselves from the chhatra of the Bangladesh Chhatra League (the student arm of the Awami League) or the tokai, a moniker for street urchins made famous by a long-running magazine cartoon from the 1980s. In everyday parlance, the tokai is a symbol of urban poverty, illiteracy, and vagrancy. Clearly, a presumed innocence still undergirded, and protected, the category of chhatra.
In fact, it was the chhatra-janata (translated somewhat awkwardly as “student-people” or “student-citizen”) who emerged as the key agent of political change. Joined together, these words signify both political hope and boundless potential, at once embodying the paradoxes and possibilities of the people, the mobs, and the masses. The chhatra-janata appears frequently in contemporary commentaries on collective politics in Bangladesh as a sort of avatar for the popular will.21 The July 2024 uprising was no exception: From the giant headlines in Bengali dailies the day after Sheikh Hasina’s resignation to Wikipedia entries on the July uprising or the Ministry of Health’s website listing the number of deaths and injuries, the 2024 insurrection has been described as an event that fused these two political beings. This was not something that was realized only in hindsight. Chhatra-janata had been invoked amid the uprising. Asif Mahmud, one of the main coordinators of Students Against Discrimination and now an advisor to the interim government, wrote on his Facebook page the day before the government collapsed: “This student-citizen uprising will continue until the fall of Sheikh Hasina. Tomorrow is the ‘March to Dhaka.’ Travel to Dhaka now to witness history. Join the ultimate fight.”22 The Chhatra-janata, then, was a symbol of the uprising’s wide appeal and signaled its rise above ossified ideologies. With ordinary Bangladeshis both wary and weary of party politics, the hyphenated agent of political change bridged the divisions long manipulated by mainstream political forces.
Reform or Revolution?
In 2020, in these pages, Harry Blair asked of Bangladesh, “Can hope for democracy survive what looks to be a lengthy authoritarian winter?”23 The “monsoon revolution” of 2024, or what I have called here the July uprising, would surely be a resounding yes to that question. On August 8, three days after the collapse of the Awami League regime, an interim government was sworn in with Muhammad Yunus as its chief advisor. It was Students Against Discrimination who requested Yunus to take on the position of the de facto leader of a newly imagined polity.
A Nobel Peace Prize winner with a focus on development, Yunus has [End Page 75] long enjoyed broad local acceptance and international recognition despite a strained relationship with the Awami League regime, particularly Sheikh Hasina. The interim government, made up of technocrats, lawyers, academics, and development workers, with students in advisory positions, has already taken a number of steps to fix the economy and reform the state. One of its main tasks has been to create the conditions for a free and fair national election, which it claimed would be possible only after serious house-cleaning.
Creating the Constitutional Reform Commission was a significant step toward this end.24 Whether to rewrite, revise, or discard the constitution has been one of the most hotly debated topics since the changing of the guard in national politics. It was perhaps on this question that a unique tension came to the fore—not, as one might expect, between reform and revolution but between the desire for regime change through credible elections and the call for postrevolution reform. A number of political parties, including the BNP, belonged in the first camp. The party’s leadership dismissed the need to rewrite the constitution—which was drafted in 1972 but has been amended a number of times since, mostly to disastrous results—remaining on the side of constitutional continuity. The BNP’s opposition to the students’ demand for the removal of the president is in keeping with this position.25
Four months into the interim government’s tenure, the student leadership was still rejecting what it considered a Mujibist (mujibbadi) constitution.26 Indeed, the call for a new basic law topped the list of five demands that Students Against Discrimination released on 22 October 2024.27 Some of the student leaders considered the 1972 Constitution, drafted without elected representatives or popular input, as the “original sin” and rejected the ready association between an elected government and a democratic one.28 Also on the list of demands were the immediate removal of the president, the voiding of the last three national elections, and the proclamation of a new republic in the “spirit” of the July uprising (abbhuthyan) and the July revolution (biplab). The word “spirit” appeared on the list in English, reflecting a conscious choice to move away from the Bengali word chetona (literally, spirit), which is now deeply tied to the political discourse of the Awami League, especially in the form of muktijuddher chetona, the spirit of the liberation war.
How will this tension between the country’s largest political party’s vocal demand for regime change through elections and the student coalition’s simultaneously revolutionary and reformist impulses ultimately play out? Ordinary Bangladeshis have been cautiously optimistic. Most are still struggling with the rising cost of living, not to mention a law-and-order situation in disarray because of a demoralized police force and familiar signs of vengeful retributions. At the same time, the transition government has been working steadily but slowly. Still, the streets of Dhaka in the days and months that followed the bloody uprising were [End Page 76] crowded with every possible community of interest, from ready-made garment factory workers to bureaucrats to religious minorities and ethnic groups. They staged regular sit-ins on busy streets, halted traffic, and demanded salaries, pay raises, job security, rights, recognition, and everything in between. Democracy in Bangladesh still needs work, but politics has indeed come back.
Nusrat Sabina Chowdhury is associate professor of anthropology at Amherst College. She is the author of Paradoxes of the Popular: Crowd Politics in Bangladesh (2019).
NOTES
1. In October 2024, the Human Rights Support Society identified 986 deaths between July and October, of which 868 have been identified. This included those who were injured during the protests as well as 51 members of law enforcement. See “At Least 986 Killed in July Uprising,” Daily Star, 25 October 2024, www.thedailystar.net/news/bangladesh/rights/news/least-986-killed-july-uprising-3736086.
2. Lisa Mitchell, Hailing the State: Indian Democracy between Elections (Durham: Duke University Press, 2023).
3. “The Plot Thickens over Calls for the President to Quit,” Daily Star, 24 October 2024, https://images.thedailystar.net/news/bangladesh/news/the-plot-thickens-over-callsthe-president-quit-3734951.
4. Rozina Islam, “Govt to Retrieve Allowance with Interest from Fake Freedom Fighters,” Prothom Alo, 19 June 2024, https://en.prothomalo.com/bangladesh/l2bn9v1urt.
5. “Bangladesh Protesters Make Defiant Call for March on Dhaka,” Al Jazeera, 5 August 2024, www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/8/5/bangladesh-protesters-make-defiantcall-for-march-on-dhaka.
6. Nusrat Sabina Chowdhury, Paradoxes of the Popular: Crowd Politics in Bangladesh, 1st ed. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019).
7. For more on the figure of the “collaborator,” see Naeem Mohaiemen, “History Is Hard Work, but Are We Willing?” Forum Magazine, March 2013, https://alalodulal.org/2013/03/04/history/.
8. Navine Murshid, “Searching for Answers: Stitching Together News During the Internet ‘Blackout,'” Dhaka Tribune, 25 July 2024, www.dhakatribune.com/opinion/oped/352660/searching-for-answers.
9. Pierre Prakash, “Bangladesh on Edge After Crushing Quota Protests,” Crisis Group, 25 July 2024, www.crisisgroup.org/asia/south-asia/bangladesh/bangladeshedge-after-crushing-quota-protests; Tathira Baatul, “Abu Sayed’s Last Stand,” Slightly Political (Substack newsletter), 1 August 2024, slightlypolitical.substack.com/p/abusayeds-last-stand.
10. Arild Engelsen Ruud, “Bangabandhu as the Eternal Sovereign: On the Construction of a Civil Religion,” Religion 54, no. 4 (2022): 532–49.
11. Nusrat Sabina Chowdhury, “A Second Coming: The Specular and the Spectacular 50 Years On,” South Asia Chronical 10 (2020): 31–58, www.iaaw.hu-berlin.de/de/region/suedasien/publikationen/sachronik/02-focus-chowdhury-nusrat-sabina-a-second-coming.pdf.
12. Human Rights Watch, “Bangladesh: Repression, Security Force Abuses Discredit Elections,” 11 January 2024, www.hrw.org/news/2024/01/11/bangladesh-repressionsecurity-force-abuses-discredit-elections; Ali Riaz and Md Sohel, How Autocrats Rise: Sequences of Democratic Backsliding (Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, 2024); Arild Engelsen Ruud and Mubashar Hasan, eds., Masks of Authoritarianism: Hegemony, Power and Public Life in Bangladesh (Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022).
13. Star Business Report, “2023: Infrastructure Was a Glimmer of Hope in a Perilous Year,” Daily Star, 31 December 2023, www.thedailystar.net/business/news/2023-infrastructure-was-glimmer-hope-perilous-year-3507106.
14. Harry Blair, “The Bangladesh Paradox,” Journal of Democracy 31 (October 2020): 138–50.
15. Nusrat Sabina Chowdhury, “Bangladesh in 2022 and 2023: Democracy and Disillusionment,” Asian Survey 64 (March–April 2024): 321–29.
16. “The Politics of Development: A Conversation with Sheikh Hasina,” Whiteboard (March 2024).
17. Monorom Polok and Md Shamsul Hoque, “‘Corruption Is Hijacking Our Development Process,'” Daily Star, 29 October 2024, www.thedailystar.net/opinion/views/news/corruption-hijacking-our-development-process-3739291.
18. Ali Riaz, “Is the Bangladesh Success Story Unraveling?” Atlantic Council, 2 May 2024, www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/is-the-bangladesh-success-story-unraveling/.
19. Alessandro Ford, “Al Jazeera: Bangladesh PM Close to Dhaka Mafia Family,” Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, 4 February 2021, www.occrp.org/en/news/al-jazeera-bangladesh-pm-close-to-dhaka-mafia-family.
20. “Once a Peon at My Home, Now Owns Tk 4 Billion: PM Hasina,” Prothom Alo, 14 July 2024, https://en.prothomalo.com/bangladesh/dt7pjqi94c.
21. Chowdhury, Paradoxes of the Popular.
22. “Bangladesh Protesters Make Defiant Call for March on Dhaka,” Al Jazeera, 5 August 2024, www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/8/5/bangladesh-protesters-make-defiantcall-for-march-on-dhaka.
23. Blair, “Bangladesh Paradox.”
24. On 5 November 2024, the commission opened its website (https://crc.legislative-div.gov.bd/), which solicited public opinion on constitutional reforms that could be submitted anonymously.
25. The latest protests erupted when, four months after the fall of the regime, the president claimed he did not know if Sheikh Hasina had been able to resign before fleeing. In an interview with a newspaper editor, he said he never saw the document. Students Against Discrimination interpreted this as an Awami League strategy to question the constitutional legitimacy of the interim government.
26. Sarwar Tusher, [The BNP and its postuprising confusion], Samakal, 2 September 2024.
27. The list of demands was shared with the author by a member of Students Against Discrimination in a personal communication on 24 October 2024.
28. Tusher, [The BNP and its postu prising confusion].
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