Bangladesh, A Year Later

(The article was originally published in Indian Express on August 02, 2025 as a part of Dr Madhav’s column titled ‘Ram Rajya’. Views expressed are personal.)

Reports appeared in the Bangladesh media that Mohammed Younus, the chief administrator of the country, indicated recently that elections to the parliament will take place in February next year. August 5 this year marks the completion of one year of the ouster of an elected government led by Sheik Hasina. Weeks of protests led by students and youth in July last year culminated in the collapse of Hasina’s government. She was forced to flee the country on August 5. Ever since, she is in exile while the country was being administered by Younus with the help of a group of student leaders and former bureaucrats.

What began as an interim arrangement continued for a year and likely to continue until a new democratically elected government is put in place. While the installation of this non-elected arrangement on a country of 175 million people can rightly or wrongly be attributed to some outside authority, its continuance without much resistance for more than a year needs to be understood carefully. Politics in Bangladesh was dominated in the last five decades by two major parties – the Awami League led by Sheik Hasina, and the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) led by Khaleeda Zia. Both parties have dominant presence not only in the political arena but also among students, youth, women, farmers and factory workers through various party wings. Question to be asked should be how come Younus’ administration continues to govern the country without any big challenge coming from the supporters of these two big parties which ruled the country uninterruptedly in the last three decades? In a country always prone for massive street protests, how come these two parties were unable to mobilise any resistance to the unelected regime for early elections? Therein lies an important message for India and the rest of the world.

It is known that Sheikh Hasina government was ousted out of power through violent mass protests by students that began in the middle of July last year and continued for weeks. Immediate trigger for the protests was Hasina government’s decision to reserve 30% quota in government jobs to children of “freedom fighters”. In a country with a massive youth population and relatively high unemployment rates, this decision, which took total reservations to 56 percent, was bound to create unrest. In fact, bowing to a similar student agitation in 2018, Hasina government had revoked that very same decision of 30% jobs to the children of “freedom fighters”, which many saw at that time as an alibi to fill the government with the supporters of her party, the Awami League. But when the matter returned to haunt her again through a Bangladesh High Court ruling annulling her 2018 decision and reinstating quotas, Hasina got into a big quagmire.

As an astute politician, having experienced the mood of the people on that issue six years before, she should have found better ways of dealing with the court ruling by adopting conciliatory measures. Sadly, when protests broke out at the country’s public universities in Dhaka, Rajshahi, Jahangirnagar and Chittagong, Hasina decided to respond with force. Worst provocation came on July 14 when she allegedly commented at a press conference that “if the grandchildren of freedom fighters do not receive benefits, should the grandchildren of ‘razakars’ receive them instead?” In Bangladesh, people who collaborated with Pakistan at the time of its freedom struggle are called Razakars. Equating the entire agitating student community with Razakars was an avoidable mistake.

Hasina’s statement brought an important twist in the agitation. Not only did the agitation spread to private universities but also brought students of madrasas into it. Rough estimates put the number of madrasa students in Bangladesh at around three million. This signified an important dimension – entry of the Jamaat-e-Islami Bangladesh into the student movement. Jamaat and Awami League had a chequered relationship throughout. Bangabandhu viewed Jamaat as a collaborator during the freedom movement and banned it in 1972. Gen. Ziaur Rehman, who succeeded Bangabandhu through a coup in 1975, lifted the ban and Jamaat became a partner of BNP in later decades, even joining the coalition government in 2001. After Hasina government came to power in 2009, it went after the Jamaat leadership and prosecuted a number of its leaders for war crimes during the freedom struggle. Supreme Court had cancelled Jamaat’s registration as a political party in 2013. Lying dormant since then, Jamaat found a good opportunity to return in strength through the largely apolitical student movement. Although Hasina government banned it again on August 1, 2024, it remained inconsequential.

Two forces that sustained Younus administration are the students and Jamaat. Whenever elections are held, it is these two forces that will play a crucial role. Younus administration banned Awami League in May this year using a “Fact Finding Report” by the UN Human Rights Commissioner’s office on “violations and abuses related to the Protests of July and August 2024 in Bangladesh”. The report’s findings, widely published in Bangladesh, were a damning indictment of Hasina’s regime. It alleged that upwards of 1400 civilians, a large number of whom were students, were killed during the protests at the hands not only of the Bangladesh police but also the youth and student wings of Awami League.

With the Awami League banned, the political space in Bangladesh remains open for new players in the coming elections. While BNP remains the main contender for power, rise of others including Jamaat cannot be ruled out. Politics is largely youth-led in South Asia nowadays and we have seen the decline of traditional parties and rise of new ones that offered a fresh hope to power in countries like Sri Lanka and Pakistan.

India is the only successful democracy in the region and an inspiration to all neighbours. It always acted not as a big brother trying to pick and choose leaders in the neighbourhood but as an elder brother to help strengthen democratic systems there. As Bangladesh prepares for its elections, India’s role cannot be anything more than that.