Under pressure from the student-worker mass uprising, Sheikh Hasina resigned as Prime Minister of Bangladesh and fled the country mid-day on August 5, 2024. A revolution led by the masses has succeeded in overthrowing the dictatorship. But has the revolution been realized?
Fall of Sheikh Hasina’s house of cards
Much like the Storming of the Bastille during the French Revolution, working people stormed into the Prime Minister’s state residence and office. The national Parliament building was occupied, billionaire’s homes were set on fire, and political prisoners were freed from secret detention cells.
The days after Sheikh Hasina’s resignation were chaotic. As people looked to the student movement coordinators for immediate leadership, all sense of governance was lost starting from public administration to law enforcement. This exposed the systemic dissolution of democratic institutions under Sheikh Hasina’s regime. Public education, healthcare, public administration, law enforcement, judiciary system, banks and ministries were packed with the ruling party Awami League’s people, who lost authority as soon as Hasina stepped down. The chain of command for the police completely broke as senior officers went into hiding, leaving junior officers and constables vulnerable to public ire.
At the same time, a concerted misinformation campaign created a state of anxiety and unrest in the country, especially for ethnic and religious minorities. Mobs attacked the homes of Hindus who they suspected of supporting Awami League in some capacity in the past. Students had to step in to protect places of worship, guard communities at night, and even manage traffic.
Interim government
Sheikh Hasina resigned under the supervision of Bangladesh’s Chief of Army, who swiftly announced intentions of forming an interim government. Students were steadfast in rejecting any military rule and the army was forced to hand over power to a civilian interim government led by Nobel Laureate Dr. Yunus, as proposed by the student leaders. This was a strategic decision for two reasons: first, to urgently prevent military takeover of a democratic revolution; and second, to lend this revolution legitimacy in the international stage.
Dr. Yunus is an economist well-liked by the West and the neoliberal order for inventing micro-credit, a loan scheme aiming to reduce poverty by giving small farmers and entrepreneurs startup capital. In reality, all that microcredit does is replace the vision of a welfare state by creating a population struggling to repay individual debt. Given his pro-market-liberalization and pro-Western democracy stance, it’s hard to say right now what Dr. Yunus will do as the Chief Advisor of an interim government put in place by a movement for better public jobs.
The student coordinators made a clear rejection of the traditional left and Islamist fundamentalist politics when organizing under the non-partisan, anti-discrimination banner. The movement’s ability to go beyond this polarization became its strength in being able to unite a mass to overthrow an oppressive government. However, in the absence of an organized revolutionary party, this spontaneous mass uprising is vulnerable to opportunism.
It is already concerning that the military, Dr. Yunus, and his interim cabinet have consulted all the old opposition parties, ranging from the mainstream conservative Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), the largest organized far-right islamist party Jamaat-e-Islami, and smaller Islamist and conservative parties and representatives of Ganatantra Mancha, a big-tent coalition of six Left groups. But none of these parties had a major role in the movement. They joined much later, beginning with the Left groups and then the BNP and Islamist groups, but are being given disproportionate legitimacy as a stakeholder relative to the students, workers, teachers, journalists, and lawyers who were integral to the movement.
If the intention of the uprising was to get rid of the lineage of these traditional careerist parties and dynasty politics, that vision is already being put in jeopardy. It is not clear what role the military continues to play in the interim government formation and how much influence they have on the government institutions. If history teaches us anything, then the masses must remain vigilant against any opening for groups with vested interests to seize power.
Women and workers in new Bangladesh
The Anti-Discrimination Movement saw the largest participation of women in Bangladesh’s history. Women were in key coordinator roles across university campuses, mobilizing thousands of students in women-only residence halls to join the “Bangla Blockade” actions where people would block chokepoint roads and highways and bring Dhaka, Bangladesh’s capital and busiest city, to a standstill. Women led the massive student marches from the front as a strategy to minimize police confrontation on the procession. On the pivotal night of July 15, when Sheikh Hasina had branded students as razakars (anti-nationals), it was the students of female residence halls of Dhaka University that broke the locks of their dorm rooms and stepped out first—raising the confidence of all other students to follow.
The movement also gave expression to the mass frustration of the working class suffering under decades of neoliberal policies and crony capitalism that created an unjust and uneven society. This uprising would not have been successful if workers did not join the students en masse, especially the urban proletariat in city centers such as Dhaka, Chittagong, Sylhet, Khulna, and Rangpur. The day before Hasina fell, students called for a “non-cooperation movement,” asking factory and mill workers not to go to work and for port workers not to load or unload goods, essentially creating the effect of a general strike.
Despite their key role in the uprising, worker and labour representation from the interim government is missing. The tea worker strike and garment worker strikes from the last couple of years that stood up to the oppressive Awami League regime were women-led resistance efforts. A new Bangladesh must reckon with this force and lean into the active participation of women and workers in democratic processes.
Revolution and counter-revolution
In Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon talks about the inadequacy of the educated elite leadership to lead the masses in the face of multiple crises, leading them to fall back on the previous oppressors’ tools. Bangladesh still has to navigate the extractive resource-sharing deals and loan repayments with India, China, and Russia that were made under Hasina’s rule. The garment owner, industrialist class is already experiencing fallouts from foreign buyers. There is no doubt that global capital and the national bourgeois class will likely mount pressure on the state apparatus to revert back to some of the old systems that facilitate wealth concentration to the few. This could open the door for some of the old parties—or whatever political entity capitalists need to take power and maintain the status quo.
A portion of the revolutionary students are much too focused on preventing a counter-revolution by supporters of the disposed Awami League regime. While not completely out of the realm of possibility, one must remain cautious of forming binaries of “revolutionaries” and “counter-revolutionaries,” should that end up in a Cultural Revolution-style purge. Freedom to openly critique governments, movements, and their leadership must be a civil right, one that was earned through the blood of over 440 who lost their lives this past month. This new freedom has come at a bloody cost. We must not give it away so easily.
There is undeniably a culture shift in Bangladesh, one that has raised mass political consciousness overnight and cultivated a spirit of revolution. Any reform must uphold the spirit of the “anti-discrimination movement” and ensure no discrimination on the basis of class, gender, sexuality, caste, and religion. To ensure that the revolution is not betrayed, the students and ordinary workers’ claim to equality, human dignity, and social justice must remain central. These are the challenges ahead.
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