On Aug. 5, after Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, 76, resigned and fled the country — following weeks-long, student-led protests — unprecedented scenes unfolded in the country.
Thousands descended on the streets celebrating her departure, waving the national flag, and hundreds stormed and ransacked her official residence in the capital of Dhaka. Photos of people relaxing in her bedroom went viral on social media, as did the videos of people taking her clothes, designer bags, elliptical machine, utensils and frozen fish, among other personal belongings.
People also gathered around and vandalized a massive statue of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, Hasina’s father and the founding father of Bangladesh, who played an integral part in leading the country toward independence in 1971 before becoming its first president. To mark the end of Hasina’s 15-year reign, people stormed into other buildings associated with the family — including the Bangabandhu Memorial Museum, the former residence of Rahman, where he was assassinated by disgruntled army officers in 1975.
Hasina fled the country in a military helicopter and has taken temporary refuge in India. She was hoping to seek asylum in the U.K., where her sister lives and her niece Tulip Siddiq is a member of Parliament. However, the plan hit “technical roadblocks,” according to news reports, and the U.S. has canceled her visa.
In the lead-up to the ouster, three weeks before she was chased from office, unrelated protests against job quotas turned violent after students who had gathered on the grounds of Dhaka University were attacked by what are believed to be members of the Bangladesh Chhatra League (BCL) — the student wing of Hasina’s Awami League party.
The students were protesting the 30% quota in government jobs for the descendants of Bangladesh’s freedom fighters, who had fought during 1971 and are known to be loyal to the ruling party. The High Court of Bangladesh had reinstated the quotas in June. However, students, angered by high unemployment, called it “discriminatory” as it “disqualified” merit-based candidates.
Government jobs are sought-after because they provide prestige, stability and retirement benefits that private-sector jobs often don’t offer. The positions are a chance for upward mobility in a country where unemployment has been soaring and any economic stability is always teetering on the brink of collapse.
“All of it was peaceful. We sang songs, recited poetry and said what we had to say. … Suddenly everyone was running because bricks were being hurled at us,” Azra Humayra, a journalism student at the university, said in recalling the scenes on campus.
Similar scenes unfolded in other universities across the country, but a viral video from Begum Rokeya University in Rangpur became a turning point for the protests. In it, Abu Sayeed, a student leader, could be seen spreading his arms wide and walking toward heavily armed police, but he died after several rounds of gunshots.
Soon the military was deployed around the country, the police imposed a strict curfew with a “shoot on sight” order, and the government enacted a telecommunications and internet blackout for 10 days. During the blackout, there were reports of government helicopters shooting indiscriminately at people and of officers in plainclothes raiding homes at night and arresting students as young as 17.
Among them was Arif Sohel, an international studies student at Jahangirnagar University and one of 65 coordinators of Students Against Discrimination (SAD), a collective that led the countrywide protests. He went missing just a few hours after this writer interviewed him via an encrypted app. After two days with his whereabouts unknown, authorities announced that he would remain in custody for six days.
There was also outrage after video footage emerged that the military was using U.N.-designated vehicles during an army-enforced curfew with gun-carrying soldiers. It was a shock to many as Bangladesh’s role in U.N. peacekeeping missions has brought much pride to its citizens. The government said it had forgotten to remove the logos.
As per several estimates, over 300 people have died during the protests since mid-July, though many believe the death toll is much higher amid allegations of police forcing hospitals to delete death records. About 9,000 people have been arrested and 61,000 protesters have been named as accused persons in cases filed by the government, many of them members and affiliates of the Bangladesh National Party (BNP), the country’s main opposition party.
Since Hasina’s departure, an interim government, backed by the army, has been sworn in, including Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus as its chief adviser. Known for his pioneering work in microcredit, Yunus was a target of the Awami League government after he tried to form his own political party in 2007. He was indicted for embezzlement and violating labor laws. Political observers also pointed out that perhaps Hasina was not happy with him outshining her father’s legacy. The charges against Yunus were dropped last week ahead of his oath-taking ceremony.
The recent uprising and Hasina’s ouster have since placed the spotlight on her tenure. The younger generation, born decades after the country was formed, has known life mostly under her reign. Initially known for its economic progress, in the past decade it was seen as autocratic by many, amid rising crackdowns on critics, journalists and members of the opposition party.
In addition, her attempts to safeguard her father’s legacy and his role in the 1971 war that led to the creation of Bangladesh while sidelining other leaders who played an instrumental role during its independence movement have also added to resentment among the masses.
Hasina — until her ouster the longest-serving female head of government in the world — had begun her fourth term as prime minister earlier this year. But she had come under fire for not holding free or fair elections. The government arrested over 8,000 leaders and supporters of the BNP ahead of the election, which the opposition party boycotted. In 2018, when its leader Khaleda Zia was arrested under corruption charges, the party also boycotted the elections. (Zia was released from house arrest last week.)
The anti-Hasina mood reached its zenith this year.
Writing as the student protests built up steam, Geoffrey MacDonald, a visiting expert on South Asia for the United States Institute of Peace, wrote: “Today’s protests are occurring seven months after a widely boycotted election and amid economic challenges, a hostile opposition and politically awakened youth, which augurs a more resilient protest movement.”
Even though there was progress on the economic front during the first decade of her leadership — largely because of a boom in the textiles industry as well as foreign remittances — and Bangladesh’s rise to a middle-income country was lauded by economists, the developments were accompanied by rising income inequality and poverty. Last year about 40% of those ages 15 to 24 were neither working nor studying or training for a vocation.
The World Bank says that the country is on track to ascend from the U.N.’s Least Developed Countries list in 2026 — considered an incredible feat since it was one of the poorest countries in the world when established and for several decades afterward. But with 9% inflation and 18 million young people without jobs in a country of 175 million, a deep economic crisis is afoot.
According to the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics, one-quarter of Bangladeshis have resorted to taking out loans to get through daily life for basics like food, clothing, shelter, medical care and education, especially in rural areas. This economic shift has been demoralizing for a population that is constantly being told about their country’s “economic miracle.”
When Hasina came to power in 2009, she promised to “digitize” Bangladesh, and the proportion of those with internet access rose from 3% percent to almost 40% during her tenure. The tech sector brings in $1.4 billion in export income every year. But that growth has come at a price in terms of individual rights.
Amendments to the Information, Communication & Technology Act (ICT Act) extended the government’s control over online speech and privacy and allowed the police to arrest people for allegedly sharing anti-government or defamatory content online without any proof or due process. There have also been cases in which citizens were arrested for merely liking and sharing posts that criticized Hasina or her government on social media.
Even though the law faced backlash, in 2018 the government updated it and enacted the Digital Security Act (DSA), which allowed the government to arrest citizens for allegedly spreading misinformation online. Human rights experts have highlighted how the law has been used to target citizens, from farmers to journalists. Over 1,500 cases have been filed by the police since 2018, including against 450 journalists. The government revised it in 2023 with the Cyber Security Act (CSA), but critics say it is “essentially a replica of the DSA.”
The Awami League has also been cracking down against political opponents and activists. Security forces have carried out more than 600 enforced disappearances, according to international human rights organizations, since 2009 when Hasina was first elected to office. Even during the recent protests, after Hasina fled the country, dozens who were abducted were freed from Aynaghor (“House of Mirrors”), a secret detention center run by Bangladesh’s military agency.
A series of student movements had also taken root under Hasina’s rule. For instance, in 2015, students protested against taxes imposed on tuition at private universities, forcing her government to withdraw the levy. In 2018, when a bus crash killed two high school students and injured many others, a student-led road safety movement was born. Students took over the streets for five days, checking licenses and directing traffic, which is notoriously difficult to navigate in Bangladesh. The same year, students protested the same quota system that was at the root initially of this summer’s protests. In the 2018 iteration, violence took place on a smaller scale and Hasina agreed to remove the quotas, which ended the protests.
But what has also added to the recent resentment, especially among the youth, is how Hasina has attempted to deify her father with the help of the law and other initiatives, which have effectively changed people’s relationship with Bangladesh’s history. Ikhtisad Ahmed, a human rights attorney and journalist based in London, told New Lines that it was increasingly becoming difficult to question any part of Rahman’s role in the liberation war or to highlight the role that others have also played.
In 1970, a year before the new country was established, Rahman’s party, the Awami League, won the most seats in parliamentary elections for Pakistan, which was at the time geographically divided between East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) and West Pakistan (what is now Pakistan), separated by India. Finishing second was Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s Pakistan Peoples Party, whose stronghold was West Pakistan. But a political crisis emerged after Bhutto declared that this party would boycott the Parliament if Rahman formed the next government.
This sowed the seeds for a civil disobedience movement in East Pakistan, and on March 25, 1971, the Pakistani military arrested Rahman and kept him jailed in West Pakistan while simultaneously launching “Operation Searchlight,” which targeted and killed academics, activists and other important members of the Bengali society in the east. This event launched a brutal nine-month war, culminating in the creation of Bangladesh.
In the past 15 years under Hasina’s rule, the only narrative allowed to be told about the independence movement was through the prism of her father Rahman’s story, despite the role played by other leaders.
One of them was Maulana Bhashani, who had been a key figure in Bengali politics since the days of British colonialism. In the 1940s, he was one of the first political leaders to highlight West Pakistan’s economic exploitation of East Pakistan. He introduced the idea of regional autonomy and self-determination for the Bengalis in East Pakistan, and his ideas led to the framework of the revolution in 1971. Seldom did Hasina’s regime acknowledge Bhashani’s pivotal role.
Called the Red Maulana, as he was known for his socialist and leftist views after independence, he was openly critical of Rahman’s government. In an infamous event, Bhashini was escorted out of a rally in Dhaka in 1974 for criticizing the Awami League party, even though Bhashani had been Rahman’s mentor in the past and had served as an inspiration for him during his early days in politics.
Similarly, Gen. Ziaur Rahman was erased from the historical record during Hasina’s rule. General Zia, as he was commonly known, was regional commander of the Mukti Bahini army in 1971. That year, he declared the independence of Bangladesh over the radio on March 27. But this was 20 days after Rahman had spoken about independence on March 7, during a speech before his arrest. Dispute remains about which man should be given credit for first declaring independence.
After Rahman’s assassination in 1975 and two military coups that followed, the country elected Zia as president. But he was also later assassinated, which led to his widow, Khaleda Zia, becoming head of the BNP that he had founded — and the first female prime minister of Bangladesh.
Under both the Awami League and the BNP, Bangladesh’s history has often been distorted so that the ruling party could bolster its own narrative. But since Hasina has been in power for longer, the Awami League has been the more disruptive to historical accuracy.
Bhashani’s contributions leading up to liberation and Zia’s role in the early years of Bangladesh’s new political existence are virtually undetectable in mainstream historical knowledge and accounts.
Those who questioned Rahman’s allegedly unique legacy in freeing Bangladesh were punished through a series of laws, which included DSA and its successor CSA.
“We have seen people being imprisoned who dared to question this one true history,” Ahmed said. In 2021, in a small village close to Sylhet, Bangladesh’s paramilitary forces arrested a man during a live video on Facebook because he “criticized” Hasina and Rahman.
There have been other “soft power” initiatives regarding Rahman’s legacy. His visage appears on banknotes and on public murals throughout the country. Even the constitution was changed to mandate that Rahman’s portrait be hung in all government offices, schools and foreign offices, replacing the photos of Zia in many places. In addition, statues of Rahman have been erected all over the country, and dozens of roads and education institutions have been renamed after him.
At the center of this project was the Bangabandhu Memorial Museum, which was Hasina’s childhood home and the place where, in 1975, disgruntled army officers gunned down not only her father but also an uncle and three brothers. The museum houses artifacts from Rahman’s life and has preserved the bullet holes from that day.
The Center for Research and Information (CRI), established in 1996 with the aim of “engaging young people in Bangladesh in politics through a variety of programs centered around democratic debate,” became infamous among Hasina’s critics for its youth program. This included “Joy Bangla” (Hail Bangla) concerts, held in March, when Rahman declared Bangladesh’s “fight for independence.” Parts of the speech would be played during breaks in the concerts, at which popular Bangladeshi artists would be invited to perform to keep young people invested in the Sheikh family’s legacy.
After the institute, led by close members of Hasina’s family, developed a documentary based on Hasina’s life in 2021 and a year later a series of graphic novels based on the memoirs Rahman wrote as a political prisoner, some in the media criticized the family for using the think tank to deploy “personal propaganda.”
Hasina’s attempts to amplify her father’s legacy have made it impossible for the younger generation to access and discuss history other than what she allowed, say political observers and experts.
“It is almost a battle against history because this is all we know. They made it impossible for this generation to know our history and they hate the history that we have been taught. They don’t buy it. The generation that toppled Hasina — this is all they know,” Ahmed said.
The job quotas — first introduced by Rahman in 1972 — raised questions about the country’s history and who counts as a freedom fighter. Thousands of young people from rural and urban areas alike had joined the Mukti Bahini — the guerrilla troops who fought against the Pakistani military — during the nine-month war in 1971.
But one requires official certificates from the Liberation War Affairs Ministry to certify former freedom fighters or their descendants. The issuing of these certificates has been rife with scandal and corruption allegations for years. The Awami League government revoked over 8,000 fake freedom fighter certificates earlier this year.
Even the day before July 15, when the protests turned violent, Hasina ignited a fire at a press conference by mocking students and calling them “razakars,” a politically loaded term. Razakars, which means volunteers in Urdu, were a paramilitary force of about 50,000 people who were recruited by the Pakistani army during the 1971 war and became complicit in mass killings, rapes and torture of up to 3 million pro-liberation Bangladeshis.
Despite its Urdu meaning, in Bangladesh the word came to signify a “collaborator” and is used as an insult. However, after Hasina’s comment, students co-opted the term and chanted on the streets, “Who are you, who am I? Razakar, Razakar,” following it up with: “Who says that, who says that, dictator, dictator!” Known for ruling with an iron fist, Hasina for the first time was being called a “dictator” by the general public.
However, in the past two weeks, since her departure, students have begun to refer to the month of July as “Bloody July” and are calling this moment Bangladesh’s “second victory day.” But with Hasina out, there are fears that Islamist parties will take over the country. Violence against minority groups, like Hindus, who make up approximately 8% of the population and are largely supporters of the Awami League, has already erupted in parts of the country.
Despite the challenges, students have taken over rehabilitation efforts and keeping the peace. They were seen cleaning up the streets and making murals, graffiti and other artworks in many parts of the country. They have also involved themselves in directing traffic on the streets in the absence of traffic police and standing guard to form neighborhood watch groups at night to deter looters and burglars.
Yunus appealed to the country to “make the best use of our new victory.”
“I appeal to all students, members of all political parties and nonpolitical people to stay calm,” he said. “This is our beautiful country with lots of exciting possibilities.”
Meanwhile, Hasina broke her silence earlier this week via a statement that her son shared on X in which she remembered her father and other family members who have been killed over the years, her childhood home that was turned into a museum and sacked after her ouster, and those who have lost their lives to “terrorist aggression.” She requested an investigation into the killings during the protests and asked people to observe a day of mourning on Aug. 15 at the museum.
But under the new interim regime, a murder probe she may not have approved of has been initiated — for her alleged role in the police killing of a grocery store owner during the recent unrest.
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