The slogans, the geopolitics, and the fraught second liberation of Bangladesh

A new interim government headed by Nobel laureate Professor Mohammad Yunus, 84, is taking shape in Bangladesh following Sheikh Hasina’s ouster. Hasina, prime minister of Bangladesh since 2008, resigned and fled the country this week to escape a student-led mass revolt against her rule, plunging the nation of 174 million into crisis. Its future is still amorphous at the time of writing; it is taking shape by the hour, through the actions of a myriad of people. 

Yunus was the choice of the student leaders. His name was accepted by Bangladesh president Mohammed Shahabuddin and the chiefs of the army, navy and air force following a meeting at which they and the student leaders were present. The president has dissolved the current parliament whose term started barely seven months ago. 

Political prisoners, including former PM Khaleda Zia, chief of the main opposition Bangladesh National Party, have been released from various kinds of arrest. On the other hand, ministers of Hasina’s cabinet fled or tried to flee in the aftermath of her escape. Former foreign minister Hasan Mahmud was detained at Dhaka’s Shah Jalal international airport while trying to leave the country. 

Over the past 15 years of Hasina’s rule, hundreds of people who were disliked by the regime were made to “disappear”. While some of them reappeared alive or dead, others had remained missing. Some of these missing people have begun to return from illegal detention in which they were held for years. 

Attacks on Hindus, and ‘attempts to divide us’

A semblance of order and normalcy has started to return to the country after a tumultuous couple of days. But the celebrations in the immediate aftermath of Hasina’s fleeing Dhaka on Monday were followed by revenge attacks on people and symbols associated with the Awami League and the lynching of regime supporters. There were also attacks on the country’s Hindu minority, although which group was behind those attacks is not yet clear. 

In response to the attacks on Hindus, student leaders Navid Islam, the convenor of the Students Against Discrimination that led the youth protests, and his colleague Asif Mahmud mobilised their cadres to guard temples.

Speaking to the press in Dhaka at night on August 5, hours after Hasina left the country, Islam had said that the students would not accept military rule or president’s rule. “We will have to remain united. There will be many attempts to destroy our unity…we are people against the fascist Hasina regime. We are not people of any party, religion or community. We must stop any attempts to divide us,” he said.

Hasina’s son Sajeeb Wazed Joy described the situation following her departure as “anarchy”. Wazed told NDTV that it was her dream to turn Bangladesh into a developed country and she had worked very hard for the past 15 years to keep it safe from militants and terrorism but “in spite of all of that now this vocal minority in our opposition and the militants have seized power”. The minority he was referring to, he elaborated later in context of the vandalism of a statue of his grandfather Sheikh Mujibur Rehman, was the one that had “opposed the independence of Bangladesh itself”.

The slogans that moved the masses

Bangladesh emerged as an independent country in 1971 following a revolt by its people, led by Sheikh Mujibur Rehman and supported by the Indian government, against the rule of the Pakistani dictator Yahya Khan. It was then a part of Pakistan, known as East Pakistan. Before 1947, it was a part of undivided India and known as East Bengal.

Not everyone in East Pakistan had supported the revolt against what was then the country’s central government in Islamabad. The Pakistani military launched a genocide in 1971 in which an estimated 1-3 million people were killed, but failed to put down what from their perspective was secessionism. India intervened on behalf of the Bengali freedom fighters and won the war. Those who supported Pakistan during those troubled times came to be known in Bangladesh as Razakars. 

It was an insult to be called one. When the students came out to protest peacefully against a jobs quota that reserved 56 percent of jobs including 30 percent for descendants of freedom fighters, Hasina, in a press conference held at her now-sacked residence on July 14, had said, “If the grandchildren of freedom fighters do not receive quota benefits, who should get it? The grandchildren of Razakars?” 

This unfortunate remark led to the students intensifying the protests and adopting a slogan that in English means “Who are you? Who am I? Razakar, Razakar”.

It was clear then that the national mood had turned firmly against her. 

Two days after her “Razakar” comment, Hasina had again spoken to the press to emphasise respect for freedom fighters led by her father Sheikh Mujib, who she referred to as the Father of the Nation. Her and her family’s repeated emphasis on their heritage did not go down well with the protesters, who raised a chant that has been resonating with Bangladeshis around the world since then. It translates in English to “The country is not anyone’s father’s” though the Hindi translation captures more of the flavour of the original: Desh kisi ke baap ka nahin hai.

The students, through the protest movement, waved flags of Bangladesh, wore the flags as bandannas around their heads, and sang patriotic songs, some of which date back to the time before India’s independence when undivided Bengal was the hotbed of protests against the British Raj. For example, after police and security forces began shooting protesters dead, the song that went up was “Karar oi louho kopat”, meaning “Whose are those iron prison bars”, a powerful protest song known to generations of Bengalis everywhere. It was composed by Kazi Nazrul Islam, an iconic figure of Bengali culture, in 1922, after Deshbandhu Chittaranjan Das, the leading figure in the Indian National Congress at the time, was jailed.  

A second liberation

The reaction to the fall of Hasina’s regime, voiced by many Bangladeshis including Professor Yunus, is one of freedom. “We are liberated. We are a free country now. We were an occupied country as long as she was there,” Yunus told Moushumi Das Gupta of The Print in an interview shortly after Hasina’s exit. It was like the second liberation of Bangladesh, and everyone could see it all over the country, he added.

A strong perception had built up over the years in Bangladesh that Hasina was not really her own person, but a puppet of India. 

The opposition boycotted the 2014 general elections after BNP leader Khaleda Zia was put under house arrest. Turnout was less than 40 percent. In 2018, the BNP and opposition took part, and voter turnout rose to nearly 80 percent, but there were widespread allegations of ballot boxes being stuffed in favour of the ruling Awami League by the police the night before the polls. The Awami League won 288 of 298 seats that went to vote. In January 2024, Hasina again won an election, with her party securing 224 seats.  The voting percent was down to 41, meaning that Hasina’s claims of being elected by a popular majority rested on shaky ground. 

That ground disappeared from under her feet with astonishing rapidity when, following the escalating protests, a militia known in Bangladesh as the Helmet Bahini, with police backing, began to ransack homes and attack students who had participated in the protests. In their enthusiasm, on July 18, they also ransacked homes in the Defence Officer Housing Society in Mirpur near Dhaka airport. A student at the Military Institute of Science and Technology, Shaikh Ashabul Yamin, was shot and badly wounded before being thrown from atop an armoured personnel carrier of the police, a force closely associated with the Awami League. He was taken dead to hospital. 

The mood in the military began to turn against Hasina and the police. 

It was all over for her and her regime when army chief General Waker uz Zaman, a Hasina loyalist with family ties to her, eventually heeded the pressure from sections of his force and declined to order soldiers to fire on the protesting youths. With millions of people out on the streets, the police had no chance.

The geopolitics and domestic politics

Hasina’s fall has geopolitical implications going beyond Bangladesh. 

The country shares a border of 4096 km with India and is particularly important for the Northeast and West Bengal. The efforts of BJP leaders in West Bengal to fan flames of communalism through irresponsible statements does not help. Suvendu Adhikari, chief of the Bengal BJP, has said “Get ready, 1 crore Bangladeshi Hindus will be coming to Bengal”. In Northeast India, this sentence is likely to fuel old suspicions that the Bengali Hindus there, like Bengali Muslims, are Bangladeshis. 

The other country it borders is Myanmar, which has descended into civil war since a military coup in 2021. The part of Myanmar closest to Bangladesh is the restive Arakan from where the Rohingya refugees have fled. It also happens to be a place of interest for India, since the $484 million Kaladan Multi-Modal Transport Project from Mizoram passes through Chin and Rakhine states to the Sittwe Port on the Arakan coast. 

Apart from India, the countries with most influence in Bangladesh and Myanmar are arguably the US and China. Pakistan also has residual influence. 

However, only conspiracy theorists would believe that it is possible for any foreign country to mobilise millions of people to hit the streets of Bangladesh in a matter of days. Even domestic political parties are unable to fill up a rally without arranging for transport and food. This scale of mobilisation, in barely two weeks, would be impossible to engineer without genuine public support.

There has been much noise in Indian news and social media about an imminent takeover of Bangladesh by the Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami. That appears unlikely since the military, after an eventful and chaotic day, has taken charge of security. In several places, the police had melted away fearing reprisals after Hasina fled, leaving a law-and-order vacuum. Village defence forces have been tasked with policing for now. On the day after the revolution, students found themselves managing traffic because even the traffic police had disappeared.

As a political force, the Jamaat was only able to garner 4.60 percent of the vote in the 2008 elections when Hasina came to power. It won two seats. It has not contested polls since. It was allied with the mainstream Right-wing Bangladesh National Party led by former Prime Minister Khaleda Zia, and 20 of its candidates ran on BNP tickets in the 2018 polls. All of them lost. 

However, Jamaat is not the only organisation of Islamic hardliners in Bangladesh.

The Awami League led by Sheikh Hasina also had a fundamentalist Islamic group, the Hefazat-e-Islam, in its corner. A group of madrasa chiefs led by the Hefazat-e-Islam supremo Shah Ahmad Shafi had publicly announced their support for Hasina before the 2018 elections, stating that they wanted her to rule the country so that she could “continue to work for the progression of Islam”. 

She is now India’s guest. Whenever elections happen again in Bangladesh, what remains of her party, along with the BNP – but not the Jamaat – will probably be in the fray. 

The Indian military, the force that in 1971 helped liberate Bangladesh, has meanwhile deployed at several locations along the country’s border with Bangladesh, to better secure it. 

While Yunus’ appointment is a sign of hope, the future of Bangladesh after its unlikely revolution remains unpredictable and uncertain.