By Omer Abdullah
Despite the state crackdown on the protesting students and shutdown of all educational institutions throughout the country, on Wednesday, July 17th, hundreds of students gathered in Dhaka University to pay their respect at the public funeral of the six fellow students who had fallen the previous day. At least 105 protestors have been killed so far by the state forces including the paramilitary, and the videos being shared on social media depict a civil war like situation emerging in the country. Students across Bangladesh are grieving, but their anger and grief is also fueling the heroic movement of resistance and defiance. As these lines are being written, the protestors set fire to the state broadcasting station, moments after the despotic prime minister Sheikh Hasina Wajid appeared on the state television. In another incident, the Rapid Action Battalion police force reported rescuing 60 policemen from Canadian University via helicopter. Such is the extent of rage and the will to fight the brutal dictatorship of Hasina Wajid. As reported by the Guardian, the government has now declared a national curfew and announced plans to deploy the army to tackle the country’s worst unrest in a decade, after student protesters stormed a prison and freed hundreds of inmates. Moreover, earlier on Friday, a communications blackout was imposed across the country, with mobile internet access and social media blocked by the government.
Over the last many weeks, students in Bangladesh have been protesting the Supreme Court’s restoration of an unfair and politically motivated quota system in government jobs. The new wave of protests is the continuation of the 2018 protest movement—which resulted in more than 250 causalities—against the same quota system. At the time Hasina was forced to revoke the controversial quota system. However, after six years she was able to reinstate it through the conventional backdoor of the capitalist state, the higher judiciary. According to the aforementioned quota system, 56 percent of the seats are reserved, with the remainder open to merit-based selection. Out of the total seats, 30 percent are allocated to the grandchildren of veterans who fought in the Bangladesh Liberation War in 1971, while 26 percent are set aside for women, disabled individuals, ethnic minorities and those from backward districts. Students are primarily calling for the revocation of the 30 percent seats reserved for the freedom fighters’ grandchildren, while supporting the limited retention of the other categories. The quota was originally established to honor and support the families of veterans who had died or injured during the liberation war. However, contrary to the original intent, the quota system has gradually become a political tool for Hasina Wajid and her Awami League to maintain their control over the state by filling key posts with loyal supporters, rewarding their stooges at the expense of the deserving, corrupting the youth, and sowing the seeds of division among the working masses.
In Bangladesh, the first and second-tier government jobs are among the few decent employment opportunities available for the youth, particularly the fresh university graduates. Other important sectors include agriculture, garments industry and information technology. However, employment opportunities in these sectors are fairly limited. Moreover, working conditions are horrible and wages are terrible. Most workers are grossly underpaid and overworked to the extent of exhaustion. According to the official sources, 41 percent of youth in Bangladesh are inactive. This means they are neither in education or employment, nor receiving any job training. Moreover, up to 66 percent of university graduates suffer from unemployment. So much for the economic miracle of Bangladesh under Hasina’s administration being touted everywhere by the apologists of neo-liberalism!
Junior employees at workplaces often face abuse from higher-ups, which can include physical mistreatment and sexual harassment. A vast majority of these private sector employees fail to make a decent living for themselves and their families. The rising unemployment rate since the COVID crisis—5.1% in 2023, up from 4.5% in 2018—has made conditions even worse. The actual situation on ground is obviously far more unpleasant than the official figures of unemployment. The gap between the labor supply and demand not only suppresses the wages but also contributes to an overall social environment of underemployment, precarious working conditions, uncertainty and insecurity. The situation is expected to worsen as the crisis of global capitalism lingers on. The major economic indicators for Bangladesh from the last few quarters depict a decline in economic growth. In these conditions, despite the relatively modest pay, government employment present a significant attraction for young graduates because of its job security and few additional benefits.
Like other South Asian countries, Bangladesh possesses a youth bulge with 65 percent of the population under 35, including 45 million or 30 percent aged 15-24. With only about 1.2 percent of the population being university graduates, a vast majority is already excluded from the competition for relatively decent jobs. But of the few who are included, only about 10 percent—mostly from the few urban isles in a mostly underdeveloped country—employed in multinational corporations or their local counterparts are able to earn somewhat reasonable living in a sense that they can afford a comparatively decent shelter, food, electricity and other basic needs. For the rest, there are almost no opportunities for an upward social mobility, and no hopes for improvement in living standards. Also, in the previous period, the promise of “growth” and “progress” of the country was oversold to its youth, who are now beginning to realize that such promises would never materialize for a vast majority of them. In this regard, the current protests are mostly emerging from the layers of youth belonging to middle class or the upper crusts of the working class, which can see their future plunging into darkness and despair.
Another significant reason for the protests has been suffocating dictatorship imposed by the Awami League’s government, which has been in power since 2009 and getting more and more authoritarian with time. Sheikh Hasina—the 75 years old daughter of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the founding father and first president of the country, assassinated in a military coup in 1975, a few years after taking office—has emerged as another authoritarian figure of neo-liberalism in the last one and half decade. The government frequently attacks the dissent both on and off campuses, arrests and detains those who criticize its policies, and pursues a policy of repression to the extent of imprisoning teenagers for alleged defamation of the prime minister on social media. The notorious Digital Security Act, adopted in 2018, allows the police to arrest anyone without a warrant. Under this draconian law, numerous political workers and rights activists have been detained and tried merely for speaking out against the regime. In the last general election, held in January this year, the opposition boycotted the electoral process after more than 20,000 of its activists were arrested, allowing Hasina to “win” the election with virtually no opposition. In this regard, the democracy in the country has turned into a façade even according to the bourgeois standards.
However, the scenes of brutal state oppression being witnessed in Dhaka and other urban centers, along with the marvelous resistance being offered by the Bangladeshi students, are not something unseen and unheard of in the country’s history. The glorious history of rebellion and resistance by the Bengali masses in the recent times goes back to the very inception of the country. Incidentally, the Bangladesh Liberation War against the Pakistani state—now officially being used as a pretext to insult the protesting students by labelling them as Pakistani agent—had begun with an uprising of students. In November 1968, both in East Pakistan (today’s Bangladesh) and the West Pakistan, the students, outraged by the murder of a fellow by the police, had begun protesting against the military dictatorship of Ayub Khan, a lackey of US imperialism. Soon afterwards, the workers and peasants across the length and breadth of the country—disgusted by extremely exploitative and repressive state capitalist policies of the regime resulting in ever sharpening class antagonisms—joined the movement turning it into a popular uprising which not only overthrew the Ayub’s dictatorship but started challenging the very relations of ownership. However, in the absence of a revolutionary party presenting a vibrant program of the socialist transformation of the society, the state was able to divert the revolutionary movement into the channels of elections and civil war. In 1970, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s left-nationalist Awami League swept the general election in East Pakistan, while Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s radical-left Peoples Party emerged as the biggest electoral party in West Pakistan. Nevertheless, the Awami League was denied the right of forming the government by the martial law administration of Yahya Khan, and a brutal military operation in East Pakistan very rapidly deteriorated the situation. The military along with its Islamic fundamentalist militias consisting of “Razakars” (“volunteers”)—the label now being used for the protesting students by Hasina Wajid—initiated a frenzy of rape and murder throughout the East Pakistan with estimates of victims ranging between 300,000 and 3,000,000. In the ensuing civil war, the Bengali students, especially those at Dhaka University, were at the frontlines of struggle for the national and class emancipation. The mass revolt, mainly organized through revolutionary people’s militias, was finally able to defeat the state forces, resulting in the emergence of Bangladesh as an independent country. Yet, the system of class oppression and exploitation was not overthrown, and continued to torment the Bengali masses with ever-increasing intensity, ultimately leading to the current scenario.
The current movement is posing an existential threat to the Hasina’s regime, which may ultimately be forced to offer some concessions and reforms to the protesting students. The agitating students, on the other hand, must recognize that reforms, no matter how significant, would eventually be reversed under the worsening crisis of capitalism. The ruling classes, whether represented by Hasina Wajid or anyone else, would always find ways to counter the previous reforms with more vicious attacks. The same has happened with the victory won by the 2018 protest movement. History also shows that while students are often the first to rise against oppression and exploitation, their efforts can only go so far without the active participation of the working masses in the class struggle. In the recent years, the workers of Bangladesh have also proven their revolutionary potential through numerous strike and protest movements on the burring issues. In this regard, the present movement, by shaking the consciousness of the working masses, can expand in its scope both qualitatively and quantitatively, which would inevitably put the question of leadership on the agenda and possibly result in new political formations. The advanced layers of the youth with revolutionary aspirations and outlook would have a vital role to play in these political and social processes.
All over the globe, the exploited masses—particularly the youth belonging to the toiling classes, whether be students, young workers or unemployed—are going through the most difficult times of the last 70 years or so. Most of them are now striving just to survive, let alone entertain the hopes of a prosperous future. In the post-2008 world, even in the developed countries, the new generation is living a life below the standards enjoyed by their parents. This is happening for the first time since World War II, and depicts a deep systemic crisis of capitalism being reflected in the protest movements and rebellions in one country after the other. The current movement in Bangladesh, ongoing mass protests in Kenya, worldwide resistance against the Zionist genocide of Palestinians and the victorious struggle of the masses in Pakistan-administered Jammu Kashmir, along with many similar cases, represent an emerging revolutionary process on an international scale, which only under a revolutionary leadership can achieve victory in overthrowing the obsolete capitalist order.