How Mass Protests Challenge Bangladesh’s Past—and Threaten to Rewrite Its Future

It took just 18 minutes into TIME’s interview with Sheikh Hasina last September for Bangladesh’s Prime Minister to bring up her murdered father. There would be at least a dozen more unbidden mentions of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the nation’s independence hero and founding President, whose portrait—bespectacled, mustachioed, chin resting on right fist—loomed over our conversation in her Ganabhaban official residence in central Dhaka just like all other public buildings.

“When Pakistan was established, he was a student and very much active against British colonialism,” Hasina explained. “And after Pakistan, he found that our people were exploited … so under his leadership we liberated the country.”

The student activism roots of Sheikh Mujib, who was assassinated by renegade soldiers in 1975, are tinged with grim irony given the chaos currently engulfing the South Asian nation of over 170 million. Earlier this month, peaceful protests broke out across campuses in response to the Bangladesh High Court’s decision to reinstate quotas that reserved some 30% of government jobs for descendants of “freedom fighters” who participated in the 1971 war of independence from Pakistan—a policy Sheikh Mujib personally introduced the year following that victory.

But with some 18 million young Bangladeshis without jobs today, according to government figures, the quota reintroduction enraged students facing an unemployment crisis. Amid this economic anxiety, government jobs remained highly coveted, though reports that entrance exams had been leaked had already galvanized a perception that civil service posts were reserved for progeny of the elite. (Descendants of freedom fighters, overwhelmingly backers of Hasina’s Awami League party, make up only 0.12% to 0.2% of Bangladesh’s population today, according to the local newspaper Prothom Alo.)

Initially peaceful demonstrations against the quota have since metastasized into an all-out revolt against the Bangladeshi state. More than 200 people have been killed, say local media, though students estimate the true figures to be significantly higher as security forces battle protesters armed with sticks and rocks with armored vehicles and even opening fire upon crowds from a helicopter. Many thousands more have been arrested, with some student activists alleging they were tortured in detention.

“This is the biggest crisis that Sheikh Hasina has faced over her 15 straight years in power,” says Michael Kugelman, director of the South Asia Institute at the Wilson Center. “It’s a really big deal and striking because it seemed to come out of nowhere.”

A nationwide curfew has been imposed during which security forces—including feared paramilitaries—have been given “shoot-on-sight” orders. A shocking video of unarmed protester Abu Saeed being shot to death by police while stretching out his arms and thrusting his chest forward in serene defiance has come to embody the rank brutality of the state. In response, protesters attacked police vehicles and key infrastructure, such as subway stations and toll booths, and set the headquarters of the state broadcaster ablaze.

Ali Riaz, a Bangladeshi-American political scientist and professor at Illinois State University, calls the level of bloodshed “unprecedented” in modern times. “Bangladesh has experienced political violence and uprisings throughout its history, but never were so many people killed, let alone within such a short period,” he tells TIME. “The ferocity of police and [border guard paramilitary] has surpassed all previous incidents of political violence and state response.”

The tumult began when the Chhatra League—the thuggish student wing of the ruling Awami League—were dispatched to confront the initially peaceful demonstrators. The resultant clashes led to the deployment of security forces whose heavy-handed crackdown garnered public sympathy and brought more protesters onto the street. By last Thursday, Bangladesh ordered the nationwide shutdown of its mobile internet network to “ensure the security of citizens,” the Bangladesh’s junior telecommunications minister Zunaid Ahmed Palak told AFP.

This partial shutdown was expanded to a wholesale severing of all internet services that were only restored on Wednesday. However, Professor Mohammad Ali Arafat, an Awami League lawmaker from central Dhaka, which he describes as resembling a “warzone” today, insists to TIME that the outage was due to protestors sabotaging fiberoptic cables rather than any deliberate government blackout. “We have become the victim of it,” says Arafat. “Because of not having the internet, we could not post anything on Twitter. We could not send any message to the international media.”

Whatever the truth behind the blackout, the uprising has become about much more than just employment quotas, which had been abolished since 2018 and only reintroduced following a Juneruling that deemed that move unconstitutional. In the face of the demonstrations, the Supreme Court on Sunday again cut the quota to just 5% but comments by Hasina that likened the protesters to traitors poured fuel on the fire. “Why do they have so much resentment towards freedom fighters?” Hasina asked in public remarks. “If the grandchildren of the freedom fighters don’t get quota benefits, should the grandchildren of Razakars get the benefit?”

The term “Razakars” technically means “volunteers,” though in Bengali parlance remains loaded shorthand for collaborators with Pakistan’s military forces against the liberation struggle. Arafat insists that Hasina never intended to imply the protesters were traitors, yet her choice of words—incendiary at worst; clumsy at best—have been seized upon by the students, who adopted the chant: “Who are you? Who am I? Razakar, Razakar! Who says that? dictator, dictator!”

The coopting and internalization of the most loathed term of Bangladesh’s liberation struggle—which Hasina lamented as “regrettable”—spotlights how detached the country’s foundation myth has become from the concerns of today’s ordinary Bangladeshis, the vast majority of whom were not even born at the time of the nation’s birth. “It’s an incredibly young country and this movement doesn’t care much about history anymore,” says Mubashar Hasan, a Bangladeshi scholar at the University of Oslo in Norway. “But this has been the building block of legitimacy for Hasina and her party.”

For much of her term, the Awami League could point to gangbusters economic growth and improved social metrics, such as poverty slashed from 11.8% in 2010 to 5% in 2022. Yet more recently, joblessness and inflation have severely impacted the livelihoods of ordinary people. In lieu of a true popular mandate—the U.S. deemed January’s election, which returned the Awami League for a fourth straight term but was boycotted by the main opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), as neither free nor fair—Hasina increasingly leans upon the cult of personality she’s constructed around her father. But few are swayed. In the lead up to the protests, a slew of damning allegations detailing the immense wealth collected by officials and cronies close to Hasina’s regime emerged, spurring widespread grumblings about perceived graft.

What happens next is the big question. The students have circulated a nine-point list of demands, including the banning of the Chhatra League, prosecution of those responsible for killings, and an apology from Hasina. This last point will likely be impossible for her to stomach. As the celebrated Bangladeshi photographer Shahidul Alam recently wrote: “This prime minister is not the apologizing kind, regardless of what she does.”

Instead, the Awami League is scrambling to control the narrative. While admitting that “sporadic” and “isolated” excessive force did occur, Arafat insists “this was not the entire scenario” and that “whoever is responsible for anything unlawful will be brought to book.” However, Arafat also assigns blame to a familiar foe: “Who planned this? Jamaat e Islami,” he says, referencing Bangladesh’s banned Islamist political party. “It was not the students. This is an ongoing battle. If it were not for the Awami League and other secular parties, the country would be Afghanistan.”

With Hasina’s economic record in tatters, and her family legacy openly mocked, the Awami League is falling back on its other principle source of legitimacy: keeping a lid on radical Islam in a nation with a bigger Muslim population than any in the Middle East. Yet there is “no evidence” to back Arafat’s claim of an Islamist fifth column behind the unrest, says Riaz. “This is an attempt to create a narrative that Hasina is battling terrorism to garner support from the Western countries, at least to silence any criticisms of her brutal crackdown. Awami League has used it before and is trying once again.”

The concern is that by labeling instigators as religious radicals that the Awami League is already laying the groundwork for inevitable retribution. In the run up to January’s election, millions of opposition activists have faced politically motivated charges, while there were almost 2,500 reported extrajudicial killings between 2009-2022. Already, a spokesperson for the BNP said that more than 2,000 party members have been detained.

“Does Sheikh Hasina accept that her policies have been abusive, will she get past calling anyone that criticizes as a traitor, and actually start governance that protects rights?” asks Meenakshi Ganguly, Asia deputy director for Human Rights Watch. “Our fear is that she will do what she’s done in the past: There will be arbitrary arrests, there will be torture in custody, there could be the usual disappearances, extrajudicial killings.”

Certainly, few believe that Hasina might step down or be removed. “She will ride this out,” says Kugelman. Riaz agrees: “The possibility of a palace coup—that is, someone from within the incumbent circle will challenge her—is nonexistent.”

Yet to many Bangladeshis, a Rubicon has been crossed, and anger at the spilt blood and anarchy that has engulfed South Asia’s second biggest economy seems unlikely to diminish soon. The internet outage, for one, cost local businesses millions of dollars while the prices of some essential goods have nearly doubled. People unable to reload their electricity meters online have been forced to queue for hours outside utility offices. A curfew remains in place, all universities shuttered, broken glass and shattered concrete litter the streets.

Still, any route out of the crisis is unclear, with Bangladesh’s once meddlesome military today firmly in Hasina’s corner. Friday could prove to be a pivotal moment if the many millions due to attend prayer services across the country choose to move from mosques to the street to express solidarity with the students. 

Certainly, any softening or introspection is not part of Hasina’s playbook. As she pointedly told TIME in September: “I’m here to sacrifice my life for the cause of my people the way my father did.”