Bangladesh: The defiance continues (plus statements from South Asian left)

First published at Asian Marxist Review. Edited for clarity by LINK International Journal of Socialist Renewal. See below for statements from CPI(ML) Liberation, All India Students' Association and Radical Socialist (India).

Despite the state crackdown on protesting students and shutdown of all educational institutions throughout the country, on July 17 hundreds of students gathered in Dhaka University to pay their respect at the public funeral of six fellow students who had fallen the previous day. At least 105 protestors have been killed so far by state and paramilitary forces. 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 fueling a heroic movement of resistance and defiance. As these lines are being written, protesters are setting fire to the state broadcasting station, moments after despotic prime minister Sheikh Hasina Wajid appeared on 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 Hasina dictatorship.

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. On July 12, a communications blackout was imposed across the country, with mobile internet access and social media blocked by the government.

Over the past weeks, students in Bangladesh have been protesting the Supreme Court’s restoration of an unfair and politically motivated quota system in government jobs [first introduced in 1972]. The new wave of protests is the continuation of the 2018 protest movement — which resulted in more than 250 casualties — 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 quota system, 56% of government jobs are reserved, with 30% allocated to the grandchildren of veterans of the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War and 26% set aside for women, disabled individuals, ethnic minorities and those from backward districts. Students are primarily calling for the revocation of the 30% reserved for freedom fighters’ grandchildren, while supporting the limited retention of quotas for the other categories.

The quota was originally established to honour and support the families of veterans who had died or were injured during the liberation war. However, contrary to the original intent, the quota system has gradually become a political tool for Hasina and her Awami League to maintain their control over the state by filling key posts with loyal supporters, rewarding stooges at the expense of the deserving, corrupting the youth, and sowing seeds of division among the working masses.

In Bangladesh, first and second-tier government jobs are among the few decent employment opportunities available for youth, particularly new university graduates. Other important sectors include the agriculture, garments and information technology industries. 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 official sources, 41% of youth in Bangladesh are inactive. This means they are neither in education or employment, nor receiving job training. Moreover, up to 66% of university graduates are unemployed. So much for the economic miracle of Bangladesh under Hasina’s administration being touted everywhere by the apologists of neoliberalism!

Junior employees at workplaces often face abuse from higher-ups, which can include physical mistreatment and sexual harassment. A vast majority of private sector employees fail to make a decent living for themselves and their families. Rising unemployment since the COVID crisis — 5.1% in 2023, up from 4.5% in 2018 — has made conditions even worse. The actual situation on the ground is obviously far more unpleasant than official unemployment figures. The gap between labour supply and demand not only suppresses 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. Economic indicators for Bangladesh from the last few quarters depict a decline in economic growth. In these conditions, government employment presents a significant attraction for young graduates, despite the relatively modest pay, because of its job security and few additional benefits.

Like other South Asian countries, Bangladesh possesses a youth bulge with 65% of the population under 35, including 45 million or 30% aged 15-24. With only about 1.2% of the population being university graduates, a vast majority is already excluded from competing for relatively decent jobs. Of the few who are included, only about 10% — mostly from the few urban isles in a mostly underdeveloped country — are employed in multinational corporations or their local counterparts, and are therefore able to earn a somewhat reasonable living to afford comparatively decent shelter, food, electricity and other basic needs. For the rest, there are almost no opportunities for upward social mobility, and no hopes for improvement in living standards.

Moreover, the promise of “growth” and “progress” has been oversold to the youth, who now realise that such promises will not materialise for a vast majority of them. In this regard, the current protests are mostly emerging from layers of youth belonging to the middle class or upper crusts of the working class, who see their future plunging into darkness and despair.

Another significant reason for the protests has been the suffocating dictatorship imposed by the Awami League’s government, in power since 2009 and getting more authoritarian with time. Hasina — the 75 years old daughter of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, founding father and first president of the country who was assassinated in a 1975 military coup a few years after taking office — has emerged as another authoritarian figure of neoliberalism in the past decade and a half.

The government frequently attacks dissent on and off campuses, arrests and detains those who criticise 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.

The opposition boycotted the January general election after more than 20,000 of its activists were arrested, allowing Hasina to “win” with virtually no opposition. In this regard, democracy in the country has turned into a façade even according to bourgeois standards.

However, the scenes of brutal state oppression being witnessed in Dhaka and other urban centres, along with the marvellous resistance being offered by 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 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 agents — began with an uprising of students. In November 1968, students in East Pakistan (today’s Bangladesh) and West Pakistan, outraged by the police murder of a fellow student, began protesting against the military dictatorship of Ayub Khan, a lackey of US imperialism. Soon afterwards, workers and peasants across the country — disgusted by the extremely exploitative and repressive state capitalist policies of the regime, which were resulting in ever sharpening class antagonisms — joined the movement, turning it into a popular uprising which not only overthrew the Ayub dictatorship but started challenging the relations of ownership. However, the absence of a revolutionary party with a vibrant program of socialist transformation meant that the state was able to divert the revolutionary movement into the channels of elections and civil war.

In 1970, Mujibur’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 government by the martial law administration of Yahya Khan. The situation rapidly deteriorated due to a brutal military operation in East Pakistan. The military along with Islamic fundamentalist militias consisting of “Razakars” (“volunteers”) — the label Hasina now uses for protesting students— initiated a frenzy of rape and murder throughout East Pakistan, with estimates of victims ranging between 300,000 and 3,000,000.

In the ensuing civil war, Bengali students, especially from Dhaka University, were at the forefront of struggles for national and class emancipation. The mass revolt, mainly organised through revolutionary people’s militias, defeated 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 poses an existential threat to Hasina's regime, which may ultimately be forced to offer some concessions and reforms to protesting students. Students, on the other hand, must recognise that reforms, no matter how significant, will eventually be reversed under the worsening crisis of capitalism. The ruling classes, whether represented by Hasina or someone else, will always find ways to counter previous reforms with more vicious attacks. This 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 class struggle. In recent years, the workers of Bangladesh have proven their revolutionary potential through numerous strike and protest movements on burning issues. In this regard, the present movement, by shaking the consciousness of the working masses, could expand in its scope both qualitatively and quantitatively, inevitably putting the question of leadership on the agenda and possibly resulting in new political formations. Advanced layers of the youth with revolutionary aspirations and outlook will 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 students, young workers or unemployed — are going through the most difficult times of the past 70 years or so. Most of them are struggling just to survive, let alone entertain the hopes of a prosperous future. In the post-2008 world, even in 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 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 will only be able to achieve victory in overthrowing the obsolete capitalist order under a revolutionary leadership.

Student uprising in Bangladesh

By Dipankar Bhattacharya. First published at CPI(ML) Liberation.

Bangladesh is witnessing a historic student upheaval. What triggered the unrest was a High Court verdict restoring the old quota system in government jobs, but what has evidently led to the intensification of the movement and its spread like a wild fire across university campuses and district towns of Bangladesh is the government's attempt to suppress the movement by unleashing state terror and extra-judicial violence. Evidently the movement is striking wider chords beyond the student community and the issue of quota and fuelling the deeper urge for democracy and change.

Bangladesh had 56% quota in government jobs - 1% for candidates with disability, 5% for ethnic minorities, 10% for districts, 10% for women and 30% for descendants of liberation war fighters. In 2018 there was a popular movement against this quota framework, especially the 30% reservation for liberation war families which is widely perceived as a partisan political privilege for the ruling Awami League. In the face of this agitation, the Hasina government had drastically changed the quota system, cancelling all the categories except the 1% quota for people with disabilities and 5% for candidates from ethnic minorities. A legal battle ensued and on June 5 came the High Court order restoring the old system. While the students started protesting, the government too has appealed against the High Court order at the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court verdict is awaited.

Why did the government choose to suppress the students by violent means when the government seems to be in substantive agreement with the students on the quota issue? The number of students killed in state repression and violence perpetrated by state-patronised goons of the ruling party and its student-youth organisations is believed to run into dozens. The video of 25-year-old Abu Sayeed of Begum Rokeya University of Rangpur being shot down by the police has gone viral. To justify this repression the Hasina government has also branded the protesting students as Rajakars, the collaborators who had joined hands with Pakistan during the liberation war of Bangladesh, a label akin to the anti-national tag routinely invoked by the Sangh brigade against dissenters in India.

The anti-quota discourse in India has a distinct elitist overtone of caste privilege. Merit is invoked as a customary cultural capital of the privileged and increasingly as a commodity meant for appropriation by the rich. In Bangladesh the popular discontent seems to be against partisan misuse of the quota system, nepotism and the ruling party's use of the liberation war as an exclusive political legacy. The main opposition is against quotas for second and third generation descendants of freedom fighters rather than other quotas. And it is not just about the quotas, students in Bangladesh are facing the same kind of corruption in the system of education, examination and recruitment just as Indian students are having to grapple with scam-ridden NEET and UPSC system. And unemployment in Bangladesh is also as severe as in India.

As we go to press the situation seems to be deteriorating rapidly in Bangladesh. The death toll is rising alarmingly, curfew has been clamped down coupled with internet shutdown and talks of military deployment. Given the shrinking democratic space and lack of credibility of recent electoral exercises, the anger of the people is understandably quite explosive. Various forces and tendencies, including diverse fundamentalist streams, are bound to be present in such a broad popular upheaval. Students and secular democratic forces in India of course stand in solidarity with the protesting students of Bangladesh, condemn the state-sponsored violence and wish Bangladesh to find a democratic solution to the current crisis.

All-India Students’ Association stands with student protestors in Bangladesh

First published at AISA's website.

When thousands of students hit the universities and streets of Bangladesh demanding a complete strike down of the discriminatory quota system in government jobs, they were met with violent state repression, not just by the police, but also the Bangladesh Chhatra League, the student wing of the ruling party Awami League, who have attacked students with rods, sticks and rocks.

The students and youth are protesting against a job quota system that allows for 30% reservation in government jobs for the children of freedom fighters of the 1971 war of independence. While there are reservations for women, indigenous communities, people with disabilities and others, the students are specifically opposing the quota for children of war veterans, terming it to be discriminatory and not based on merit. Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has arrogantly labelled those opposing the quota as “Razakar” — a term used for those who allegedly collaborated with the Pakistani army during the 1971 war — prompting more widespread protests.

Bangladesh, which has failed to generate more secure and dignified government jobs, pushed its youth to the brink when it introduced this policy in 2018, which was met with protests at the time and came to be challenged before court. The Bangladesh High Court recently upheld this discriminatory policy, which triggered the protests.

The lack of dignified jobs and unemployment resonates with the students and youth of India, who too are facing unprecedented challenges such as unemployment, lack of recruitment, paper leaks, massive privatisation, contractualisation of jobs, sale of PSUs, among others.

We stand in absolute solidarity with the fighting students and youth of Bangladesh, especially the student leaders of the Socialist Students’ Front, who are being hounded and arrested in their just demand to strike down discriminatory employment policy and ensure dignified and secure employment.

NIlasis Bose, National President
Prasenjeet Kumar, General Secretary

Radical Socialist (India): On the raging student movement in Bangladesh

First published at International Viewpoint.