Bangladesh in revolution

David Whitehouse: Bangladesh is the second country in South Asia to experience a political revolution in just two years. A mass movement drove out Sri Lanka’s president in 2022. Leftist economist Michael Roberts recently attributed the revolt in Bangladesh to a situation that’s actually widespread:

[an] economic nightmare that many so-called developing economies are experiencing now: stagnant trade, rising debt interest costs and severe austerity being imposed by the IMF and private capital in return for “financial aid.”

How would you describe the social situation preceding this year’s revolt of June, July, and August?

Nagesh Rao: It was volatile. We might begin by thinking about what fueled the revolt. The immediate cause was the issue of quotas in civil service jobs, which is an issue rooted in high unemployment. Among Bangladeshis who are 5 to 24 years old, 40 percent are neither in school nor employed. So, on the one hand, there is unemployment and under-employment, and since COVID we’ve seen a stagnant economy, a depreciating currency, a foreign exchange crisis, and high inflation.

On the other hand, there has been massive accumulation of wealth at the top of society. There’s actually been an economic boom that made Bangladesh into a sort of “model economy.” It has a higher per capita GDP than India, and it’s seen as on track to being considered a “developing economy” by 2026. But most of the benefit of that economic boom has gone to the elites.

When I moved here last year, Dhaka appeared to me as an incredibly hierarchical, class-stratified society. And it’s visible everywhere: massive amounts of wealth on the one hand and poverty on the other. So—unemployment, inequality, but also a sheer sense of lack of freedom. It was palpable everywhere you went. People were scared to speak. People were scared to say anything against the government in any context. People had become accustomed to whispering rather than speaking up aloud, even in normal conversation. Fifteen years of increasingly authoritarian, increasingly repressive rule had created a powder keg.

Leading up to the so-called election in January that brought Sheikh Hasina back to power—the latest installment of sham elections—Hasina herself had said that they need to put up “dummy candidates” to give the appearance of a genuine election. That was because the entire opposition had boycotted the election, and they were demanding that she step down. They had a 31-point program, but they had one demand—Hasina had to step down, and a caretaker government would conduct the elections that were due in January. She refused to do that, and instead: massive repression.

So along with economic inequality, we have to talk about the level of repression and the complete absence of freedom that people felt in a very visceral way. In the months leading up to the election, thousands and thousands of people were swept up in raids. In these raids, they would arrest thousands and accuse them of either arson or explosives-related charges, which were non-bailable offenses, and they would just lock them up until after the election was over. Repression everywhere. There were forced disappearances, extrajudicial killings, and torture chambers.  And you couldn’t say or do much about it.

So this was a powder keg, and I think everyone recognized that. The opposition were a mix from conservatives to former leftists, and their strategy essentially was, “We need to confront the state and force it to reveal its repressive nature and that will set off an explosion.” At the time it seemed a harebrained, adventurist idea. And the repression was so intense that it was virtually impossible for protests to take place without people getting beaten up by police.

That was the social situation on the eve of these protests that set up the uprising.

DW: You mentioned the leading role of the students in the revolt, and you went to Bangladesh to take a faculty position at a university. How would you describe the situation of your students and how they thought about their own prospects and their mood before the protests began?

NR: First, a caveat. I came here in July last year, and I started teaching in February of this year, so I’m a newcomer in many ways. My wife is Bangladeshi and from Dhaka but I haven’t lived here that much. So I’m not new to the country but new to the academic culture. I’m also only just beginning to pick up the language. So my assessments are colored by my own relative ignorance.

The thing that struck me in the university was the lack of space for critical thinking, for critical questioning, and the difficulty that students had in expressing themselves. Self-censorship was everywhere. Self-censorship among faculty, among administration, among students—everywhere. You really couldn’t say anything that would antagonize the government. You couldn’t say anything that might antagonize the Americans, because the Americans might pressure the government. You couldn’t say anything to antagonize anyone in power.

That was the mood. But at the same time, it was remarkable how widespread anti-Hasina sentiment was. Everywhere. If you managed to get a sense of where people were politically, you would eventually find out that they were against the incumbent government, but they were not going to be forthright about it. They weren’t going to be open about it.

I teach at a private university, and private universities don’t have the same political culture that public universities do in Bangladesh. The public universities are older established universities, with student politics fairly well entrenched. The private universities are newer, neoliberal formations, and they’re run like corporations. So it’s all corporatized space in there. Imagine holding a political rally in a mall. That’s the kind of atmosphere.

There were politically-minded students on campus, but they didn’t necessarily have an organized presence, whereas in the public universities, it’s the opposite. In public universities, political parties had established their control over the campuses. The Awami League student wing, Bangladesh Chhatra League, controlled the residence halls on the campuses. The photographs of the weapons recovered from these residence halls after the uprising will send a shiver down your spine. It’s the machetes that got to me: dozens and dozens of long-bladed machetes. These people literally ruled by fear; they would beat people to death, or they would hack people to death. So the atmosphere on campuses was volatile, combative—on public campuses particularly—a powder keg waiting to explode.

The movement began on the public university campuses—Dhaka University and Jahangirnagar University in particular but it was when the private universities got involved that the movement really began to explode, partly because private university students drew in sections of the middle class, with parents joining their kids when police began to shoot at them.

Aaron Amaral: Given the extent of repression on the public universities—the organized presence of the Awami League’s so-called students—was there an organized opposition presence that had any roots, or was it more spontaneous as a result of the protest?

Nagesh: No, it wasn’t spontaneous. The main opposition party, Bangladesh National Party (BNP) has its own student wing called Chhatra Dal, the Communist Party of Bangladesh (CPP) has its own student wing. So there are left party student groups as well, but the party in power dominated the campus politics and ruled over it.

DW: Let’s go to the period of the revolt itself. The movement expanded its demands in the course of the revolt, and it expanded its base to wider layers of the population. Tell us how that went. Would you describe this as a process of radicalization, and did it involve the development of new leadership and organization?

NR: I think that’s a really important question, and I would have to say that it did not. I wouldn’t call it a process of radicalization. The student movement initially was a mixed bag. The movement was against preferential treatment for descendants of the freedom fighters of the 1971 war for independence, who are seen as beneficiaries of Awami League patronage and linked to the Awami League. But many students were also against any kind of affirmative action quota, although others were for affirmative action for women. It was all over the place.

And this was a public university thing. Initially, private university students stayed aloof from the anti-quota movement because they saw themselves as not looking for jobs in the government civil services, anyway. They saw themselves as aspiring to private sector jobs. The quotas only affected civil services. So they’d stayed aloof from the quota movement.

Then Sheikh Hasina came out on the 14th of July with the snide remark on TV, “Who are we going to give jobs to? Aren’t we going to give them to the children of freedom fighters? Of course we’re not going to give them to the Razakars.” And that was essentially taken by the student movement as an insult, as a slur that she was labeling them all as children of Razakars—that is, traitors to the nation.

That insult—along with the Chhatra League goons beating up Dhaka University students on the 14th and 15th—triggered solidarity demonstrations at the private campuses as well. Private university campuses who wanted to make their way to Dhaka University couldn’t get through traffic and so on and decided, “We’re just going to occupy the space in front of this mall, we’re just going to occupy that space”—they occupied spaces and they started protesting in solidarity. That’s when it became a mass student movement. On the 16th, Dhaka University student Abu Sayeed, the first martyr of this movement was killed with his arms spread wide. Six people were killed that day.

That might have been the last chance for the Hasina government. Had she come out then and said, “We’re sorry, this officer who killed this student is going to be suspended, we’re going to conduct an inquiry, this has gone out of hand, we’ll sit and negotiate with the students,” etc. etc. this might have ended. But instead she doubled down, claiming that the violence was all being done by Islamists—Jamaat and Chhatra Shibir (the student wing of Jamaat-e-Islami)–and threatened a stronger crackdown.

Now the students began demanding that Hasina apologize, that offending ministers resign, and that the government take responsibility for these killings. But of course, the authoritarian dictator was not going to apologize. And I think the students knew that too, maybe—that this was not a demand that she would actually meet.

After July 16th the streets were filled with students battling the cops. On the 19th, the government imposed curfew and cut off the Internet, but the thing just exploded. People had had enough, and the student movement triggered a mass uprising that the government could not control. Fed up with years of being put down and being repressed by this regime, masses of people vented their pent-up anger against the police—against the police state. Down with fascism, down with autocracy, became a single-point demand. They went from a nine-point demand to a single point: Hasina has to go. And that’s when you get the curfew, and people began to defy the curfew, and there were running battles through the night, through the day, and a massive number of people killed. And by August 3rd, we had something like 200 killed—officially 200, unofficially probably higher– most of them students, and the killing continued.

There’s so much that happened in those few days. Student coordinators were forced underground. Some who had been in hiding were abducted and beaten up. There was a spectacle where they were taken to a police station, given food, and then forced to sign a statement calling off the movement. All sorts of things happened. Those two weeks—July 20 to August 5—went by in a blur. With total curfew and broadband Internet shut down, each day blended into the other, with sounds of street battles and helicopters and wild rumors dominating our consciousness.

On August 4, the students called for a final push to topple the government, dubbed the Long March to Dhaka. On the morning of August 5th, the streets were eerily empty. The sounds of firing had lessened because the army had taken over. The army had said that they were not going to fire on people. At least that was the rumor—so people came out, and by noon, Shahbagh, the main gathering point, was filling up with hundreds and hundreds of protesters, and thousands more were on their way.

At 1:00 that afternoon, we heard that Hasina was stepping down, and by 3:00 we heard that she had resigned.

There was no place to stand on the streets, it was so packed! A sense of accomplishment, a sense of—I mean, the sense of freedom that people felt that day in that square, and coming back home from those crowds—I’ve just never felt anything like it. Like a “festival of the oppressed.” People dancing, chanting, everyone. Everyone just out on the streets. It was glorious. It was just amazing.

To what extent does it signify a radicalization? I’ve characterized this as an uprising that resulted in a political—I don’t know what word to use—revolution? Political transfer of power? It set off a revolutionary process. It has opened up the space and potential for revolutionary possibilities. That’s what it’s done.

DW: I’d like to take some things from those climactic moments. First of all, there’s a report from the UN stating that the number of people killed by the beginning of August was around 400 people.

NR: Now, the latest thing says (as of August 24) about 890.

DW: We can come back to who that has included, but let’s go back before August 5 for a moment. By the end of July, some 70 police outposts had been burned. When Sheikh Hasina fled to India on August 5, many police went on strike. I don’t know if that was formally, but they disappeared from sight, leaving their stations deserted for the better part of a week. Members of the movement stepped in to fill some of their functions. How did that work?

Bangladeshis were thus left briefly to their own devices with no government and no police. And to a leftist, such an experience would seem like a premonition of a different way of running society. Did it seem that way in Dhaka?

NR: Totally. Those seven days, eight days with no sight of police, three days with no government—it showed right away the amazing, awesome power of mass collective victory and how it transforms people. The students pivoted from toppling a dictator to controlling traffic, cleaning up the parliament building, cleaning up the streets that they had dirtied in the protests, painting murals on the walls depicting the movement… and then people were like: “Stop the painting! We want to preserve the graffiti!”

These students made traffic flow like we’ve never seen it flow. People were following lane discipline—Dhaka traffic never really operates according to lanes! But students made it happen. Many of these students are veterans of the 2018 protests for road safety. After two school children were killed by a speeding bus, there were mass protests that involved students from high school, and middle school and even elementary school. You had middle school students at that time in 2018 directing traffic, checking people’s licenses. Many of our college students today are veterans of those protests. So when the government collapsed, they were like: “We got this.”

In the process, they started checking prices at markets, stopping price gouging, and making sure that the price of essential commodities in one market was consistent with another market, and so on, because many of these markets have been run by cartels and syndicates connected to the Awami League. Immediately, a day or two after the government fell, prices were down! Prices of onions were down by 40 percent or something—prices were down everywhere. That’s because whoever these cartels were—who were taking money from the traders—were now on the run. And students were checking to make sure that there’s no one coming back. The sense of empowerment, the sense of creativity, and the sense that we can do anything—you could feel it among the students. And since then, not just among students.

Once the interim government was formed, every group and grouplet has formed its own set of demands: “We demand this, this, and this.” There are demands flying all over the place. Everyone’s trying to find ways of democratizing their spaces, reclaiming spaces, creating new spaces. Public spaces that had been shut down by the Awami League are now being opened up again. There’s that kind of joy in the streets.

Now, of course, as we speak, this whole thing has turned so bad so quickly with these floods. South and eastern Bangladesh is all flooded now, thanks to very heavy rains, along with upstream dams being opened by India—without warning—because of flooding there as well. Flash floods. And so 3 million, 4 million people are affected now by the floods—whole cities, everything just under water. It’s a terrible, terrible situation. But in the last two days, all these students have pivoted to organizing flood relief. And Dhaka University is now a big flood relief donation processing camp, and these students are taking boats and boats of relief materials to these places.

So there’s a sense of, “We can organize things, we can do things,” a sense of empowerment among students. Students are now beginning to demand change in their universities. Universities are in turmoil everywhere. I think nineteen or twenty vice chancellors have resigned from public and private universities. All the top administrators of public universities have resigned. So there’s no leadership. There’s a total vacuum of power. The way the Awami League functioned was through the politics of capture. They captured every institution. They captured every organization. They captured every space. With them gone and with their leaders on the run and in hiding, there’s a huge vacuum that’s opened up.

That’s a window of opportunity that’s going to close, soon. There are forces working to return to normalcy. Police are back on the streets. At the same time, there are people who are organizing to try to deepen democratic ways of functioning and being—trying to free institutions of nepotism, corruption, all of this stuff. So there’s revolutionary potential in the sense that there’s a vacuum and there’s space for people to assert themselves—oppressed people and minorities and workers—to take charge, take space.

So that potential exists, but it’s not something that’s automatically going to go the way that we would want to see it happen. While that potential exists, most people are focused on calling for justice for crimes that the previous government did. Garment workers had a rally yesterday calling for justice for garment workers who’ve been killed and for people who’ve been falsely accused in cases.

The students have been at the center of this thing, while the working classes have played a kind of supportive role. They’ve provided the energy, but the leadership has really been with the students. Students have filled the vacuum in terms of social organization, but that can’t last forever, and they can only do so much. They can do civic-life organizing, but for there to be any kind of improvement of workers’ wages, working conditions, poverty, inequality, etc.—which are the sort of the things that made this a powder keg—if there’s going to be movement on that, that’s going to have to come from workers organizing themselves. That opportunity exists now, but it’s very difficult to bring those forces to fruition because the working class has been so repressed for so long.

Throughout the past year, for example, garment workers had been agitating for higher wages, and many dozens of them had false police cases filed against them.

Many union leaders had been co-opted. Even in the garment workers’ unions there are union leaders who had ties to the Awami League, and formed a “syndicate” that managed and contained workers’ struggles. Many of those union bosses have been kicked out. In Gazipur, for example, the mayor of the town used to control the unions. His assistant was killed and strung up from a tree.

Working class organization in this country hasn’t been very strong. Unions represent about 5 percent of the labor force; that’s it.

Ready-made garment (RMG) workers have a disproportionate impact on the economy because the sector accounts for 10 percent of Bangladesh’s GDP and 80 percent of exports, but the number of workers who are unionized is fairly small (about 10 percent). And their organizations have taken a beating. So workers’ organizations weren’t at the forefront of this uprising. They’ve been fighting a defensive battle. But they’ve also been making demands. Throughout last year, they had a campaign for raising wages. The average wage was about Tk 8000 per month (about $67). Thanks to months of agitation, they won an increase to Tk 12,500 in December last year, but that’s not even close to the Tk 25,000 wage that they’ve been demanding. This should be the time to push for it. This should be the time that you come out for “25,000 for us and for everyone else.” Or a 100 percent raise for workers across the board. This is the time for those bold sorts of demands. But the unions have been slow to react or to catch up with the moment, and I think that’s because of the state of the unions under the Hasina regime.

AA: Was production disrupted? What’s the state of the sector in general?

NR: Well, everyone is worried about the state of the economy. Because already before the protests, there was a gathering currency crisis, a gathering foreign exchange crisis. And yeah—disruption to production, of course. Everything was shut down. Nothing was functioning for several days. And the garment industry was all shut down because the bosses had shut them down. So it wasn’t strikes. Everything was just closed down in response to curfew and in response to the unrest. The government has said that it’s going to put out a white paper on the economy. We’ll have to see what it says.

DW: I’d like to come back to the subject of workers action later on, but now I want to backtrack to the situation right now and hear what you have to say about communalism, which is the antagonism between ethnic—and especially religious—groups. Bangladesh is about 90 percent Muslim, about 8 percent Hindu, and there were reports of attacks against the Hindu minority in the course of the movement, and also a report of student leaders meeting with minority representatives. There’s also evidence that news of such attacks has been exaggerated or even fabricated.

At the same time, Hindus have mobilized for minority rights, including a demand for 10 percent of parliamentary seats to be reserved for minorities. It seems that mobilizations like that offer a chance for the broader movement to expand its focus toward a general commitment to civil and social equality. What’s your take on that possibility?

NR: The fact that the movement named itself the anti-discrimination movement is significant. That’s a progressive stance. That allows you to talk about oppression and discrimination, and the student coordinators of the movement have been consistent in their demand for equality and inclusiveness.

How did communalism play into the uprising? Three days, no government. Seven days, no police anywhere. Police stations had been burned. Police stations had been raided. Armories had been raided. There were lots of guns floating around, and a lot of violence and arson took place around the country. The majority of this violence was against known supporters and known leaders of the Awami League.

There was a statement put out by a coalition of minority groups—Hindu, Buddhist, Christian—that said that some 200-odd attacks had taken place on minorities across the country. On social media, if you go now, you’ll see a whole ecosystem of trolls who’ve been sharing inflammatory videos purportedly of Hindus being attacked. Most of them have turned out to be fake.

There’s an example from just two or three days ago in our neighborhood. We have a neighborhood watch now because there’s no police, so we have students keeping guard in the neighborhood all through the night in shifts. Someone uploaded a video of some guy who was caught trying to sneak into a building. He was beaten up by the people who caught him after he was made to sign a confession. So this is a problem of mob violence. The very next day, that same video from my neighborhood resurfaced online with a title on it like, “Hindu teacher attacked by Islamic students and forced to resign”! So there’s a lot of this fake stuff that’s been going out there.

There were some attacks on Hindus who were affiliated with or known to be associated with the Awami League. But many, many more Muslims were attacked for the same reason. Awami League tried to establish a monopoly on secularism. It presented itself as a secular party safeguarding minoritized Hindus from right-wing Islamists, even as it co-opted the Islamists themselves. So there are Hindu Bangladeshis who were attacked because they were leaders in Awami League, or were recognized as Awami League sympathizers.

Nevertheless, when those reports of violence came out, the student coordinators immediately issued a “command directive” or something like that, calling on all their local chapters to go out and protect all the minority places of worship. And that was done. Students, including many madrassa students, took up positions outside Hindu temples.  There were no more attacks.

But after that, here’s what you notice. Since about August 10 onwards, you begin to see report after report, mostly coming out of India, about attacks on Hindus in Bangladesh, and those reports merely cite the same initial statement that 200 places had been attacked on August 5-6, but present it as an ongoing thing. They’ve kept up the drumbeat claiming there are mobs going around attacking Hindus, which was, and is absolutely untrue.

DW: The head of the interim government is Muhammad Yunus, who seems to be responding to the influence of both the army and the insurgent student movement. These two forces must be pulling in opposite directions at times. Tell us about the nature and performance of the government so far.

NR: This government is a mixed bag of civil service appointees and two student leaders, headed by Dr. Yunus. The government now consists of this panel of advisors, with Yunus as the chief advisor. Among the advisors are two student leaders. They have been given charge of key ministries. One of them has the telecommunications portfolio, while the other has labor.  Yunus is the Chief Advisor. So, the question is: advisor to whom? And as it stands, he’s the advisor to the president—a president who was appointed by the now-toppled Awami League government! That’s a constitutional knot that needs to be resolved before anything can actually move forward—with free and fair elections and all of the stuff that needs to happen. So constitutional reform is one of the things that’s on people’s minds. We’ll talk about that.

People expected the army to take over; no other force could have. And the fact that they’ve appointed Yunus is interesting. It’s indicative of their willingness, for now, to allow a civilian government to try to bring stability and move towards elections.

At this point in time, I don’t think the army could take full control of the government. The students wouldn’t allow it. Students wouldn’t have allowed it then. I don’t think they’ll allow it now. In fact, at the height of the crisis, when the army chief wanted to speak with the student leaders, they refused to meet with them and said, we’ll only speak with the president, according to the constitution. The army, I think, read the situation well. The number of people killed during this uprising is unprecedented in Bangladeshi history. They’ve had coups and counter-coups, and violent repression before, but never have so many people been killed on the streets by police. So the army recognized that you can’t repress this movement, and they gave in to the demand for an interim government.

As long as this government can ensure stability and can create the conditions that will allow the emergence of genuine political alternatives and parties that are independent of Awami League and BNP—and as long as it is able to create conditions for elections to happen—that’s what people by and large expect from the interim government. But here’s the thing: That process is going to take a couple of years in order to have any semblance of free and fair elections. You’re actually going to need a process of renewal of society, renewal of institutions, and possibly even a constitutional reform, before an elected government emerges. That is, some sort of constituent assembly is necessary; there are groups discussing the need for a constituent assembly of some kind. But that also necessitates elections of some kind.

So how do we assess what the interim government is doing? Well, Yunus has given an indication of where his economic priorities lie. He met with garment industry leaders and business owners but he hasn’t met with the workers. The garment industry workers have had meetings with other members of the government, but Yunus himself didn’t meet with them. He met with the owners.

There is turmoil in the ready-made garment (RMG) industry right now. Garment exports count for 80 percent of foreign exchange earnings, and the industry contributes 10 percent to Bangladesh’s GDP. Workers’ wages, on the other hand, are abysmally low, as are their working conditions. The uprising may have ended with Sheikh Hasina’s fall for many people, but in the garment industry it seems to have just begun. Even as Yunus met with RMG bosses and promised them a “safe return” to work, police were being unleashed on protests involving RMG workers and organized, unemployed workers. The protests have been deemed illegal, and they have been vilified as the work of “outside agitators.” This is right out of the playbook of the Awami League regime. If this continues, Yunus’s rush to return to business as usual will run up against the raised expectations of a mobilized workforce.

If the state were responsive to workers’ conditions, improving those conditions would be top of the agenda. Workers too gave their blood in this revolution, for those who want to see it that way. I don’t, because I think workers ought to run society. Dramatically raising the minimum wage, an across-the-board Monsoon Bonus, a promise of greater subsidies in the coming future for workers’ education, health care, and housing. All this could at least have been announced.

Instead, manufacturers’ desire for “safe return” to work has been the main talking point coming from the government. As everyone is already hyper-tense about the fragility of law and order, this discourse resonates, and is quickly normalized, the better to sideline workers’ demands by claiming their protests are the work of (or are infiltrated by) “outside agitators.” So now workers are told they must bear austerity as the price for toppling the old regime.

Right now the government’s focus has been on apprehending all the Awami Leaguers who are trying to flee. People have been caught at airports, trying to get out of the country, trying to get to India. There’s been a purge going on of government institutions, educational institutions, banks. The Bangladesh Bank chairman was replaced. There’s all this administrative cleanup and reshuffling going on.

The worrying thing is that they’re using some of the same methods that the Awami League government used, slapping them with all sorts of false charges. So there is the former minister of social work, Dipu Moni, who’s infamous for corruption and embezzlement and land theft—all sorts of things—but they’ve been arrested and charged with murder, which seems like an absurd charge. This is the practice of the old regime. They’d open up, say, a murder case and charge five named individuals and five hundred unnamed individuals, or one thousand unnamed individuals. And then, they’d go around arresting people who they suspect are BNP supporters and show them “arrested in this case.” And that’s what they’re doing here too. This manner of filing false cases, mass cases, to bring justice today is a hangover of the past, of the previous regime. It’s the same mechanism, and this is problematic. People have to push back against this.

Police have returned to the streets, though many of them are still refusing to come back. The way they’re saying it is, “We have to recover from this trauma.” And the trauma was getting their asses kicked by the people, the trauma was that the mass of the population turned against them and fought back against them. Now, can those police come back on the streets? If they came back on the streets, that would be problematic because many of those police are themselves former Chhatra League. The line that separated the police and the Chhatra League was blurry. There was no line. These had uniforms. Those didn’t have uniforms. From what I’ve heard, you went through Chhatra League and then got out and joined the police. And so to see those same police back in the same uniforms is galling, and I’ve only been here a year. I can’t imagine what it’s like for other people who’ve learned to hate these uniforms to see them back on the street.

The government is now going to be caught in a contradiction between the forces demanding a quick return to normalcy and those wanting to press for their rights and demands. With law and order being a critical issue because there are still guns floating around, people are scared, especially in the more posh neighborhoods, a return to normalcy will mean that those demands are put on hold, or those rights are curtailed. So that’s the contradiction. The fast return to normalcy on the one hand, while on the other hand social justice requires empowerment of people.

And that empowerment takes time. It requires a different process. They’re trying to solve these problems from the top down. But in fact if anything, we saw during the days when there was no government and no police on the streets, things actually ran pretty efficiently when the students had taken over. Workers can take the lead in many of these things that require policing; community policing can actually be done by contingents of students and workers if they were paid by the state. They could be given stipends. But those sorts of measures, which could actually strengthen neighborhood committees, workplace committees or campus committees to run things—we’re not going to see that. It won’t happen, largely because those who might press for these things are few and fragmented. But that’s what would be needed for a genuine deepening of these democratic processes.

People are going to be pushing for that—for more democracy, for less authoritarianism, for an end to corruption. Another reason why the police are not coming back is they can’t take bribes anymore, so one of their main sources of income is gone. They can’t extort. Students have gone after extortion, and the interim government has also taken up this thing like, “We want to end extortion,” because extortion was a huge racket that the police engaged in. So all of these sources of income are gone, and they’re not returning anytime soon. So that’s where we are. So what happens now? Can you strengthen neighborhood and community watches and policing? And for how long will you do that? Can you do that with a civilian population, which is unarmed, against potential looters who are going around armed?

DW: You mentioned the time that a democratization process or a revolutionary process will take to develop. So I want to jump ahead of whenever this election is going to take place, because it seems that—even though you haven’t described the revolutionary process so far as a process of radicalization—it seems like there are a whole lot of people, including both students and workers, who probably think that there needs to be more change done than has been done already. Call that radicalization, if you like, or not; they’ve been activated. Right?

NR: That’s right.

DW: My question is about future organization—and not just organization that might contest an election. In the past, student activation or radicalization in other countries has led at least a section of them to reach the conclusion that the working class actually does need to be in the driver’s seat. I’m thinking, for example, of the students in South Korea under the dictatorship who decided they had to get jobs in the factories. There were also Christian activists who went into the factories. These all helped build a workers’ movement in the 1980s that really democratized South Korea at least in bourgeois terms—to have contested elections, freedom to speak, organize, assemble, etc. Anyway, there was a longer-term period in which the active elements, the ones that were most active initially, determined that they needed to connect with the working class. Do you see anything like that happening? Do you see people thinking in those terms at this point?

NR: There are established left parties which have been thoroughly discredited because they’ve been co-opted by Awami League—Communist Party of Bangladesh and other, tiny left groups, which don’t have much credibility. They’re pretty marginalized. So… that vacuum that I described, who’s going to fill that vacuum? What sort of organization, what kind of organizing is happening on the ground to fill that vacuum? There’s a whole layer of non-party leftists in academia, among students, among cultural activists—probably not among worker organizers. I think most of the worker organizers are in some way or the other connected to established political parties. The new energy is to be found in these non-party spaces. So, for example, there’s the University Teachers Network, which has been influential in terms of guiding, or putting out certain ideas for the students, and working together with the students. So in a sense, there are spaces for radicalization and, for example, raising not just class issues, but also issues of minorities and issues of self determination of indigenous peoples. Those spaces exist outside of established left organizations. So let’s just keep that in mind. Or those spaces are forming outside of established left organizations.

On the other hand, I feel like the tendency of the student leadership at this point is in the direction of reform of state structures and institutional structures, even at universities. For example, at my university, students have demanded changes to the fee structure and to the scholarship structure. They’re demanding various institutional reforms.

But the one political demand coming from the students across the board is for a politics-free campus. So, universities have started banning party politics on campuses; political parties are no longer allowed to organize on campuses. And this is by student decree. You can understand why, because these political parties—Chhatra League—had basically demolished any kind of space for student politics, student democracy, campus democracy. Even this University Teachers Network that I’m a part of, their members cannot be members of a political party. This shunning of political parties is movement-wide. People just don’t trust political parties, including parties of the Left.

There are figures on the Left that are trusted and that are beloved. There are people like Anu Mohammed, who’s a well-known Marxist economist, but their party affiliations will not win them any favors from the students.

So this is the contradiction. On the one hand you want democracy, you want to democratize the space, but on the other hand you’re not only banning politics and political parties, but you’re actually empowering institutions to ban them. Our university put out a statement— and they were happy to do it—no “overt or covert political activity” will be allowed on campus.

We can understand where it’s coming from, and we have to work with that. My friends and students who are leftist and part of leftist organizations are frustrated: “What’s gonna happen to us?” But it just means, I think, you just have to learn how to engage in campus politics without bringing your party into it. And that’ll be an interesting experience, an interesting experiment. Maybe it’ll teach student politics to be less sectarian, I don’t know. We’ll have to see what comes of it. But it’s unanimous. There’s no space to argue against this position.

So then where are the forces going to come from for new formations? They’ll have to come from these kinds of organizations, but it’ll take all sorts of changes. And right now the focus everywhere is on institutional reform. So people are drafting reform proposals, drafting reform demands. Universities are being changed in terms of their institutional structure—or proposals are being made.

But what are the forces that are driving revolutionary possibilities forward? Not that many at this point, because when it comes down to it, the organized political forces are the forces of the Right—the center-right of BNP, Jamaat-i-Islami, and the far-right with groups like Hefazat-e-Islam. There’s only a weak and fragmented left.

Coming back to the communalism question for a second, there’s a different element to it as well. Awami League, like I said, monopolized the label of secular. It justified its existence on post–9/11 paranoia about an Islamist right and the threat of Islamist takeover. So: “Waiting in the wings are all these Islamist radicals and I’m the only one who’s keeping this country secular.” This was Hasina’s approach. Many sections of the Left, and secularists, fell into the trap of confusing secularism with atheism and secularism with no religion. The secularists ended up swallowing the Islamophobic paranoia about religious organizations and displays of religiosity. And this meant that they were thoroughly marginalized from Bangladeshi society. This divide between the Left and large sections of Bangladeshi society that consider themselves religious, but are not necessarily attracted to extremist ideologies—that gap needs to be somehow bridged. That’s one of the challenges of this moment.

There are different political currents trying to do that. One, called Gonosohati Andolan or People’s Solidarity Movement, sought alliances with the center-right in the struggle against the previous regime. By fighting alongside these forces, they hoped to build a Left that does not deny Muslim identity—that does not deny the Muslim-ness of the working-class population. There’s also this charismatic and well known speaker and writer, named Farhad Mazar, who’s kind of an anarchist, but religious. So he has this sort of anarcho-Islamo peasant-uprising, peasant-commune politics. There’s also a tradition here coming from Maulana Bhashani (1880–1976). He was known as the Red Maulana—a cleric who tried to bridge socialism and Islam. So there are these sorts of left Islamic traditions as well.

This is a moment where people are finding that they have to break with all their old patterns of organizing, and everything’s up for renewal now. Everything has to be renewed, everything has to be rethought. The way people have worked in the past, who you’ve worked with, how you’ve worked, what kind of work you’ve done—all of that needs to be rethought and reconfigured here. And that’s what’s happening. People are forming all sorts of new organizations and new relationships.

AA: Can I go back to the issue of organization and the imminent growth of new organization. The entity—I think you characterize them as the student leadership—the current entity that’s issuing the “command directives.” Is this just a transient formation? Where does this fall in this discussion?

NR: The student coordinators. Let’s be clear, some, perhaps many, are not students anymore, as former students continue to participate in campus politics as a matter of course. They’re a body of—at one point, it was 56 coordinators from different campuses. Some of them belong to a group called Chhatra Shakti—student power. They communicate horizontally. I’ve tried to find out how they arrive at their decisions, but it’s been very opaque. It’s not a democratically accountable leadership. It’s a leadership that won legitimacy simply by leading; these were students who took the lead. They were militant from the beginning, were forced into hiding because of state repression, and emerged as victorious heroes embodying the spirit of the mass movement. They had the credibility, the legitimacy, because of what they’d been through and how they’d led on the ground. And that’s it. Not because of any organizational affiliation or political ideology or anything like that. They played the role of organizing this movement, and they emerged as leaders of an uprising.

They weren’t prepared for it. They didn’t expect it. They didn’t necessarily want it. They wanted quota reform, and they got the overthrow of the government. So they found themselves in a situation where they’re being called on to chart a way forward for society. And they’re doing remarkably well, given all that, but it’s very much still an ad hoc formation which doesn’t necessarily have representative accountability. It has legitimacy, wide legitimacy. People accept what they say—so legitimacy, yes, but it doesn’t have accountability, because communication is still very much one-way. Even before the collapse of the government, when the movement was at its height, there were students who were complaining about the fact that the leaders weren’t approachable or weren’t listening.

At the same time, there’s a dynamic unfolding on different campuses where these newly activated students who are not part of the leadership are now assuming leadership in their own campuses and looking for ways to to move things forward. Very few of the students—and this is just my impression—few students want to simply return to classes, go back to normal life. Everyone wants to be engaged in some way in changing things, in doing things. Our social media pages and our university pages are just filled with demands. It’s just demands and demands and demands, all over the place. Some ten students here, twenty students there. The other day, two hundred students showed up at the campus gates and they were protesting. We have 11,000 students, and some 200 students protesting about some demands. And it’s like, well, who do you represent? Everything is in formation. It’s very difficult to say where things are going to go. The only organized forces are the religious organizations and the BNP forces.

And so if socialists and progressives don’t get their act together—if they are not able to bring together all of these non-party progressive and left forces, these newly energized, newly activated folks, into a participatory project where people are actually publicly participating in shaping things—then, slowly, institutional reform will take shape in the way that institutions do it. And everything will consolidate, and that window of opportunity will close sooner or later, because there’s also still the question of stability—economic stability, social law and order stability, stability coming out of the flood situation, this new crisis. So we’re all operating on the assumption that things will go smoothly and this government will be able to steer a clear path forward to elections in two years or whatever. But there are so many forces that work against that, objective forces in terms of the economy, but also subjective ones, from organizations of the far right to interference—Indian interference or what the deposed regime and its hangers-on might be plotting or planning.

Nevertheless, as the fear of counter-revolution recedes, the reconsolidation of Bangladeshi capital and reconsolidation of the state in some reformed fashion will happen sooner rather than later. It’s most likely that some sort of centrist political formation, a centrist party based in the student movement, will emerge. Of course, a lot can happen in two years. They say, “There are weeks when decades happen,” and we’ve lived through weeks when decades have happened, and it still feels that way. There’s not a moment to sit still. Day to day, week to week, things are being shaped. It’s constantly moving. It’s constantly evolving, but because the forces driving towards normalcy are so strong, I feel we have a small window of opportunity to consolidate the progressive and left forces. The Left has to find its feet, find a way of operating within this very complex milieu.

The memory of the nearly one thousand people martyred in this uprising, including hundreds of students, will stay with this generation for a long time. As campuses reopen and begin to settle into an uneasy new normalcy, it is unlikely that students will accept a return to old habits and practices. There are many things yet to be done to achieve their aim of a democratic society built on the principle of anti-discrimination. In confronting these tasks, both on and off campus, students will have to ask themselves whether they will allow the energies of the movement to be turned on and off from on high by unelected and increasingly unaccountable leaders, or build student power from below that is democratic, transparent, and accountable. The desire for change is real, and my bet is that campuses will be ripe for student organizations, ideas, and leaders, but they will face a stiff challenge from conservative forces.

English-language sources based in Bangladesh:

New Age

Daily Star

Dhaka Tribune

Featured Image credit: Nagesh Rao; modified by Tempest.
Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”