There goes the neighbourhood
A microfinance whiz is in charge of running a politically and emotionally devastated Bangladesh until it picks itself up well enough to hold elections. Until August 5, a micro-management whiz was in charge of running Bangladesh—and nearly ran it to the ground.
Now the challenge of shepherding renewal faces Muhammad Yunus, Nobel Prize-winning economist and now “chief advisor” of that country’s interim government. It came about because Sheikh Hasina Wazed, Bangladesh’s four-term prime minister and a long-time bête noire of Yunus, destroyed her fifth term with a students’ protests that she and her coterie fuelled. It ultimately served to eject her from the country she had for the past 15 years and more run as her own.
This change, which many in Bangladesh are calling the Monsoon Revolution, has major ramifications for Bangladesh. Political, with the interim government a bridge between an openly tyrannical Awami League and an intended resumption of true multi-party democracy. Social, with a country of 170 million in collective PTSD. And economic, with massive disruptions since mid-July, the bill for which the president of Bangladesh’s Foreign Investors Chamber of Commerce and Industries estimates as being $10 billion and counting; he wasn’t counting livelihood losses, just business losses.
And there are ramifications for India, on account of its presumptuous and often-arrogant foreign policy and security play in a country with which it shares a 4,096 km border, longer than India’s borders with either China or Pakistan.
Indeed, since the ouster of Sheikh Hasina, there has been a visible scramble to rewire India’s relationship with South Asia in general and Bangladesh in particular. Bangladesh is the bulwark to socio-economically, and with better defence, internal security, and civic infrastructure, shore up India’s east and northeast. It’s as much “Neighbourhood First” as “China Foremost”.
It’s quite a story.
As we know—despite largely shrill and misinformation-led coverage by Indian media—a protest against restrictive government quotas for jobs, mostly by students of public universities in Dhaka and across Bangladesh, had taken root in the first week of July. This happened on account of the quota, kept judicially in abeyance since 2018, being revived by a High Court order. The quota favoured families of freedom fighters from 1971—even their grandchildren—by providing 30 per cent reservations.
After providing for those from underdeveloped districts and women, ethnic minorities, and the disabled, it left 44 per cent of government jobs, ever more attractive in a country where ‘jobless growth’ had become a reality in a flattening private sector, to those who might earn it purely on merit. A Reuters report this July placed by joblessness among youth at 32 million.
The High Court’s revival of the quota was also widely interpreted as a prop effected by a subservient judiciary for the ruling Awami League to further cement its political base.
When students protested, instead of dialogue the government offered domination. The League and its notorious youth and students’ wings, Jubo League and Chhatro League, armed with big sticks, iron rods, and sharp weapons, began to push back violently, targeting students who protested against the quota.
On July 14, Sheikh Hasina indirectly referred to the protesting students as “razakars”, pro-Pakistan collaborators during 1971. Deeply insulted, the students went ballistic. They found solidarity among students of private universities as well.
On July 15, this writer’s conflict studies class at University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh (ULAB), a private university, was truly ‘live’. We discussed governance and misgovernance, corruption, political rot, the future of Bangladesh, and the region. The South Asian literature class later that day was about protest literature, and, ironically, literature and art that evolved from “1971”, when Bangladesh was born amidst genocide and enduring trauma.
The following day police shot dead the first visibly unarmed student protester in northern Rangpur. In his death Abu Sayed became a rallying cry.
Classes haven’t been held since that day. The University Grants Commission first banned in-person classes, and then online classes. It was aimed at stanching protests. The government didn’t factor in the protesters’ resolve.
By July 18—and since that day up until Sheikh Hasina left—Bangladesh became a war zone. Police joined the League goons in attacking students across Dhaka and Bangladesh, including inside campuses. More students began to be killed. Passersby joined the list, even a youngster who was handing out bottles of water to protesters. Video and audio clips of his selfless “Paani lagbe, paani?”—Would you like some water?—became viral memes of protest and remembrance.
Several children were killed, including a four-year-old girl who was shot in the head on a roof top. It’s not clear whether it was a stray bullet, or one aimed from one of several government choppers flying over Dhaka’s airspace.
Now enraged teachers, parents and civil society folk joined the protests, defying an internet ban, defying curfew, defying police and its SWAT teams, the cross-force Rapid Action Battalion, the paramilitary Border Guards Bangladesh. They even defied the army that was deployed from July 20; their ubiquitous eight-wheeled armoured personnel carriers weren’t at that time seen as bastions of public protection.
When Hasina’s government finally pressured a court to rescind the quota on July 21 and opened up 93 per cent jobs to merit-based applicants, it expected protests to die down. Obtusely, it discounted the hundreds of students and other citizens killed by its orders, several thousand injured, students and other citizens arrested in the thousands—including high-school students. The protests remained alive.
The notorious Detective Branch of Dhaka Metropolitan Police began to pick up protesters, including protest coordinators—six of whom were made to issue a sham statement of withdrawal under duress, as has subsequently been proven. (Two of these students are now advisors to the interim government.)
There were no apologies. The protesters switched their agenda from getting rid of the quota to demanding justice for mass killings to getting rid of Hasina.
The more Hasina persisted, the more the death toll climbed, the more her government spun the entire episode as being manufactured by Bangladesh’s seething underbelly of Islamist extremism, the more India was perceived to assist her.
Now to the foreseeable future.
In a Bangladesh on the remake, several memories will endure. Two of them are of particular relevance to India. One is of Sheikh Hasina leaving her official residence in the early afternoon of August 5. The second is of her arriving in a few hours at Hindon Air Force Base, where she was received by India’s National Security Advisor Ajit Doval.
It merely reinforced the belief in Bangladesh of India’s heavy hand. To many, India had ensured the survival of Hasina’s government, most recently in the riotously controversial general elections in early January 2024. Despite being boycotted by opposition parties such as the conservative Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) and hardline Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami, it witnessed violence and ballot-stuffing. (An acquaintance told this writer of a League cadre who had gone from Dhaka, a major job-magnet, to his village in southern Bangladesh to vote. “Did you vote?” he asked. “Oh yes,” the reply came. “I voted seven-eight times.”)
In the Bangladeshi mind’s eye, India supported a deeply corrupt government and associated apparatus. Awami League had, since coming back to power in 2008, and subsequently through consecutive terms in 2014, 2018 and January 2024, continued to visibly suborn the judiciary, the bureaucracy, policing, and the economic process.
Corruption was rampant. The Centre for Policy Dialogue, a major Dhaka-based think-tank, estimates that between 2008 and 2023, Taka 92,261 crore (about INR 66,000 crore) was embezzled by government cronies in 24 major banking scams. A prominent accused is Hasina’s key investment advisor and chair of a major business house who made a habit of taking vast loans from public banks; they were subsequently written off. Estimates of squirreling money outside the country are as high as $92 billion over the same period.
Through late 2023 and 2024, a few resolute media exposes highlighted how top bureaucrats and police officials had built multi-million dollar—and some, billion-dollar—fortunes. They were either let off with resignations, or transferred. On July 14, the same day she made her obtuse “razakar” remark, Hasina—in her estimation, trying to prove to citizenry that her governance was above-board—announced that she had prosecuted a “peon” in her household who had amassed a fortune of Taka 400 crore.
So, it was a bit rich for students and citizens to be lectured about doing the right thing in an atmosphere of mind-numbing cronyism and corruption. More so, when such lectures were widely televised after students had been killed, beaten, maimed, and arrested in distressing numbers.
It was by now evident to all but Hasina, who had undeniably boosted infrastructure and macroeconomic growth but discounted comprehensive economic wellbeing, that she had lost the plot. India lost the plot with her.
India has accrued appalling optics across the region, particularly in the past decade.
In Bangladesh optics were made measurably worse after the tenures of high-visibility, affable, tirelessly networked high commissioners like Harsh Vardhan Shringla, who went on to become India’s foreign secretary, and Vikram Doraiswami, who left in September 2022 as India’s envoy to the UK. The year Doraiswami left Dhaka was also the year that India greatly stepped up its G2G, or government-to-government, play to the detriment of its P2P, or people-to-people, play.
An upswing in Bangladesh-India relations, from people-to-people contacts to trade and transshipment, began during the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government from 2004 onwards. It deepened and expanded in the decade since 2014, when the Bharatiya Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government took office. But the G2G aspect began to be amped up from 2019, after Prime Minister Narendra Modi was re-elected to run a second-term NDA government.
Indian think-tank heads began to breeze in and out of the top offices of Bangladesh. Indian businesses, blessed by India’s establishment, appeared to run monopolies—from disingenuous pricing scams for raw materials, like coal, to finished products, like electricity. High-level conferences as one such organized by India Foundation, a think-tank transparently close to the establishment, drew fixers from India’s resident and overseas “saffron” establishment alongside government officials—politicians, career diplomats, and technocrats—in droves.
The intention of such a conference was crystal. Continue to establish bulwarks against China; and secure India’s eastern borders by securing Bangladesh against every manner of implosion and explosion in a range from political to demographic. (Bangladesh is among nine countries in the Indian Ocean Region that the Indian establishment has identified as a focus.)
But the gathering impression in Bangladesh—and one lamentably ignored by India’s policy-makers and glossed over by ivory tower government-to-government bonhomie—was of a creeping Indian zamindari. Mutually respectful cooperation was seen to give way to a relationship of the controller-state and client-state. Bangladesh’s now-deposed leaders fed off that platter for their own survival.
India’s negative image took deep root despite a thriving functional relation particularly in trade and transshipment, connectivity, and tourism—Bangladeshi tourists now count among the top three visiting nationalities to India.
The anti-quota protests and their brutal putting-down only reinforced the impression of India shielding the leaders of an immensely corrupt, absolutist government.
There is now a desperate scramble in India to repair its relationship with Bangladesh. But this outreach will require ample demonstration.
Besides reining in dog-whistlers, India will likely need to offer Bangladesh major concessions in trade, and offer grants and aid to boost socio-economic programs. It needs to actively dispel public fear that connectivity and transshipment is a one-way street. India needs to ensure equity in the imminent talks to share waters of the Ganga/Padma, initiate meaningful dialogue to fix the vexing issue of the sharing of Teesta River waters, cooperate for flood control, and establish equitable riparian mechanisms.
The relationship would greatly benefit from an overhauling the visa regime and offering more visitor-friendly visa formalities for Bangladeshi citizens.
As for Bangladesh, it would also need to walk several practical steps along this two-way street of rapprochement.
As this writer pointed out at a seminar in Dhaka this past March, while on a panel alongside Md Touhid Hossain, Bangladesh’s former foreign secretary, and currently, advisor on foreign affairs to the interim government: While India has indeed boosted Bangladesh’s roads, railways and water networks to boost transshipment facilities to Northeast India, the assets created in the process are now undeniably Bangladesh’s. Bangladesh earns revenue from all transshipped freight. And Bangladeshi importers, exporters and citizens will continue to use the same infrastructure for their own benefit.
Hossain surely also sees that Bangladesh’s ambitious outreach for an overland trade boost with Nepal and Bhutan, and the country’s plans to import electricity from Nepal and Bhutan, must necessarily use Indian territory for its own transshipment needs. Alongside, several Indian ports and airports now offer Bangladesh easier access to regional and global markets. Since 2023 there’s also been a US- and Japan-led push to integrate India and Bangladesh into a productive, transnational supply chain.
As if in agreement, on August 12 Hossain voiced support for smoothening India-Bangladesh ties at a media briefing in Dhaka. I would add to that: goodwill ambassadors from New Delhi will hotfoot across to Dhaka at the first opportunity.
Meanwhile, students and their leaders have shown more smarts than Hasina and her consiglieres, caporegimes and enforcers. Student leaders—two of whom are now a part of the interim government—have also displayed resolve and foresight by insisting during their conversations with the president and service chiefs that they are neither interested in the declaration of an Emergency nor in military rule. They selected Muhammad Yunus as the head of the interim government. Yunus, for his part, freely acknowledges their invitation to run the country.
Students have gone from deconstruction to reconstruction in a month.
They are also watchful about the possible resurgence of BNP, demonstrably adept at mastanocracy during their time in power that ended 15 years ago; and the rise of extreme Islamists that, in tandem with BNP, could erase recent gains for democracy. There isn’t a name to place on a disturbing trend this past July, when the student movement was piggybacked on by groups—mobs—who, with impeccable coordination descended on streets across Bangladesh to destroy public property, even kill several police and Awami League workers. The League’s spin-doctors repeatedly used the phrase “BNP-Jamaat” to highlight these attacks, taking care to differentiate between students and these “others”.
Even the most liberal Bangladeshi will admit to the danger of extremism; and of the danger to liberals and minorities of all persuasions. Ironically, it mirrors the growth of muscular, religion-led politics in India.
Students and citizens alike will also be watchful of the army—a monolithic, immensely influential security arm of Bangladesh. The army refused to fire on students and unarmed protesters, and ultimately stood aside to let students and citizens march to Ganabhaban—the house of the people—the prime ministerial residence. They pressured Hasina to leave. A Bangladesh Air Force transport to ferried her to Hindon. The army has, as moral victors, worked hard to convey a benign presence. It will now need to unimpeachably maintain this moral high ground, and remain benign, for a post-Hasina Bangladesh to have a conclusive chance at reconstructive success.
Meanwhile, students are clearing up the streets of Dhaka and other cities across Bangladesh of the detritus of protest. Several compelled looters to return state property, which was then handed over to the army. In the absence of police, for several days they managed Dhaka’s chaotic traffic into stunning discipline. They have kept neighbourhood watch. And they have looked after their comrades.
Students and public-spirited citizens—millions across Bangladesh—have carried Bangladesh’s flag. It’s a red circle on dark green, signifying sacrifice for a land of beauty and plenty. They have also worn these colours on T-shirts and as headbands and bandanas to stand against the might of a runaway state.
They will as likely not permit the power hungry to evaporate their dreams, their idealism, and their love for a country that must now once again rise from the ashes.
And surely these transformative student leaders will not now become hungry for power?
Fingers crossed.
The writer is author of the book The Bengalis: A Portrait of a Community and Director of the Center for South Asian Studies at University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh (ULAB), Dhaka