During a press conference on 14 July, Sheikh Hasina, the prime minister of Bangladesh, was asked about the peaceful protests that had been on across the country’s university campuses for a week, with students demanding an end to a quota system for government jobs. “Why are they opposing the freedom fighter quota?” she asked in response. “Do they want the descendants of the Razakars to get all the facilities?”
Hasina was trying to discredit the protesters, but instead her use of the term “razakars” offended students and further fuelled their protests. Razakar is a pejorative used for people who collaborated with the Pakistan army during Bangladesh’s war for liberation in 1971. In reaction to the remark, students carried out marches late the same night, using “razakar” satirically in their slogans and accusing Hasina of labelling them as such for simply demanding their rights. Ministers and leaders of the ruling Awami League made remarks distorting the protesters’ slogans, again aiming to politically ostracise them.
The situation escalated dramatically when the party’s general secretary announced that its student wing, the Chhatra League, was ready to respond to perceived insults to the spirit of the Liberation War. Members of the Chhatra League and Jubo League, the youth wing of the Awami League, carried out armed attacks on protesters at various universities, including Dhaka University, which resulted in hundreds of injuries and at least six deaths. These clashes, streamed live on social media, fueled nationwide outrage and resistance.
For nearly a week now, protesters have continued and escalated their demonstrations despite attacks from ruling-party factions and supporters. The government’s response, involving both law-enforcement forces and party men to suppress the growing rebellion, has included indiscriminate use of live ammunition and brute force. Although there is no official casualty count, the news agency AFP reported over 100 dead and thousands injured up to 19 July, Friday. The unrest has resulted in a nationwide implosion of order, with reports of prison breaks, a prolonged silence from the state-owned television station after its headquarters was set on fire, failure to protect key installations and widespread disruptions to railway and commercial flight services, illustrating the authorities’ struggle to maintain control. The government’s initial resistance to addressing the protesters’ grievances and its strategy of using deadly force has backfired, with discontent spreading and new participants joining the protests.
By now the government had called out the army and imposed a country-wide curfew. While the army’s deployment aims to support the civil administration, it remains to be seen whether it will restore order or further complicate the crisis.
The turmoil that Hasina’s regime is facing is not entirely surprising. Hasina’s fourth consecutive term in power was bound to be fraught with challenges. The controversial election earlier this year, in which the Awami League stood almost unopposed due to the government’s crackdown on the opposition, had raised questions over the legitimacy of her mandate. But few people in Bangladesh expected significant unrest within six months. The quota protests and Hasina’s unfeeling dismissal of protesters was the last straw for a citizenry battling high unemployment and inflation, and faced with reports of shocking corruption by government leaders.
The student uprising demanding equity in civil-service recruitment by abolishing a politically skewed quota system has successfully united various groups feeling deprived of justice and their rights. The current protests reflect growing frustration over a lack of democratic representation, as three consecutive elections stage-managed by the Awami League have effectively led to a one-party state.
The quota system that students find so offensive reserves 30 percent of government jobs for the families of Liberation War veterans. In 1972, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, who was Hasina’s father and then the prime minister, introduced reservation for freedom fighters only as a temporary measure. However, since then, successive governments, including military ones, have maintained special preferences for freedom fighters and their descendents in public employment, justified historically as a mark of respect. Bangladesh’s constitution also provides for reserved quotas in government jobs for minorities and disadvantaged communities, granting the executive the authority to determine their proportions.
After the Awami League returned to power in 2010, it extended 30 percent reservation to the families of freedom fighters, that is, to their children and grandchildren making the provision permanent. It also announced that posts reserved for veterans’ families would be left empty if there were not enough candidates, adding to acrimony over the quota that was already higher than that for disadvantaged communities including minorities, women and the disabled. Only 44 percent of government jobs remained to be filled through open competition on the basis of merit. This skewing of the reservation system has been seen as a tool to reward Awami League supporters and entrench the party’s influence within the civil bureaucracy. In recent years, there have also been numerous reports of fraudulent use of the quota system, with ministers, top bureaucrats and prominent professionals found to have used fake freedom-fighter certificates. Recent arrests of a number of employees of the Bangladesh Public Service Commission also exposed how question paper leaks have been plagued the recruitment system for over a decade.
Six years ago, a student protest movement demanding reform of the system had forced Hasina to scrap all reservation in jobs. That movement, in 2018, carried on largely peacefully for four months before the issue was resolved. However, potential beneficiaries of the system mounted a legal challenge, and the country’s High Court restored the reservations this June, asserting that while the government can allocate quotas for disadvantaged groups as it finds appropriate, special reservations for veterans’ descendants must be protected.
It has long been alleged that the government has packed the higher judiciary with party loyalists, and many accuse the government of reinstating the quota system through judicial means. Even a move by the Supreme Court to suspend the High Court order till an appeal hearing in August has failed to placate protesters. They said that the Supreme Court’s suspension was temporary and that they wanted a permanent legislative solution by the government.
These protests come at a particularly challenging time for Hasina as Bangladesh’s economy struggles and youth unemployment soars. Official data from 2023 indicate that 12.2 million youths – a full 39 percent of people between the ages of 15 and 24 – are unemployed and not enrolled in educational institutions.
Recent revelations of massive corruption involving top figures – including a former police chief, ranking tax officials and several politicians – have further infuriated inflation-hit citizens. Requisite declarations of wealth by candidates during the recent election revealed the astronomical riches amassed by many ruling-party parliamentarians, and the government’s inaction in investigating these issues has further fueled public anger. The Awami League government has been accused of patronising businesses linked to the party, facilitating money laundering and abetting a significant burden of defaulted loans, which many economists cite as a cause of high inflation.
The Awami League has historically used the “razakar” label with a lot of success to discredit opponents. In particular, it has used the term to tar figures associated with the rival Bangladesh Nationalist Party after it forged an alliance with Jamaat-e-Islami, an Islamist party that opposed Bangladesh’s independence and collaborated with the Pakistan army in the 1971 war. This strategy had worked well until now despite the Awami League’s own engagement with Jamaat in earlier times, as when the two joined hands to oust the BNP from power in the mid-1990s. But this time Hasina’s ill-considered comment fanned the flames of disaffection among the already beleaguered Bangladesh citizenry. Hasina, who has led her party for 43 years of its 75-year history, has now put the Awami League and the state against the people of Bangladesh – a regrettable legacy that will not be easy to erase.
(Published on July 21, 2024 in Himal Southasian. https://www.himalmag.com/politics/bangladesh-sheikh-hasina-awami-league-quota-protest-employment-razakar)
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