A nationwide curfew imposed by the Sheikh Hasina government in Bangladesh on Friday, 19 July, may not be enough to quell the student protests that began on 1 July. Already over 100 protestors have been killed in police firing and 25,000 protestors injured.
Prime Minister Hasina imposed the curfew after a massive breakdown of law and order. Social media reports claim that on Friday, the Mayor of Ghazipur was attacked and his bodyguard killed; protestors attacked a jail in Narsingdi in central Bangladesh. 500 prisoners escaped, and nearly 4000 protestors attacked a police base at Rangpur.
Bangladesh’s history reveals that students have led the movements that transformed the country – from the language movement of 1952 and the Liberation War of 1971 to the movement that ousted the government of General Hussain Muhammad Ershad in 1991.
The current anti-reservation student movement, however, did not start out explicitly against the government of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina. With students raising slogans like “It’s a war now”, one wonders, though, what the political fallout of the agitation might be.
The total reservation in government jobs is 56 percent. Last year, about 346,000 candidates competed for just 3,300 civil service jobs. The protestors are, however, not against the quota for disabled persons, women and ethnic minorities.
By all accounts the unemployment situation in Bangladesh is grim. Private sector jobs have shrunk and government jobs with a greater security of tenure are few. Officials statistics from 2023 show that about one in five Bangladeshi youngsters in the age group 15 to 24 are neither in the classroom nor in a job. About 65,000 new graduates join more than two million youngsters entering the job market annually. They face higher rates of unemployment than the less educated in their age cohort.
The slowdown of the Bangladesh economy is palpable. The country’s GDP growth rate is declining, foreign investment has fallen and its forex reserves shrinking. This means fewer jobs will be created and incomes will be lower. With growing job scarcity, any quota system, however justified, is bound to be criticised. The movement which started at Dhaka and Jahangirnagar Universities has spread to universities and colleges in Khulna, Chittagong, Barisal, Sylhet, Rajshahi and Comilla.
The student protests began on 1 July, when their ultimatum to the government ended. However, the confrontation sharpened after a press conference by Prime Minister Hasina where she indicated her government’s bias towards retaining the freedom fighters’ quota. Questioning the motives of the protestors she asked, “Why are they opposing the freedom fighter quota? Do they want the descendants of the Razakars to get all the facilities?” Razakar is a derogatory term used for those who collaborated with the West Pakistan Army in 1971……
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