by Girard Mariano Lopez

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Photo Credit: Rayhan9d/WikiCommons/CC BY-SA 4.0

IN THE PAST WEEK, Bangladeshi youth took to the streets in the tens of thousands against a “jobs quota law”. The law was criticized as a system that favors public sector jobs to allies of the ruling party. However, the government responded harshly against the protests—deploying military forces to universities, imposing curfews, and shutting down both the internet and media, effectively cutting off 170 million people from the outside world. More than 150 are said to have been killed by police, with thousands injured.

Original Jobs Quota System Reinstated last June 2024. Statistics from the Dhaka Tribune

The original jobs quota law of Bangladesh reserves 30% of high-paying civic jobs to descendants of veterans of the war of independence against Pakistan. Another 26% are given to certain minorities and people from special districts. This just leaves 44% of all public sector jobs to be earned by one’s qualifications and skills. While it was originally abolished in 2018 after intense student protests, a High Court in the country recently reinstated it last June, despite a fifth of the population facing unemployment

While protests started peacefully, tensions flared when Prime Minister Hasina implied protestors were “Razakar” in an address to the nation. Razakar were local collaborators with Pakistan who killed pro-independence Bangladeshi fighters, angering the public.

“They are people that Bangladeshis don’t want to be named after,” said exiled Bangladeshi investigative journalist Zulkarnain Saer Khan in an interview via Taiwan Plus News, “So, in the middle of the night you started seeing people marching outside, who said, uh, if you’re saying that we are Razakars, okay, fine, we are Razakars.”

The protests have spread not only throughout the country, but also abroad among Bangladeshi diaspora who’ve gathered in the hundreds echoing the call of the anti-quota movement back home. However, the situation only spiraled as police shot six non-armed Bangladeshi students and were seen collaborating with the ruling party’s student group or “Chhatra League” in attacking protestors.

“They (the police) are firing openly. Three of my brothers (protestors) are already dead at Maitree Hospital”, cries an emotional student in a clip by AP News at a hospital in Dhaka, “See, there are blood stains on my hands!”

Now, the protests have transformed to a broader call demanding the ouster of the Hasina government. Human Rights Watch has noted that the current administration, who’s been in power since 2009, has a reputation of arbitrary arrests, torture, extortion, and intimidation of government critics by security forces. Most notably, Hasina raised trumped up charges against their country’s only nobel prize winner, entrepreneur Muhammad Yunus—a form of retaliation when he tried to create his own political party in 2007.

“It’s become a people’s movement,” Khan added, “(The students) don’t want to sit down with the government. Blood has been shed. Their friends died in numbers and are demanding the government to step down.”

Internet access continues to be sporadic for almost all Bangladeshis, and curfew has reportedly been extended indefinitely. While the court has just rolled back some of the controversial quotas now leaving for 93% to be earned on merit, student groups say that the government has yet to address the detained students and those who’ve been killed by state forces in recent clashes.

New jobs quota system implemented by the High Court last July 21, 2024

Multiple political parties and student alliances are now calling for an all-out movement demanding the resignation of Hasina’s government. A shaky calm has set upon the whole country as the demonstrators give the government until Wednesday to comply with their demands of lifting military curfew, releasing protest leaders, reopening the universities, and a formal apology from Prime Minister Hasina and the resignation of her party leader and home affairs ministerial Otherwise, they vow to return the streets.
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