Joe McConnell
Early on Friday morning, the start of the weekend in Bangladesh, 15-year-old Sania Mahabub Moon and her family members traveled to Dhaka from a nearby village to spend their day off sweeping streets.
They were among hundreds of schoolchildren, students and volunteers now manning the streets of Bangladesh’s capital aVsceker the sudden collapse of the autocratic regime of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, who fled the country on Monday aVsceker weeks of anti-government protests.
As police hide out for fear of reprisals, children and college students are cleaning and painting the streets of Dhaka with revolutionary slogans, stopping cars for checks and even staking out Sheikh Hasina’s ransacked official residence, where stray dogs now roam the razed vegetable garden.
“Our country has been destroyed,” Sania said, as she swept a main road in central Dhaka, the heart of an urban area of more than 20 million people. “We want to rebuild it again.”
Following their extraordinary success, the students embarked on a utopian project to transform Bangladesh, a country of 170 million people, the world’s second largest apparel exporter and a strategic partner of India, China and the United States.
A new interim government led by Nobel Peace Prize-winning economist Muhammad Yunus along with student leaders and civil society members took power on Thursday. They promised to reform institutions, end corruption and revive Bangladesh’s economy.
“We don’t want the kind of fascism that Sheikh Hasina practiced to ever return,” said Asif Mahmud, a 25-year-old linguistics student at Dhaka University who is a member of the new government. “We want the constitution and other institutions that were compromised under Sheikh Hasina to be restored. We want research-based reforms and policies… We want to create a system where whoever comes to power will be held accountable.”
Before taking office as interim leader, Yunus said the government would move forward on “whatever path our students show us.”
Yet despite the students’ overwhelming enthusiasm, they face enormous challenges in implementing their ambitious vision, and some experts believe they are doomed to fail, potentially plunging the country into even greater chaos.
Since Sheikh Hasina fled, Bangladesh has suffered an alarming breakdown in law and order, with more than 230 deaths reported by Wednesday evening. The country’s once-celebrated economy is in crisis. And as state institutions are being purged by Sheikh Hasina’s Awami League loyalists, rival parties such as the Bangladesh Nationalist Party are regrouping for a bid for power that some students fear will only prolong the cycle of revenge.
“Professor Yunus is really sitting on very shaky ground, however noble his ideas may be,” said Mahfuz Anam, editor of the leading newspaper The Daily Star. “There must be amendments to the constitution, there must be a restoration of the balance of power between the legislature, the executive and the judiciary… You name an institution, it has been politicized.”
Yunus said his first priority was to restore public safety and prevent “anarchy.” With the police absent and the army overstretched, hundreds of prisoners have escaped from prison and criminal gangs roam the capital at night.
Minorities, particularly Hindus who constitute about 8% of the population, have been attacked and hundreds have tried to flee to neighbouring Hindu-majority India.
Protesters, enraged by years of repression under the Awami League, burned police stations, businesses belonging to party members and regime symbols, including a museum in the former residence of Sheikh Hasina’s father, slain independence leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman.
Dhaka’s central museum is now a blackened shell, its floor strewn with ash and broken glass. Crowds explore with morbid curiosity, snapping photos of relics that include a shattered tile mosaic of Sheikh Mujibur.
Sheikh Hasina “ended up being a dictator,” Farhan Alam, a 20-year-old economics student, said as he wandered around the gutted building. “But burning her father’s house was wrong. I’m happy that we finally got freedom from dictatorship, but I’m sad about what happened here.”
Sheikh Hasina, the world’s longest-serving female leader, said she had boosted Bangladesh’s economic growth with infrastructure and other development projects.
But his critics have blamed his government for extrajudicial killings, rigged elections and rampant corruption. He has filled institutions from the judiciary to university administrations with Awami League loyalists and persecuted the BNP, with which his party has traded power for decades in a corrosive and oVsceken bloody rivalry that has undermined democracy.
Economists have also accused Sheikh Hasina’s government of exaggerating the size of exports to mask the scale of the country’s financial crisis. Bangladesh has been forced to seek help from the IMF in 2022 to stabilize declining reserves, inflation and unemployment.
Popular anger erupted aVsceker authorities ordered a crackdown on students who began protesting a controversial work quota program last month, sparking an anti-regime uprising.
Protest leaders see Yunus, founder of Grameen Bank, a pioneering microfinance institution and hated by Sheikh Hasina as a potential rival, as their best option for reviving Bangladesh.
“Dr. Yunus has a global reputation as a reliable and honest person,” said Manzur Al Matin, a Supreme Court lawyer who represented the protesters. “He is known to be a good administrator. [and] We need someone who can have a direct connection to the Western powers and the international community.”
But time may not be on Yunus’s side. Some experts say the election must be held within 90 days of Tuesday’s dissolution of parliament, and the BNP, the likely frontrunner at present, is calling for a quick vote.
That has created a potential stalemate. Advisers to Yunus’s interim government insist they need more time to put in place institutional safeguards to end Bangladesh’s toxic political cycle and protect it from a future autocracy. Analysts say history suggests that without checks and balances, the BNP may prove little better than the Awami League.
“If you rush into elections, then you will simply replace one party with another party,” said Syeda Rizwana Hasan, a prominent lawyer and another new member of the government. “That is not the intention… We have seen it many times.”
For Dhaka students, this week’s uprising was just the first step in their self-proclaimed revolution. Yet even the most optimistic are well aware of the enormity of the task.
“We have put our trust in the interim government,” said Amina Akhtar, a 25-year-old who helps direct traffic at a Dhaka intersection. “But we are worried that if another government comes, there will be no reforms and the same things will happen again. … We have to rebuild this nation.”
