What comes next in Bangladesh is far from certain. The specter of further political violence is real.

For the entirety of Bangladesh’s independent existence, the family of now-deposed prime minister Sheikh Hasina has been central to its story. Hasina’s father was the esteemed Mujibur Rahman, the pioneering icon of the Bangladeshi nation, who led the country’s freedom struggle that withstood the genocidal rampages of the Pakistani army in 1971 and, with Indian aid, ultimately severed the unnatural union between what was then-West Pakistan and East Pakistan.

Four years later, Hasina was studying abroad in Germany when an army putsch saw soldiers burst into her family’s residence in the capital, Dhaka, and assassinate her father, mother, three siblings and members of the household staff. That trauma was profound for both young Hasina and the fledgling nation: It prefigured cycles of violence and instability, military coups and vengeful, zero-sum political battles. And it lurked below Hasina’s multiple stints in power, especially the last 15 years, during which the democratically elected leader turned into an increasingly aloof and heavy-handed autocrat.

Hasina and her secularist Awami League party won elections in 2009 that were held after a military intervention placed the country under an interim technocratic government. She took office bent on extracting justice for the past, and ushered in trials and tribunals seeking to punish a generation of pro-Pakistani collaborators implicated in wanton massacres, rapes and atrocities that accompanied Bangladesh’s bloody independence five decades ago. The proceedings were cheered by many as a necessary step to healing the country’s wounds. But they were carried out in a manner that engendered criticism by rights groups and foreign governments, who questioned the fairness and transparency by which Hasina’s government was carrying out its prosecutions.

Some critics wondered whether Hasina was actually pursuing justice or executing a vendetta. A few influential politicians with documented links to 1971 death squads were executed. But, as Hasina assumed more autocratic behaviors and powers, the dragnet of lawfare expanded, sidelining rivals and silencing journalists and civil society activists. She won reelection three successive times in conditions that were increasingly less free and less fair.

Dozens killed in Bangladesh anti-government protests

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A nationwide curfew was imposed in Bangladesh as renewed anti-government protests turned violent Aug. 4. (Video: Reuters)

The scenes Monday in Dhaka mark a dramatic denouement for Hasina’s career. A month of protests that had been met by deadly repression culminated in Hasina’s resignation and hasty departure to India alongside the familiar intervention of Bangladesh’s top brass. It also saw the ransacking of Hasina’s official residence by jubilant demonstrators and once-unthinkable scenes of vandalism, with some protesters hammering away at a large statue of Mujib, Hasina’s father and the spiritual figurehead of the nation.

The spur of the uprising had been a government quota policy that reserved a major proportion of civil service jobs for the relatives and descendants of those who fought in the 1971 war for liberation. But they represent only a sliver of the country’s overall population — Bangladesh is the eighth-most-populous country in the world — and a generation of students and other young people shorn of opportunities and frustrated by the endemic corruption of the political elites rebelled.

“This quota reform movement became a spark for other political and economic grievances. Three elections have taken place in Bangladesh which were completely fraudulent,” Ali Riaz, a political scientist at Illinois State University, told Scroll.in, an Indian publication. “So people have no way to vent their anger. So when the quota reform movement spilled over to the streets that is when this convergence took place.”

Their dissent was met with brute force and stubbornness from Hasina, who appears to have unleashed armed cadres of party loyalists onto the protesters once it became clear that elements of the security forces weren’t willing to follow her orders. At least 300 people were killed in clashes between the two sides over the past month — the majority shot dead by police, paramilitaries and members of the ruling Awami League, my colleagues reported.

Hasina was defiant till the end, even branding the protesters as “razakars,” a reference to the pro-Pakistani death squads that murdered myriad university students clamoring for independence in 1971. The audacity of the claim only further incensed those protesting her. “It seems that we have been liberated again. I am over the moon,” Rakibul Islam, a student of Abudharr Ghifari College, told my colleagues after news of Hasina’s departure broke. “I am going to celebrate this victory for a long, long time.”

What comes next is far from certain. The specter of further political violence is real, with reprisal attacks on Awami League officials proliferating throughout the country. In neighboring India, concerns grew over the perceived advantage gained by political Islamists in Bangladesh, whom Hasina had suppressed while in office. After student leaders, security chiefs, and the country’s president sat down for meetings Tuesday, it emerged that Muhammad Yunus, a Nobel laureate and civil society activist, would serve as a transitional leader.

The prime minister’s defenders, including her own son, Sajeeb Wazed Joy, extolled her economic track record and feared the turmoil that may hit the developing country in the coming months. “She has turned Bangladesh around,” Wazed told the BBC. “When she took over power it was considered a failing state. It was a poor country. Until today it was considered one of the rising tigers of Asia.” But a surge in Bangladesh’s GDP was not felt by the average citizen. “Over the years they have seen that Bangladesh reportedly achieved high economic growth, yet the unemployment rate was very high. On the other hand, they saw widespread corruption,” noted Riaz.

Attention shifts to Bangladesh’s influential military, which yet again says it’s stepping in to clean up the misdeeds of civilian rulers. “Please trust the armed forces. I am taking full responsibility to protect all lives and property,” Gen. Waker-Uz-Zaman, the army chief, said to the nation Monday. He called for an end to the violence and promised a full investigation into the deaths of the protesters. “I assure you that you will not be disappointed,” he said,adding, “Every single death will be investigated, every atrocity will be discussed.”

As stunning as the developments of recent days have been, one can’t help but feel a degree of déjà vu. I was in Dhaka in 2008, not long after the country’s generals had interrupted Bangladesh’s democracy amid a bout of dysfunctional bickering between Hasina and her main rival, former prime minister Khaleda Zia of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (who on Monday was ordered released from the jail where Hasina had had her consigned in recent years).

I interviewed the army chief at the time, the unassuming, diminutive Gen. Moeen Uddin Ahmed. “The situation was deteriorating very rapidly,” he said, justifying the military intervention in 2007. “The world saw people dying in Dhaka’s streets. Was this the way forward?”

The piece I ended up writing cast Moeen as a potential wolf in sheep’s clothing, perhaps a would-be strongman who could snuff out the democratic aspirations of ordinary Bangladeshis. In hindsight, that was an unfair assessment. He ended up fulfilling his promise to allow fresh elections that paved the way for Hasina to come to power, and retired from the armed forces. It was the Bangladeshi prime minister who then set up a regime that further polarized her country.

“No systems of government are bad in their own right,” Moeen told me philosophically 16 years ago. “It’s the human beings who make it so.”

By Ishaan TharoorIshaan Tharoor is a foreign affairs columnist at The Washington Post, where he authors the Today’s WorldView newsletter and column. In 2021, he won the Arthur Ross Media Award in Commentary from the American Academy of Diplomacy. He previously was a senior editor and correspondent at Time magazine, based first in Hong Kong and later in New York.

Excerpts: Washington post

Bangladesh has achieved its second liberation : Muhammad Yunus