Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina of Bangladesh, who fled to neighbouring country India on 5 August 2024 after massive violent street protests, fought a political guerrilla war for years against her successor Muhamad Yunus, a 2006 Nobel Peace Prize winner. She defeated him in 2011 when a court kicked him out of Grameen Bank, a world-famous institution he built from the ground up.
The legal battle was part of Hasina’s game plan to cut down the U.S. protégé to prevent him from becoming too strong to replace her with himself. In the end, however, she lost out to the U.S.-trained development economist.
Three days after Hasina’s ouster, Yunus became de facto prime minister, albeit unelected, fulfilling the wishes of anti-Hasina agitators. On the surface, it appeared that the students led the successful street protests, but in reality, deep-rooted religious-political cliques in the Muslim-majority South Asian nation of 170 million Bengalis fomented the unrest from behind the scenes.
This is evident from the fact that the agitation, which started with a simple demand to repeal a special job allocation policy that allegedly favoured ruling party followers, suddenly transformed into a mass ultimatum for the prime minister’s resignation. The dynamics of the protest shifted even though Hasina had accepted the protesters’ demands earlier.
The demand for the quota reform, which culminated in the ouster of Hasina, was merely a facade used by anti-Hasina, pro-Islamic, anti-Hindu, and anti-India factions to incite public sentiment aimed at toppling the prime minister.
QUOTA REFORM ISSUE FAKE
The civil service comprises only 1.6 million jobs within a workforce of 73 million, and more than 400,000 candidates vie each year for fewer than 4,000 available positions, representing just one per cent. Thus, these jobs logically cannot be a significant issue for the vast multitude of job seekers, even though the allure of prestige and employment security may exist. The real issue was the belief that the Hindus held far more of these positions than their share of the population justified.
For many years, rumours have run rampant in Bangladesh that Hasina had imported many Hindus from India to fill top civil service jobs to ensure loyal Awami League supporters were in the administration. The omnipresence of Indian businesspeople in Dhaka greatly fueled this view. Ordinary people asserted that they often saw these “imported Hindus” in the media serving as government spokespersons yet speaking in a dialect different from theirs.
Hindus, who make up 8 per cent of Bangladesh’s population, held 12 per cent of civil service cadre officer positions in 2017. They occupied only 3 per cent of these jobs in 2001 when Hasina ended her first term as prime minister. The data clearly show that the number of Hindu civil servants started to rise since Hasina returned to power in 2009.
This occurred due to job quotas for the freedom fighters. No hard figures are available, but the proportion of Hindus among the freedom fighters is likely greater than their demographic ratio. This is so because 80 per cent of the refugees who went to India in 1971 were Hindus, many of whom fought in the Bangladesh Liberation War and later received preference in civil service jobs under the quota system.
Anti-Hasina elements used this phenomenon to falsely accuse the prime minister of giving jobs to her supporters (read Hindus), an accusation that incited the unsuspecting common people against her.
In Bangladesh, Hindus are often equated with India, even though they are natural-born citizens. In addition, Hasina was widely regarded as India’s lackey and a darling of Hindus, who allegedly often sacrificed national interests to appease Delhi. The Hasina administration failed to effectively counter this simmering public perception.
ARMY DEFIED HASINA'S ORDER
All indications suggest that the military sealed Sheikh Hasina’s fate on Sunday night (4 August) when it refused to comply with her order to impose stricter security measures to suppress the violent agitation. The anti-Hasina stance of the mid-level officers, who declined to order the soldiers under their command to shoot the agitators, was leaked out to the demonstrators.
This information emboldened throngs of people to take to the streets the following day. This was an undeclared coup d’etat, a betrayal from Hasina’s point of view. The outcome proves once again that the military is the power behind the throne in this violence-plagued, hapless Bengali nation.
There was a widely circulated rumour in Bangladesh that Army General Waker-Uz-Zaman held a virtual meeting with his field commanders the night before Hasina’s removal. During the meeting, the commanders informed the general they would not order the soldiers under their command to shoot the protesters to end the street demonstrations.
There were also reports that two days earlier junior officers had already expressed concerns about being asked to fire on civilians in a meeting with the Army chief. The chief became virtually powerless, but it remains a mystery if he kept this information secret from the prime minister, denying her precious time to formulate her new moves.
The next morning, around 11 o’clock on 5 August, when Hasina asked military and police chiefs why they could not control the mobs, they told her the demonstrations were too massive for the security forces to suppress. They also advised her that the violent protesters could reach the prime minister’s palace in 45 minutes and that she must leave immediately to save her life. Hasina refused.
The Army chief, who is married to a cousin of Hasina, then appealed to Hasina’s younger sister, Sheikh Rehana, and Hasina’s son, Sajeeb Wazed Joy, who lives in the United States, to persuade the prime minister to give up. With so little time to think it through, Hasina relented and decided to leave her homeland under prodding from her family.
HASINA MADE FATAL MISTAKE
This was a fatal mistake. She could have turned the tables by fortifying herself in her home district and urging her supporters to come out in large numbers to demonstrate her popular appeal. The sheer presence of massive pro-Hasina crowds in the streets would have uplifted her followers, pushed back her opponents, maintained military loyalty, and turned the tide in her favour.
The Awami League is much stronger today than it was in 1975 when a confused party faced a brutal military coup that resulted in the death of Hasina’s father and Bangladesh’s founder, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, while other top leaders became bewildered.
A nationwide survey by the International Republican Institute, a nonpartisan democracy promoter in Washington, D.C., in August 2023 found that despite having serious concerns about the economic outlook, elections and corruption, seventy per cent of Bangladeshis approved of Hasina’s performance. The government’s policies on infrastructure and development buoyed the prime minister’s public support.
Hasina first became prime minister after her party, the Awami League, won parliamentary elections in 1996 but later lost to Begum Khaleda Zia of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party in 2001. She returned to power in 2009 through elections and remained in office until her downfall, securing three more contentious victories in subsequent polls, which critics alleged were rigged in her favour.
It remained unclear whether Hasina had actually quit. The Army chief told the nation in a broadcast that she had resigned, but the former prime minister later claimed from exile in India that she never officially tendered her resignation and that she remained the legal head of the government.
No one could produce Hasina’s resignation letter, and the president, Mohammed Shahabuddin, who was supposed to receive the letter as per the constitution, stated that he had no documentary evidence that the prime minister had truly stepped down. This raised questions about the legal validity of the current administration.
YUNUS FOLLOWED MUSSOLINI
Yunus took over Bangladesh in precisely the same manner that dictator Benito Mussolini captured power in Italy. In the night between 27 and 28 October 1922, about 30,000 Fascists converged on Rome to demand the resignation of Prime Minister Luigi Facta and the appointment of Mussolini as prime minister. On 28 October, King Victor Emmanuel, who held the supreme military power, refused the government’s request to impose martial law, leading to Facta’s resignation and Mussolini’s power grab.
On 4 August 2024, sporadic clashes between the protesters and the security forces broke out in Bangladesh, killing an estimated 300 people. On 5 August 2024, after word spread that the soldiers would not shoot the demonstrators, throngs of anti-Hasina agitators took to the streets, many of them marching toward the capital Dhaka defying a nationwide curfew. This forced the military to urge Hasina to resign.
After Hasina’s resignation as prime minister and departure to India, the protesters named Yunus as Bangladesh’s ruler. On 8 August, the president swore Yunus in as de facto prime minister. Bangladesh’s constitution provides for no interim government, and it is considered high treason to capture power by force. There is widespread speculation that the next elected government will declare the Yunus government illegal and its actions null and void.
With Hasina’s chaotic overthrow, Bangladesh has regained its notoriety as a nation of chronic violence and anarchy where angry street mobs—rather than voters—choose rulers. This situation has seriously hurt the country’s economy, especially the readymade garments sector, which accounted for 84 per cent of the nation’s total exports in 2023 and employed millions of people, mostly women. The International Monetary Fund predicted that Bangladesh’s growth could drop by two percentage points in 2025, falling from nearly 6 per cent in 2023.
Hasina, no doubt, used a steamroller to suppress dissent during her fifteen-year continuous rule. But she also dazzled the world by turning the basket-case Bangladesh into an economic wonder and an island of stability, notwithstanding the propaganda unleashed by the successor regime to tarnish her image by throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Bangladesh’s stable macroeconomic conditions helped achieve an annual real growth of 6.4 per cent on average between 2010 and 2023, the World Bank reported.
During her rule, according to the International Monetary Fund, extreme poverty halved to less than 6 per cent and per capita income soared nearly fivefold exceeding $2,600, the best record in Bengal’s history. Indeed, if the same growth trend continued for the next fifteen years, Bangladesh could emerge as a highly respected middle-income country, becoming the Switzerland of the East as envisioned by its founder.
