Why and how Bangladesh's youth dismantled 'Sheikhland'

On Monday, Bangladesh's army chief Waker-Uz-Zaman announced Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina's resignation. In a televised address, he said she had fled the country and an interim government would soon be formed. Before Sheikh Hasina’s helicopter even touched down in India, jubilant celebrations erupted across Bangladesh.

“It's like a second Independence Day,” said journalist Zulkarnain Saer Khan, who has been living in the United Kingdom since 2021. Khan left Bangladesh after working on a documentary that exposed alleged links between criminal gangs and government security forces.

“Sheikh Hasina has been ruling for the last 15 years. She failed to hold free and fair elections, or respect the people's vote. The government did create some facilities for businesses, but the miseries of the general population and the middle classes were never really addressed. The price of commodities went up. When you look at things like that, and the issues that have been piling up for years, it's natural that people will be agitated,” he told TRT World.

The events that lead to Sheikh Hasina's ouster kicked off in July. At the time, Bangladeshi students launched nationwide protests against the reinstatement of a quota system which reserved 30 percent of government jobs for family members of the freedom fighters of Bangladesh's Liberation War.

Growing anger

But what began as a peaceful student protest movement for job security soon turned into a wider expression of anger against the country's economic woes. The government's heavy-handed response—some 100 protesters were killed by law enforcement over the weekend—only further incensed protesters, leading to Sheikh Hasina's resignation.

“Look at the videos from the protests,” said Zahed ur Rahman, an analyst based in Dhaka. “You can see that the protestors were unarmed and posed no threat. In the past, protestors have carried firearms or some form of homemade explosives, but that hasn’t been the case this time. They just had some stones or sticks in their hands, yet the regime used firearms and assault rifles to kill these people.”

Speaking to TRT World, exiled journalist Khan said, “All these years, people couldn't express themselves. They couldn't criticise the government openly. They would send us to jail, or state forces would be used to suppress crowds and manipulate narratives to their favour. So now there's an outburst of emotion and anger.”

Zahed ur Rahman compared the protests to the Arab Spring, but added that he thinks Bangladeshis have learned from their failures.

What the future holds

“Sheikh Hasina lived in an ivory castle. It had become very clear in mid-July that she had lost control. If she had listened, she would have resigned earlier, but instead her government suppressed all voices and imposed a complete communications blackout.

Now we're going to have elections, though it's a bit early to say what the outcome will be. But the purpose and responsibility of the interim government should be to repair and restore the institutions, so it will take some time.”

Amid celebrations, there have been reports of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman's historic residence in Dhaka being vandalised and set on fire.

“Of course, extremism is wrong, but I understand why this is happening. Nepotism was rampant in Sheikh Hasina's government. We would joke that the country should be named 'Sheikhland' instead of Bangladesh because they would rebrand everything as Sheikh-something-or-the-other.

You can't politicise the entire civil service like that, especially in a country of 166 million people. No one party can do that. You can't pass laws in which people will be sent to jail and tortured for simply drawing a cartoon of the party leadership. You can't kidnap people, or allow extrajudicial killings. All this happened during the last 15 years,” he said.

For now, Khan is keeping a close eye on events in Bangladesh from thousands of miles away. “I'm looking forward to going back home,” he said.