The streets of Bangladesh have seen their share of bloodshed over the past week as more than 100 protesters were killed during mass student demonstrations against a quota system that reserved 30 percent of government positions for Bangladesh Liberation War veterans and their descendants.
Although the quota system was largely scaled back by the country’s Supreme Court on Sunday, concern abounds for the condition of the country amid an internet blackout affecting its 171 million people that has lasted for five days, according to web monitor Netblocks. Bangladeshis abroad have faced hurdles in contacting relatives back home amid the unrest while human rights groups have decried the blackout’s impact on freedom of expression and access to information. Though authorities have reported that the internet will be restored on Tuesday, only some fixed-line connections have been confirmed back online thus far.
Although reports suggest that the country’s streets have calmed following the SC’s latest decision, it remains to be seen how the legacy of last week’s violence will affect the authoritarian government of Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and the ruling Awami League. In this explainer, we shall examine how discontent over the quota snowballed into killings and questions about the future of the Awami League.
The origins of the quota
Bangladesh, previously known as East Pakistan, won its independence on December 16, 1971 after a bloody eight-month-long war that saw the killings of at least hundreds of thousands of Bangladeshis by the Pakistani Armed Forces. Following the hard-fought independence campaign, the new Bangladeshi government headed by the Awami League implemented a quota in 1972 reserving at least 30 percent of government jobs for persons who fought in the war of independence and a 10 percent quota for women affected by the conflict.
That 30 percent quota was later extended twice, in 1997 and 2010 respectively, to include the children and grandchildren of liberation war veterans.
The extensions proved to be controversial in the country. Student protests broke out in 2018 demanding an end to the quota over fairness and corruption concerns. Hasina withdrew all government job quotas later that year.
Bangladesh High Court ignites powder keg
On June 5, 2024, Bangladesh’s High Court declared the abolition of the quotas illegal and reinstated them. Student protests reignited soon after, with a decentralized movement springing up from multiple universities to decry the court’s verdict and demand the scrapping of the veteran descendants’ quota. Protesters blocked roads in early July to convey that the quota system unfairly benefited government supporters.
However, reports of violence surfaced last week when clashes broke out between police, government supporters and student protesters. The anti-quota demonstrators alleged that police and the Awami League’s student arm, the Chhatra League, attacked protesters while police claimed that demonstrating students injured officers.
Photos and videos that surfaced on social media over the coming days, seen but not yet verified by JURIST, pointed toward the scale of the violence that had broken out. Numerous photos showing young people with serious injuries were disseminated. One video showed a police truck carrying a limp man, potentially deceased, on its roof through the streets of Dhaka. Another depicted a number of riot police shooting projectiles at a man wielding a stick. Civilians later carried the man, said to be Abu Sayeed of Rangpur’s Begum Rokeya University, away, and a putative death certificate showing that he arrived at a hospital already deceased later emerged on the internet.
Due to the violence, the Bangladeshi government implemented a curfew on Friday and deployed its army to the streets, also giving a shoot-on-sight order for mobs of violators. The curfew remains in place as of Monday and will continue Tuesday, BBC Bangla reported.
The current death toll in Bangladesh is at 147, according to Reuters.
A people silenced: Bangladesh’s dayslong internet shutdown
As videos of the chaos were being shared with the world, Bangladesh’s internet fell silent on July 18. The popular messaging platform WhatsApp was taken down in Bangladesh, and Bangladeshis abroad reported not being able to reach their relatives in the country through traditional telephone calls. The websites of the English-language paper The Daily Star became unreachable as a result of the outage. The shutdown has continued for four days, throttling the reports emerging from the country amid the unrest. However, as of Day 5, some fixed-line connections have been restored.
Supreme Court reverses course, but future remains uncertain
Upon appeal from the government, the Bangladeshi Supreme Court’s Appellate Division overturned the High Court and scaled back the quota system on Sunday. According to the new rules, only seven percent of government positions will be subject to a quota, five percent of which is reserved for liberation war descendants. BBC Bangla reported that despite the Appellate Division’s ruling, some student organizers called for protests to continue over the killings of demonstrators.
AFP shared that an “uneasy” calm could be seen on the streets Monday as the government curfew remains in force. Though the trajectory of the protests remains unknown, it is certain that anger and indignation festers in the hearts of students who have witnessed and been subjected to last week’s violence. Bangladesh’s internet blackout cannot remain in place forever, and the world will eventually learn the full truth of what happened. Until then, rights observers and the public will make do with reports running the information blockade as protest organizers and the government deliberate on their next steps.
