On a recent evening, in a brand-new office on the first floor of a commercial building where wires dangled from the ceiling and flooring was still being laid, a group of university students was plotting a new future for Bangladesh.
A few months earlier, they were among the thousands who had risen up and overthrown Sheikh Hasina.
Now, the students are determined to seize their opening — however long it may last and however messy the process may be — to rebuild Bangladesh as a robust democracy. They envision a system with free and fair elections, social justice and bulwarks against autocracy that no leader could chip away.
“Our political power is in a very fluid form right now,” said Arif Sohel, 26, a student organiser. He said he hoped to unite students and win over political parties with a pithy message: “We want a country that is stable and will progress.”
It is a daunting task for Bangladesh, a nation born in violence 53 years ago and turbulent ever since. The work has fallen to an unusual mix of unelected people in the interim government — experts with distinguished careers and students just embarking on theirs — who are operating under enormous pressures beyond the weight of history.
While toppling the old system was swift, overhauling it will take time — and the students and technocrats now in charge may not have that luxury.
“It’s moving, it’s moving, it’s moving,” Mahfuj Alam, the main student adviser to Muhammad Yunus, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate who leads the interim government, said of the progress it had made.
Alam, 26, takes credit for being the strategist whose lofty ideals drove the protests. “The idea of abolition of a fascist regime and the idea of a ‘new political settlement’ was my wording,” he said. In a country with a conservative Muslim society, the students have leaned into the language of Left-wing revolutionary politics.
For now, Alam said, the new government is focusing on more visible, short-term changes like updating election rules. More deep-rooted changes, such as increasing women’s participation in government and creating jobs for Bangladesh’s young population — nearly 80 per cent of its 17.1 crore people are of working age — will take longer.
In an interview, Yunus, an 84-year-old microfinance pioneer, said his government had the full support of the people. While he has faced criticism for being too slow with overhauls, “they didn’t say, ‘We don’t want you’,” he said.
It might take several years, but the students will be able to pull off what they call Bangladesh 2.0, Yunus said.
Badiul Alam Majumdar, a 78-year-old economist, activist and election expert, first heard that he would be overseeing the reworking of his country’s electoral system a few minutes before Yunus went on national television to announce his appointment.
It was a similar experience for Ali Riaz, a political scientist at Illinois State University, US, who is in charge of the constitutional reform commission.
Their panels are among six that Yunus set up in September. They are filled mostly with experts from academia, government and civil society groups, as well as student representatives, and are excluding political parties from their initial work. The commissions have until the end of December to come up with recommendations on overhauling institutions such as the police and the judiciary, as well as on reducing corruption and improving public administration.
The interim government wants to lay down big ideas, then let elected representatives decide on the details. It expects broad overhauls to be enacted, given the support for sweeping change from the public and the politicians who are likely to lead the next government.
In a corner of the abandoned Parliament building in Dhaka, a hefty tome on Sheikh Mujibur Rahman lay in a pile of garbage, its pages warped by water. Across town, about 35,000 books celebrating the life of Rahman — Hasina’s father and the man long considered Bangladesh’s founding leader — have been locked away.
During the uprising, students demolished or defaced thousands of statues that Hasina had erected of her father. “Students said he is not a deity,” said Riaz, the leader of the constitutional reform commission.
But the anger that fuelled once-unthinkable scenes of vandalism has cooled. Students have begun to think again about studies and careers.
Some, like Nishita Zaman Niha, the only female student member of one of the commissions, want to pursue higher education abroad, if given a chance. Even Alam, the main student adviser to Yunus, said he wanted to eventually get back to his interests in language and history.
For now, though, they are focused on remaking politics into a force for good.
“What we are trying to do is to create a new platform for politics in Bangladesh,” said Asiful Hoque Robin, a student at Independent University, Bangladesh. “If not for us, for the next generation.”
NYTNS