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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, whose 15-year rule had descended into authoritarianism, brutality and corruption.
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 organizer. 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 — highly trained experts with long, distinguished careers and students just embarking on theirs — who are operating under enormous pressures beyond the weight of history.
A major political party that had been suppressed under Hasina is demanding fresh elections be held, perhaps within months, before any reforms are formalized. Weary citizens continue to suffer under high inflation, which has pushed up prices for such essentials as oil and rice. Protests keep disrupting life in Dhaka, the capital. Tensions with neighboring India have soared amid reports of attacks by Muslims on Hindu minorities in Bangladesh. There are fears of a resurgence of militant Islam.
While toppling the old system was swift, overhauling it will take time — and the students and the 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.
“It was stagnant before for two months,” Alam said, referring to the period after Hasina’s Aug. 5 overthrow when the government was focused on law and order. “And right now it’s moving, and our economy is healing.”
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% of its 171 million 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.
A ‘Moral Responsibility’
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, 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 support for sweeping change from the public and the politicians who are likely to lead the next government.
Majumdar’s commission is considering measures that would allow the Bangladeshi diaspora to vote, increase turnout among female voters and update electoral rolls.
Bangladeshis haven’t hesitated to weigh in, writing hundreds of emails saying that anyone running for office must meet certain educational thresholds.
“They feel that they will be better able to understand the things that are needed to run an organization or office,” Majumdar said. “But I keep telling people that all the people who are most corrupt and the bad dudes are very highly educated.”
Across town, Iftekhar Zaman, the longtime chief of Transparency International Bangladesh, who has spent decades tracking illicit flows of money, is working to strengthen an existing anti-corruption commission.
“All that’s needed is to get the right people in the right places, remove the bad ones from the organization and create a sense of ownership,” Zaman said. But he added that it was a mammoth task.
Riaz, the Illinois State professor, said he considered it his “moral responsibility” to help after hundreds of lives were lost in Hasina’s crackdown on the student protesters in the summer.
Working out of an office in the virtually empty parliament building, Riaz said his goal was to restore the Bangladeshi Constitution to how it was originally conceived, guided by ideals of “equality, dignity and social justice.”
More than a dozen amendments to the document, Riaz said, have made it little more than a lever for increasing autocratic power. He said that he welcomed debate on whether the constitution should be rewritten or amended. But those who participated in, supported or legitimized Hasina’s “undemocratic autocratic rule,” he said, will not be invited.
“When Germany was rebuilt after the Second World War, did they talk to the Nazis?” Riaz said. “I don’t think they did.”
Pressures All Around
Gobinda Chandra Pramanik, a lawyer and Hindu leader in Bangladesh, is caught in the middle as relations between India and the interim Bangladeshi government turn bitter.
In Bangladesh, anti-India sentiments have been simmering since Hasina fled in August to India, whose prime minister, Narendra Modi, is a strong ally. On Monday, the interim government said it had formally requested that India extradite Hasina back to Bangladesh to face trial. A spokesperson for India’s foreign ministry said it had received the request but otherwise had “no comment to offer on this matter.”
In a recent YouTube video, Hasina accused Yunus of being involved in the “genocide” of Bangladeshi Hindus, a claim also made by right-wing Indians who support their country’s government.
Pramanik dismisses such accusations as political, saying Hindus were not systematically singled out in the violence that killed hundreds of Bangladeshis after Hasina’s overthrow. He hews closely to the Yunus government’s message, hoping Hindus, who make up 9% of the population, will have a seat at the table in the country’s rebuilding.
Yet tensions between the two countries have flared. Last month, for example, Bangladesh’s interim government charged a Hindu monk with sedition, saying he had disrespected the national flag. India said Bangladesh had targeted a religious leader making legitimate demands for protection of Hindus.
In the interview, Yunus said Hasina — and, along with her, India — was the “single biggest destabilizing factor” for Bangladesh. “You want to keep her, go ahead,” he said. “But you must make sure she doesn’t interfere with our politics.”
Government officials in both countries have sought to cool things down. This month, India’s foreign secretary, Vikram Misri, met with Yunus in Dhaka. Though he noted that India was concerned about reports of attacks on Hindus and other minorities, he said that ties between the two countries were about more than a “single political party,” referring to Hasina’s Awami League.
The country’s other major party, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, or BNP, has been another major source of pressure on the interim government.
The party — run by Tarique Rahman, the son of former Prime Minister Khaleda Zia, Hasina’s arch-nemesis — has chafed at being shut out of the commissions seeking to reimagine Bangladesh.
The BNP says Yunus has been too slow in offering a road map for elections or implementation of changes. Last week, Yunus said elections could be held between the end of 2025 and the middle of 2026, depending on the extent of the overhauls proposed.
Mirza Fakhrul Islam Alamgir, the BNP’s secretary-general, said in an interview that “elections should be held as soon as possible because an unelected government will face a lot of problems.” He was alluding to the growing number of clashes and protests in Dhaka and other cities, including over wages for auto rickshaw drivers.
Double-digit inflation is an additional strain. On a recent morning, around 100 citizens lined up in front of a government truck in Dhaka that was selling oil, rice and vegetables at subsidized rates.
“You can’t take as much as you want from here,” said Naseema, a tailor. But “if I had to buy it from the market, it would cost double.”
Individual Futures
In a corner of the abandoned parliament building in Dhaka, a hefty tome on Sheikh Mujib 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 fueled 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.”
The New York Times News Service
