Sheikh Hasina’s regime first began in opposition to Bangladeshi dictator Hussain Muhammad Ershad. She, alongside political leader of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) Khaleda Zia, campaigned against his imposed martial law and suspension of the Constitution in the 1980s. This eventually led to the 1991 parliamentary elections — the first elections in nearly a decade, and the new beginnings of a “democracy” in Bangladesh. However, over her decades in power (1996-2001, 2009-2025), Hasina’s leadership quickly revealed itself to be only an illusion of democracy, having engaged in serious democratic backsliding which culminated in authoritarianism.
Hasina cultivated authoritarianism through extensive human rights abuses, erasing freedom of speech through violent persecution of journalists and whistleblowers. There is also strong evidence of her government conducting enforced disappearances of oppositional forces in the internment centre Aynaghar (house of mirrors). Additionally, Hasina regularly enforced suppression of political freedom by enabling the Awami League to violently assault members from her main opposition party, the BNP, at gatherings; she also widely sanctioned the use of law enforcement as a corrupt tool to “arrest” oppositional forces. Corruption and authoritarian political behaviours are not unusual in Bangladesh, but Hasina’s regime is particularly important to contextualise and understand the impact of the shockingly powerful nationwide student movement which forced her to resign. This resignation is a particularly unprecedented outcome for a Prime Minister who had madly and unlawfully clung on to power through undemocratic, rigged or one-party, ‘elections’ since 2009.
The student protests began due to extreme anger toward Hasina’s government for maintaining a quota system for public service jobs. Initially introduced in 1972, the quota system was designed to reserve more than half of prestigious public service roles for specific members of the community, including minorities. However, Hasina’s government ensured 30% of these jobs were reserved for descendants of 1971 Liberation War veterans known as “freedom fighters”. This is a significant percentage and has empirically been observed as a corrupt mechanism to specifically benefit members of the Awami League. Essentially, Hasina was building up a base of supporters to always remain within the ranks of the public service —solidifying a cycle of corruption and a class of untouchable elites immune from consequence— which had a severe impact on life-changing employment prospects for tens of thousands of young Bangladeshi students.
However, the protests require more context than just the public sector job quotas, which were a tipping point for mobilisation but largely grew from deep-rooted, long-held economic and political frustrations with Hasina’s regime. Significant structural issues plague the economy in Bangladesh. These include high inflation of 9.73% in the last financial year, the highest in over a decade, and deteriorating growth in the country’s overall economy; this pushed citizens into a severe cost of living crisis, disproportionately impacting young people seeking employment. Youth unemployment is incredibly high, with 18 million people (one-fifth of those between 18-24) being unemployed or in schooling. Among the available employment opportunities, government jobs are stable and high-paying careers in Bangladesh —incredibly rare characteristics in an economy focussed largely on exports, such as garments, in which jobs are frequently low-paying and unstable due to international economic shocks such as COVID-19 and the Ukraine-Russia war. With 400,000 new graduates competing for 3,000 public service jobs, the vast majority of those jobs going to Awami League affiliated individuals deeply angered a growing youth population facing unemployment in a country with heavy income inequality and worsening political freedoms. The issue of quota reform was the culmination of several contextual crises which rendered it severe enough to spark nationwide protests.
It does not help that, even after the eruption of anger towards Hasina’s corruption in Bangladesh through the student protests, her response was drastically escalating her authoritarian behaviour. She met student protestors with bullets, deploying Bangladesh’s military Rapid Action Battalion to brutally enact a “shoot on sight” military curfew for all citizens —official government death tolls are in the hundreds and non-official citizen journalist estimates in the thousands. Her government cut off all telecommunications services in Bangladesh, imposing a digital blackout. This had the serious impact of completely blocking both access to and sharing of crucial information regarding protest organising, death tolls, and safety. Her violent and unlawful actions constituted a grave violation of the fundamental principles of “democracy” that she allegedly stood for when beginning her political career.
Thus, the evolution of the student protests must be contextualised within an understanding of Hasina’s reactions to the protests beyond simple job quotas. Protests continued long after the quota was overturned and meritocracy restored by the Supreme Court. The “Non-Cooperation Movement”, spearheaded by a quota reform protest activist, was functionally the final protest. It was a long march to Dhaka with a single, unifying demand on August 5th 2024: the resignation of Sheikh Hasina and her cabinet. Sheikh Hasina resigned that afternoon, fleeing the country without so much as a speech. Protestors stormed Ganabhaban (the official residence of the Prime Minister of Bangladesh), occupying and stealing from Hasina’s space. Media circulated with images of gleeful protestors posing with Hasina’s personal items, from her sari blouses to her pet animals —poignant snapshots of citizens taking back what rightfully belongs to them, freed from dictatorship.
Thus, protests began as a reaction to severe economic anxiety, institutionalised corruption, and democratic backsliding. However, in the wake of mass death, destruction, and Hasina’s full ascent into unbridled dictatorship, the student protests were no longer about job quotas. The protests were ultimately about the martyrs murdered by Sheikh Hasina; they were about the blood on her hands, seeping into the soil and poisoning Bangladesh.
