Has Bangladesh students’ protest been hijacked? Will embers keep smouldering?

As a peaceful anti-quota protest turned violent in Bangladesh and spread across the entire country, it is being said that the agitation has been hijacked by sinister elements. Experts say the movement is unique because of the diverse participation and in being leaderless. They, however, express concern that though the Sheikh Hasina government might be able to douse the fire with a heavy hand, embers will continue to smoulder, risking eruption at any time.

Reports say 133 people have been killed, while Bangladesh watchers say the toll could be much higher. What exactly is going on in Bangladesh is shrouded in mystery as information isn’t coming out because of the internet shutdown for the last 72 hours.

There is a nationwide curfew and police were given shoot-at-sight orders on Sunday, the day when the Supreme Court is going to give its verdict on the 30% quota for descendants of freedom fighters of the 1971 Liberation War in civil service.

Such is the extent of violence that bodies have been hung from trees, IndiaToday.In has learnt.

How did a students’ protest that began at Dhaka University take such a disastrous turn?

“The agitation is called quota agitation. If you see the facts, the government has already scrapped the quota in 2018. The recent agitation started after the High Court reinstated the quota. If both the government and students want the quota removed, then its not clear what it is that the students are protesting against,” said Riva Ganguly Das, former High Commissioner of India to Bangladesh.

“There is perhaps more to this than what meets the eye. The protests at this stage aren’t just about quotas,” Das told IndiaToday.In.

India hasn’t commented on the situation in Bangladesh, calling it the country’s “internal matter”. It has worked to get Indian students back from the country.

“It is shocking how the protest started by students has exploded and led to over a hundred deaths. Unemployment, corruption seem to have got added, but even then the sheer numbers of protesters on the streets has surprised many,” said Das.

It was also a reference to the Razakars, collaborators with Pakistan in the 1971 war, by Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina while talking about the protests that added fuel to the fire. Being called a Razakar is the worst slur in Bangladesh.

Shafquat Rabbee, a Bangladeshi-American political analyst and faculty member at University of Dallas, sees a broader historical context to the recent students’ agitation and believes the issue of quotas was just the trigger.

He tells IndiaToday.In that the protest is distinct from previous ones due to several factors that are also behind the “sheer number, depth, and breadth”.

BRUTAL VIOLENCE SPREADS, BODY HUNG FROM TREE

Some in Bangladesh believe that it’s no more a students’ protest and has been hijacked by Jamaat-e-Islami and other radical Islamist groups. This has been outrightly rejected by experts who say that videos and bodies in morgues reveal that students are the protesters.

Jamaat-e-Islami and other Islamic fundamentalists are known to survive on such oxygen.

On a call on a patchy telecom connection, Dhaka-based senior journalist Swadesh Roy described to IndiaToday.In how protesters vandalised houses and set fire to whatever they could lay their hands on.

“It has now become an agitation of Jamaat and other Islamist fundamentalist groups. In a crowd of about 1,000, only three-four students are present,” said Roy. “Most students have realised that and withdrawn from the agitation,” he added.

Describing the brutality, the Bangladeshi journalist said that protesters killed the personal secretary of former Mayor of Gazipur, Jehangir, and hung his body from a tree.

The incident in Dhaka’s Badda area is said to have taken place when Jehangir, who is infamous for his high-handedness, confronted the protesters with his men. “The former Mayor has also sustained severe injuries and the attackers are known Jamaat faces,” said Roy.

There was fear that the protests could take a turn for the worst.

On an internet-based call moments before the shutdown on Thursday, a prominent Bangladeshi legal activist feared that the protest had already been hijacked.

“What started as a demand by students, which seems to be in consonance with the government’s position in the Supreme Court, seems to have been hijacked by sinister forces given the statements issued by ministers and Awami League officials,” the activist, who knows the ruling party’s mechanics, said. “This protest has been hijacked just like the Shahbag movement had been hijacked.”

The legal activist also pointed out how it was intriguing that Sheikh Hasina’s ministers and Awami League leaders, including the party’s General Secretary Obaidul Quader, have been issuing pro-quota statements. That, the activist said, was in contradiction to the government’s anti-quota stance in the Supreme Court.

“People are baffled and are questioning if these remarks are by design. Are they being made deliberately to confuse people and for conflagration,” the activist said.

Bangladesh has been at the crossroads of vested interests.

“There could be other invisible hands. There are examples of how organic protests in Bangladesh have been hijacked by people with vested interests in the past,” the activist said.

WHY IT’S A UNIQUE LEADERLESS AGITATION IN BANGLADESH

Bangladeshi-American political analyst Shafquat Rabbee says one has to understand this protest on a broader context of the situation in Bangladesh over the last decade and half.

“The students protesting originally were in the 15-25 age group who have seen no other political systems but one-party rule by Sheikh Hasina all their lives,” said Rabbee.

He says then there’s a high unemployment rate and rampant corruption. Private sector jobs growth is abysmal, and these young people are seeing cronies capture all the government jobs, positions and power.

“This prepared a fertile ground for a large-scale protest and this is what we are seeing now. This is a spontaneous protest,” he said.

According to Dhaka-based journalist Swadesh Roy, violence had spread to 46 of Bangladesh’s 64 districts. By Friday, he said, violence continued in six of those districts.

The large-scale protests have also seen the deployment of the army, paramilitary forces and armoured vehicles. Security forces have used live bullets to tackle protesters.

One of the Bangaldesh watchers told IndiaToday.In that a doctor at Dhaka Medical College told him that she saw 400 people dead or critically injured.

Rabbee explains what has contributed to the size, depth and expanse of this agitation.

“What is remarkable this time is that the students who were killed by government forces are not just the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) and Jamaat activists or madrassa students like in earlier stages of Hasina’s rule,” said Rabbee.

“Apart from those students, among the dead now are children of senior government officials, urban kids who appeared on podcasts and created high-quality content for social media,” he added.

The American-Bangladeshi analyst says only public universities used to be the hotbed of political violence in the past.

“This time around, you have an equal amount of protests and violence taking place inside private universities, where richer kids study, and the casualty count in those private universities is also almost equal to the public ones,” he said.

“Therefore, both the sheer number, depth, and breadth of participation in the protest, and the corresponding casualty count are unprecedented. The impact will also be proportionate,” the American-Bangladeshi analyst tells IndiaToday.In.

WHO IS LEADING BANGLADESH PROTEST, HOW WILL IT END?

Journalist Swadesh Roy said there were casualties on both sides and the brutality is reminiscent of Afghanistan in the days of the war.

“For the Jamaat and the other fundamentalists, it is a life-and-death situation. They know they won’t be able to regroup if they lose,” said Roy.

University of Dallas faculty member Rabbee said the agitation not only changed from quota to one of popular anger, it also saw political parties and other groups join in.

“It will be foolish to assume political forces are not part of this protest. People of all political persuasions are in it given the broad-based nature of the grievances, both political and economic, felt by the younger generation under Hasina’s autocratic rule,” he said.

Hasina’s critics, however, see the mention of Jamaat as an attempt by the government to whitewash its excessive use of force against the protesters.

Rabbee said the protests appeared rudderless and leaderless from the beginning. “It may both fail or succeed exactly because of that,” he added.

“What you are seeing is more of a classical political pressure-cooker under an oppressive regime exploding in all directions. There are not very many leaders or directors in the protest, only participants attacking each other,” he said.

“The only coordination, if there is any, is on the government’s side, which seems to be hanging in there amid all these unprecedented chaos.”

With scores of innocent lives lost and the country remaining paralysed, how does all these actually end?

It isn’t a coup that the situation returns to normalcy with the military going back to the barracks. It is actually a kind of mini-civil war, say experts.

This is a faultline that has stayed in Bangladeshi society since the 1971 war when most fought to end Pakistani control of Bangladesh (then East Pakistan), while a substantial chunk of the population was also supporting Islamabad.

“Though the participating students were born decades after the 1971 War of Liberation, they are part of a society that still carries the wounds of the ’71 war. Bangladesh is a relatively young nation which is still trying to reconcile with the past to move on,” said former diplomat Riva Ganguly Das.

How will the reconciliation take place and who will initiate it are the big questions in a country where anger and mistrust have come to rule.