Bangladeshi student uprising: From grassroots to technocracy in a flash

Looking back at mainstream news coverage of the resignation and subsequent flight of Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheik Hasani in August 2024, and the dissolution of parliament for elections following weeks of student protests, one gets the impression that this was a revolutionary act. And, from certain perspectives, that is not entirely wrong.

The most recent numbers from 2022 found that unemployment of recent university graduates stood at 28 percent in a country where the overall rate is 3.5 percent, or 2.6 million. This number is likely to have worsened in the last two years. Frustrated youth began with peaceful protests against the 30 percent quota of civil service jobs that are reserved for the relatives of 1971 Liberation War veterans. This civil service quota system had been struck down by the High Court after protests in 2018, only for the Supreme Court to reinstate it this past June. Police and pro-government factions unleashed violence onto the protestors causing around 10,000 arrests, 7,000 injuries, and 266 deaths. Popular riots ensued in response, culminating in Hasani’s resignation and departure to India.

However, it is important to understand that this is not the proletarian uprising that mainstream media would suggest. While the germ for such may have been present early on, a lack of any coherent political vanguard has resulted in the protests becoming quickly co-opted by the local bourgeoisie compradors and, potentially, international imperialists.

The protests themselves were very much born out of a grassroots concern among Bangladeshi youth for their futures. Organized by the Anti-Discrimination Students Movement (ADSM), demonstrators — whose prospects look bleak due to a lack of good, guaranteed jobs — peacefully took to the streets to air their rightful grievances. The response from police and pro-government groups, however, was anything but. Rather than dissipate in the face of violent pushback, the students stood their ground and fought back — creating a month-and-a-half’s worth of street clashes. Sajeeb Wayed Joy, Hasani’s son and former advisor, stated that she was not willing to leave Bangladesh until familial pressure sent her to exile in India for the second time, the first being in 1975 following the assassination of her father and then-Prime Minister Sheik Mujibur Rahman. Joy has also stated that Hasani will return once fresh elections are called. This has left Bangladesh in the hands of a caretaker government… and at the potential mercy of exploitation.

An interim government has been installed with Nobel prize recipient, Dr. Muhammad Yunus, at its helm. Yunus has been endorsed by the ADSM leaders as their choice for the caretaker government’s Chief Advisor and has since been sworn into that role. Hasani’s fall and Yunus’s ascendence has placated enough of the ADSM protestors into going from seizing the Jatiya Sangsad (National Parliament), PM’s residence, and the offices of the ATN TV channel to voluntarily cleaning up the parliament building and returning looted weapons.

Yunus’s claim to fame comes from his work as the founder of the Grameen Bank and as the innovator of microfinancing, once heralded as the solution to global poverty via the distribution of “microloans” to those too poor to access traditional bank loans. It appeals to the petit-bourgeois feel-good idea of welfarism: lend a small lump sum (microloan) to an individual borrower and have them pay the sum back (with interest) over a period of just a few years via regular installments — a small loan for small businesses and people to stimulate local economic activity into snowballing into national economic activity. Over a decade later, the results have proven to be grim. The co-option of this philanthropic endeavour by rent-seeking national bourgeois financiers — funded by global development banks including the World Bank, the European Investment Bank, and the U.S. International Development Finance Corp. — has instead re-created the same material conditions that microfinancing sought to end, trapping third-world denizens — including thousands of women — into crushing debt and causing some to commit suicide as the accumulated interest rates become impossible to bear any longer.

Yunus disavowed what his creation has become and has long since left the Grameen Bank. However, the lack of foresight, unabashed idealism, and inherent liberalism that went into microfinancing as a poverty alleviation strategy cannot be separated from Yunus. It was his grand solution to the poverty question which would marry the worlds of banking and social justice: a form of welfare where the private sector, infused with public cash, would uplift the proletariat and peasantry now so that they could pull their own bootstraps later; a project which has not so much failed as it has turned into the expected direction that any capitalist-directed initiative such as microfinancing would inevitably take.

The relation between Yunus’s past and his present are inexorably linked. Yunus has indicated a desire to strengthen economic ties with China — including a desire to increase China-bound exports — and has declared support for Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh. Both of these are admirable tracks to sustaining national sovereignty and human rights respectively. However, Bangladesh remains vulnerable to Western imperialist forces. The garment industry is the focal point of Bangladesh’s economy: It’s the second largest textile exporter on Earth with $2.55 billion going to the U.S. in 2022. The ADSM protests and catastrophic floods have led to economic and industrial destabilization. Yunus’s power is temporary and parliament remains dissolved until elections are held, which are expected in June 2026.

The vulnerability lies therein. The Bangladesh economy depends heavily on the U.S. and it is unlikely that US-based corporations, or any for that matter, will surrender its source of cheap garments anytime soon. Unfortunately, there is a distinct lack of a truly proletarian representation in Bangladeshi politics. Hasani and the Awami League led the “Grand Alliance,” a big-tent electoral alliance in which the centre-left to left-wing members of the separate 14 Party Alliance and various right-wing parties come election time. The ADSM’s celebration of the appointment of Yunus, the inventor of a failed liberal economic experiment, also points to a lack of any class consciousness or proletarian characteristic in that movement as well. The Communist Party of Bangladesh has not been in the Jatiya Sangsad since the 1991 election and its six-party electoral alliance — the Left Democratic Alliance, of which only two member parties are registered — has never been elected since its inception. The student uprising has quickly made way for neoliberalism to take the reins. Currently, there does not seem to be any signs of any international meddling in the situation, but Bangladesh’s position as one of the biggest sources of textiles certainly makes the possibility imaginable. Yunus may placate worried market forces now, but there remains plenty of uncertainty in the years to come.