Will Bangladesh's Revolution Go the Way of Arab Spring?

This article was first published by The UnPopulist on 27 August 2024 and is reproduced with permission.

Image: Mamunur Rashid/shutterstock.com

There is a real danger that the country will go the way of many Arab Spring countries and swap a secular dictatorship with another one.

As soldiers exchanged greetings with students protesting the now-deposed Bangladesh prime minister Sheikh Hasina Wazed this month, the scenes at Dhaka’s Shahbag Square evoked memories of Cairo’s Tahrir Square one February night 13 years ago. The Tahrir uprising spelled the end of Hosni Mubarak’s 30-year rule in Egypt. Likewise, Shahbag’s led Bangladesh’s powerful army to withdraw support for Hasina, tilting the balance of power in favor of the protesters after a two-month stand-off.

The popular protests that brought the curtain down on Hasina and forced her to flee to India have drawn obvious parallels with the Arab Spring. But it’s an unhappy comparison since that movie did not end well. Indeed, most countries that constituted that moment transitioned not into rights-protecting democracies but just a different kind of despotism.

The ignominious fall of a secular despot

Hasina, like Hosni, was a seemingly secular ruler. However, she had perfected the art of modern despotism. She captured governing institutions, jailed opponents, and rigged elections, turning the world’s third-largest Muslim-majority nation into a one-party state even while maintaining the trappings of a democracy by holding elections. The dramatic end to her 15 years of iron rule has now spurred hopes of a new Bangladesh. A Nobel Peace laureate is head of the interim government and a full-scale purge in governing institutions is under way at the insistence of the students who led the “Gen Z revolution.”

Hope is palpable. But so is fear—because who will ultimately fill the political space vacated by Hasina’s secular despotism is an open question right now.

The fall of the government has triggered violence and arson, especially against the workers and supporters of Hasina’s Awami League party, the country’s oldest political party that has the proud history of leading Bangladesh to secede from the draconian rule of Pakistan in 1971. As Islamist elements reassert themselves after years of being suppressed by Hasina, an alarming level of violence has also been directed at the country’s religious minorities, especially its Hindus, who account for about 8% of the 170 million population. The specter of the re-emergence of hardline Islamism as a powerful political force now looms large in Bangladesh.

Bangladesh’s secession from Islamist Pakistan

As part of Pakistan, Bangladesh used to be called East Pakistan. It was born out of a bloodbath as Pakistan’s power elite refused to share power with Bengali nationalists of East Pakistan. Pakistani generals—backed by the U.S.—unleashed a genocide on the Bengalis, a multi-religious group spanning both Bangladesh and India that has distinct cultural traditions based on a shared language, Bengali. That triggered an exodus of refugees to India, followed by a war between Pakistan and India. Pakistan’s humiliating defeat led East Pakistan to break away from it and form Bangladesh under the stewardship of Hasina’s father, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, who led the Bengali resistance. An inclusive Bengali cultural nationalism has since dominated Bangladeshi politics, but has had to contend with competing political forces of exclusionary Islamic nationalism that consider Islam—rather than Bengali-ness—as the prime identity of the state and the people.

These two conflicting strains of progressive secularism and religious fundamentalism have coexisted in Bangladesh’s politics since the British colonial rulers left the Indian subcontinent in 1947 and carved out India and Pakistan into two separate countries. They handed most of the Muslim-populated areas to Pakistan, including what is now Bangladesh, even though the two regions were separated by India in the middle.

In other words, although East Pakistan’s Muslim identity led to its separation from India in 1947, Bangladesh’s Bengali identity led to its separation from Pakistan in 1971. The country’s political contests have since been a struggle between these two identities.

Competing national ideologies: Secularism vs. Islamism

As a flag-bearer of Bengali nationalism, Hasina had projected herself as a radical secularist since her second stint as prime minister in 2009. Her hard line can be traced back to a Harvard International Review essay authored by her son Sajeeb Wazed Joy and former American army officer Carl J. Ciovacco in November 2008. In it they highlighted the risks of Islamization in Bangladesh and offered secularization as a prescription for deradicalization. Hasina used secularism strategically to consolidate her rule, not only cracking down on Islamist organizations but on rival political parties as well, branding all political opposition as Islamist.

As in much of the Middle East, the West (along with local powers like India) looked away from Hasina's despotism because it feared that the alternative was Islamism. Now, as the revolution ends, and life returns to normal, there’s little clarity on who will actually control state power; a secular Bangladesh—with all its imperfections and pretenses—might very well be on the wane given the forces that will most likely benefit from Hasina’s downfall.

The students leading the movement have a progressive vision for Bangladesh, and the interim government led by celebrated microfinance pioneer Muhammad Yunus has laid out a liberal roadmap. But neither has an organized political structure to retain power. Yunus is powerful only as long as he enjoys the trust of the students and Bangladesh needs a liberal face to calm domestic and international jitters till the dust settles. The student protesters are powerful only as long as they occupy the streets. What then? Moreover, they are not a homogenous entity given that many subscribe to a hardline Islamism. A Dhaka University dean was forced to resign a few days ago for not allowing students to recite the Quran on campus.

Wither Bangladesh?

The interim government running the country includes two leaders from the progressive “Anti-Discrimination Students Movement” that helmed the agitation against Hasina. The students are also reportedly considering floating their own party to end the duopoly of the Awami League and the main opposition party, the Bangladesh National Party (BNP). Power in Bangladesh has traditionally rotated between these two parties and the military. But the Awami League is in disarray and the success of a new party—if one is formed at all—is uncertain. That leaves the military, the BNP and its past Islamist ally, Jamaat-e-Islami, as the potential beneficiaries in a post-Hasina Bangladesh. One could be forgiven for wondering if Bangladesh is trading one kind of despotism for another.     

India’s dimming liberal lodestar

Bangladesh’s own proclivity toward Islamism apart, what now complicates its internal politics further is the regional environment. The rise of Hindu supremacist politics in India under Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the marked decline of this giant neighbor’s secular ethos only strengthens Islamist voices within Bangladesh and weakens Bangladeshi liberals who could earlier point to India as a liberal lodestar in South Asia.

India’s Hindu supremacist leaders use “Bangladeshi” as a slur word to otherize Indian Muslims, directly implicating the neighboring country in their own politics of Islamophobia and making it even harder for Bangladesh to insulate itself from the majoritarian identity politics in India. In their stump speeches, the ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) top leaders often refer to Bangladeshi “immigrants” as “termites” eating away India’s resources—a dog whistle meant to include Indian Muslims. New Delhi’s unquestioned backing of Hasina’s despotic reign has only added to resentments against India, strengthening the Islamists. A scenario of Islamists gaining the upper hand in the power vacuum so that the military has an excuse to jump in to restrain them, with full international backing, is not far-fetched, à la Egypt.

None of this bodes well for a glorious liberal dawn for Bangladesh. Successful uprisings, after all, rarely lead to genuine democratic transitions. Apart from Tunisia, where the Arab Spring began in 2010 and had some limited success, in none of the other countries facing popular protests against authoritarianism then did democracy actually take hold.

Some countries descended into civil war while others ended up with equally autocratic regimes. Egypt dislodged Hosni Mubarak only to end up with Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, a general with zero respect for democracy or rights, to keep the Muslim Brotherhood at bay. Qaddafi's ouster led to the proliferation of armed groups and a resurgence of Islamist politics in Libya as its economy imploded and the prolonged civil war turned it into a failed state.

Bangladesh itself has a dismal track record of popular uprisings succeeding in unseating despots but failing to establish lasting democracy. Pro-democracy protest in 1990 by students along with, ironically, Hasina as one of the opposition leaders, forced a military dictator to hand over power to a civilian government. Six years later, that government led by BNP was brought down by Hasina.

Bangladesh’s challenge: Creating the material conditions for Liberalism

The recurrence of public anger points to the persistence of the underlying frustration at exclusionary governance systems, elite control of politics, chronic political and economic disempowerment, unmitigated kleptocracy, and rampant income inequality. Bringing about lasting change would entail addressing these deeper malaises.

Hasina’s government achieved admirable improvements in most components of the human development index, such as life expectancy and school enrollment, but inequality levels remain high, with 22 million people—about 13% of the population—still living below the poverty line. Two-thirds of the people above retirement age receive no pension and there are no unemployment benefits.

Bangladesh has more than a hundred social safety net programs but they are still inadequate, especially considering the vulnerabilities the country faces. Ground zero of climate change, it ranks seventh on the 2021 Global Climate Risk Index. In another 25 years, climate change will have likely displaced one in every seven Bangladeshis. Extreme weather events, salinity increases, and land erosion due to rising sea levels are already forcing migrations. Parts of the country are currently reeling from devastating floods that have marooned nearly three million people.

Even more pressing is labor precarity. Among all the countries swept up in the Arab Spring protests, only Tunisia achieved some degree of democratic transition arguably because of its pre-existing empowered working class and a powerful trade union confederation that had the structural leverage to force real change. In Bangladesh, union organizing has been constantly delegitimized and even violently suppressed. Only 5.1% of the workers are unionized and Bangladesh maintains its export competitiveness on the back of a cheap and unorganized labor force that often works in exploitative conditions. After ignoring the issue, the Biden administration last November was forced to condemn the police shootings of labor leaders and the crackdown on trade unionists who were demanding a review of the country’s minimum wage laws.

Altering basic inequities like these would be key to rebuilding democracy in Bangladesh. In sum, for “Bangla Spring” to achieve transformative change, Bangladesh would need a new social contract. With freedom in the air after years of severely curbed civil liberties, the country is brimming with new possibilities. As it happens after every mass uprising everywhere, there have been calls for structural reforms in Bangladesh as well. The students have vowed to fix the systemic rot to make good on what Yunus calls the “second liberation.”

Student activism in the past has definitively shaped Bangladesh, from the language movement in the 1950s demanding official status for Bengali that culminated in Bangladesh’s secession from Pakistan, to the many revolts against military and civil despotisms thereafter. This time, apart from standing up to an apparently invincible authoritarian, the students showed the way in steadying a rudderless country in the aftermath of Hasina’s fall. They managed public order, provided security, and cleaned and repaired damaged public places amid the chaos.

But effecting widespread systemic changes is something else. Toppling a despot might seem easier in comparison.

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Debasish Roy Chowdhury is a journalist, researcher and author based in Hong Kong. He is co-author of ‘To Kill A Democracy: India’s Passage to Despotism’ (OUP/Pan Macmillan). He is a member of Toda Peace Institute’s International Working Group on Global Challenges to Democracy.