One year on, hope turns to frustration in Bangladesh

Just over a year ago, after Sheikh Hasina, the autocratic leader of Bangladesh, had unleashed a brutal crackdown on protesting students, Abu Sayed stood defiantly in front of armed police officers in the city of Rangpur, his arms outstretched. Moments later he was hit by bullets and later died from his injuries, his family said. He was one of almost 1,400 to die in a mass uprising that eventually toppled Hasina’s 15-year rule. Hasina later fled to India. She left behind a country on the brink of anarchy, but one also suffused with hope.

The students wanted to rebuild Bangladesh as a more equitable and less corrupt democracy. They helped install Muhammad Yunus, a Nobel Peace Prize-winning economist, atop an interim government tasked with leading the nation out of chaos into stability. But many Bangladeshis are frustrated with the slow pace of change, wondering whether protesters like Sayed sacrificed their lives in vain.

Under Yunus, Bangladesh has struggled to dislodge systemic problems like corruption, inflation, a paucity of jobs and an entrenched bureaucracy, which partly fed people’s anger against Hasina.

Students have clamoured for democratic reforms to kick in faster. They also want swifter punishment for Hasina and the perpetrators of last year’s attacks on protesters.

“We thought the country would become morally better, inequality would end, there would be fair elections, the killers would be punished, and that punishment would make criminals afraid. But nothing like that has happened,” said Romjan Ali, Sayed’s older brother. He added that without Yunus, though, it would probably be worse.

A new beginning

The burden of reforming one of the world’s poorest and most corrupt countries has fallen largely on Yunus’s shoulders, in a nation still divided and with nearly five dozen political parties.

Yunus’s first task was to restore law and order. Looting, rioting and attacks on minorities had destabilised the country after the revolution. Although Bangladesh is more stable now, the government has been accused by human rights groups of not doing enough to control bouts of violence against Hindu minorities and supporters of Hasina, while Islamic hard-liners have tried to get a foothold.

His next goal was to get an extensive reform agenda going. Yunus appointed 11 commissions to propose reforms, including changes to the electoral system, the judiciary and the police. The overarching goal was to make the country’s democratic institutions, which Hasina had bent to her will, more resilient against authoritarian rule. But few of those changes have happened, and hope has turned to defeatism.

“Everything seems messy now,” said Abdullah Shaleheen Oyon, a student at the University of Dhaka. He was shot in the leg during the protests, which were set off by anger over a quota system for government jobs. “Our dreams remain unfulfilled,” he added, saying that the urgency with which student leaders had launched their plans is petering out.

Last week, Yunus announced that Bangladesh would hold elections under a reformed voting system in February, though many details need to be resolved before then amid disagreements between political parties. In an address for the anniversary of the overthrow of Hasina, Yunus said that his government had inherited a “completely broken” country but that it was recovering. He said he was preparing to hand over the running of the country to an elected government.

More than half of his tenure has been dominated by discussions with political parties about the timing of those elections.

The Bangladesh Nationalist Party, which became the country’s largest political party after Hasina’s Awami League was decimated, has insisted that the interim government should implement only reforms necessary to hold free and fair elections, leaving further changes to an elected government.

But other political parties, including Bangladesh’s largest Islamist party, Jamaat e Islami, have backed Yunus on the need for more extensive reform first. Some 30 political parties have been engaged on constitutional and governance issues for two months, said Ali Riaz, a political scientist and vice-chair of the National Unity Council, a government body tasked with overseeing the commissions’ reform proposals.

He said they had done so without “any acrimonious exchange,” painting a sanguine picture of progress. The various parties have agreed on issues like the need for an independent judiciary and term limits on the prime ministerial role, he added.

Choosing its leaders through a fully democratic process would be a significant step for Bangladesh, a country of 171 million people. Since Bangladesh became an independent nation in 1971, splitting from Pakistan where the ethnic Bengalis had faced violent suppression, its course has largely been shaped by two political dynasties. Hasina’s father, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, one of the country’s founders, started the Awami League. Ziaur Rahman, who was a military officer central to the independence war and became president, founded the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, which is now led by his son from London.

The two dominant parties regularly passed the baton to each other before Hasina gripped power. The BNP refused to contest the last election in January 2024, calling it rigged. At the coming election in February, it is the Awami League that may be absent from the ballot because the party’s activities are banned in the country.

Newer political parties have been trying to widen their reach by targeting populations in rural and semi-urban areas. Nahid Islam, a leader of the student uprising, started the National Citizen Party in February after he left Yunus’s government. To drum up support, he embarked on a “nation-building” walk-athon in July.

Young voters are crucial for all parties: The median age in Bangladesh is around 26, and many of the country’s young people grew up knowing only Hasina’s rule.

“We, as a generation, have no good understanding of democracy because we haven’t seen it,” said Saeed Khan Shagor, a filmmaker who joined the protests last year. “So the state should make sure that citizens will live in peace, without any kind of fear.”

Thahitun Mariam, a Bangladeshi American who has been working with community groups in Dhaka, said she worried another common problem would not be addressed: the marginalisation of women in the deeply traditional society. Without significant social change, she said, elections and reforms would simply recreate a “male-centric, male-dominated political reality.”

Many female students who were highly visible in the 2024 protests, have retreated from their public roles. But Mariam said she was still hopeful that Bangladesh’s new democracy would prove to be more inclusive.

As Bangladeshis took a moment on August 5 to note the anniversary of the downfall of the Hasina government, tens of thousands of people gathered in Dhaka, the capital, braving an evening drizzle to listen to Yunus’s address.

The audience cheered as Yunus said that those who died in last year’s mass uprising would be deemed national heroes, and Bangladesh would provide “legal protection to the families of the martyrs, the wounded fighters and the student protesters.” But the celebrations masked growing acrimony from students about an as-yet unfulfilled promise of the revolution: bringing the perpetrators of the July 2024 killings to justice.

For most Bangladeshis, there are more everyday concerns, as the economy has sputtered. Economic growth slowed to 4.2% last year, down from 5.8% in 2023, according to the World Bank.