The Day After

liberation, again

A tea garden in Srimangal, Bangladesh (2005)

“New beginnings are often disguised as painful endings.”

— Lao Tsu

Dhaka, Bangladesh, 6th August 2024

This morning, I woke up a little late and missed talking to my cousin, whom I’d been trying to speak to since yesterday. I asked when she’d be available and she said her trainer was over so she’d call me after her workout session.

A little while later, my mother’s yoga teacher arrived at her home (where I am currently staying) and they started their lesson. The water filter folks called and said our biannual servicing was due so they would be over later today. I called the internet company and asked them to collect their monthly payment.

So far, so normal, right?

Except, yesterday, the Bangladeshi government collapsed! The Prime Minister, Sheikh Hasina, resigned and fled the country in an army helicopter to India! Her brutal, authoritarian regime is over!

Bangladesh has had its fragile democracy overtaken a few times by dictatorship. Sheikh Hasina was the last (as in, most recent, but hopefully also its final) one. Under the guise of democracy, she’d ruled the country for over 20 years, the last 15 until yesterday. Increasingly, her government could not be crossed. Opposition was quashed, any questioning of the government’s authority was beaten back (literally), and those who dared to stand up to her, like Nobel Peace Prize laureate Dr Muhammad Yunus, were threatened and jailed. People in government got emboldened with their power. They padded their income (there’s a startling account in Bloomberg of one such former government minister who, on a salary of £10,000 a year, somehow managed to buy up £200 MILLION (USD 255M) worth of property in the United Kingdom). Corruption and intimidation prevailed. They thought they could get away with murder. Until, one unexpected day, they couldn’t.

Last month, university students began to protest about government job quotas. Sheikh Hasina could have chosen to sit down with the student leadership and find a solution, but that’s not how the government operated any more. Instead the students were met with brute force. To stop the word spreading, Hasina shut down the internet and phone lines, newspapers and TV news too, while curfew was imposed.

I was in Italy when this started and I can tell you I have never felt so helpless not being able to contact loved ones for days and days. During the first six months of the 2020 pandemic, travel was impossible and the world was driven indoors but at least we could speak to one another. Now, there was no way for me to reach my elderly mother, who only a week earlier had had to spend a night at the hospital. There would be no way to get help for her or any of the many elderly and frail relatives in our family if they needed it at this time.   

News in the international media was scant. At most it was a paragraph written by Reuters or the AP every few days. We didn’t get to read how the protesting students were tracked down by the authorities and went missing middle of the night. How they were terrorised. And how they were shot at point blank on the streets. When the internet went live again, it became awash with what the government had done and were still doing.

The original grievance of job quotas was settled by the Supreme Court soon after. But after the violent reaction of Sheikh Hasina to the peaceful protestors, the movement swiftly evolved to become a call for the Prime Minister to resign.

There’s a moving account written by Mubin S Khan in The Business Standard newspaper today of what helped turn the country around from being jaded and resigned to this authoritarian rule. I’m quoting some of it here:

Abu Sayeed was the first in his family to enter Begum Rokeya University and… became one of the primary organisers of the protests at his university.  

On 16 July, the second day … protests turning violent, Abu Sayeed was on campus demonstrating, when the police shot at him. 

He was standing at least 50 to 60 feet from the police, with nothing but a stick in his hand and no aggressive intent, and yet the police shot at him – once, twice and thrice – before he succumbed. 

But before he fell, this young man flayed his arms out and bared his chest, allowing the bullets to hit him one after the other. That evening and over the following days, the whole country saw the video over and over again, of courage standing up to brutality. 

[Another protestor] Mugdho was captured on video running amidst the violence to help out the protestors by distributing water bottles among them. 

“Pani lagbe pani” (“They need water”) [were] Mudgho's last words before … the image of bloodied water bottles on the ground began ringing in the ears of every countryman.  

Hasina had cowered the whole nation through the fear of stigmatisation, harassment, destruction of reputation and livelihood, arrest and legal harassment, physical harm, extrajudicial killings and enforced disappearance.  

Fear had gripped the whole nation and even the international community had resigned itself to her endless presence. 

And then came Abu Sayeed, Mugdho and hundreds of other young men, many less than 18 years old, who showed us how you stand up to a dictator.

So, in the end, what did it take to bring down a dictator? Was it violence, terrorism, [a] coup, or international pressure? None of these, it seem[ed]. What it took was the image of courage and compassion. Of one youth standing up to the bullets being fired at him. [Of] another passing around water bottles amongst compatriots, while bullets rained on them.

The full article, An image that brought her down, by Mubin S Khan can be read here.

I arrived in Dhaka this past weekend. I had my ticket booked months earlier, and the timing thankfully coordinated well with an uneasy period of peace. But within 48 hours of my arrival, things began to heat up again.

On Sunday, a working day in Bangladesh, I went out in the morning to run errands. We’d been told that things should be peaceful until noon, but I could already sense some unrest. I started to get messages from cousins to stay indoors. We had little money at home so I called the bank to ask if I could come withdraw some cash. The manager said I had to be there in two minutes because they were shutting down for the day as rioting had broken out on the building opposite. When I met him at the bank – shutters down, lights off, staff huddled – the manager told me to ensure my family had enough groceries and to stay home.

I came back and my mother was urging me to sit down and eat lunch, and I was like, do you have enough food for a few days? What medicine do you need? I need to go get it all now. She said, “Have the mango I cut up for you!” and I was like, “Do you not GET IT?”

I dashed off, mango uneaten, and went looking for an open supermarket and a pharmacy with the driver in the car. Everything was not just shut but shuttered. As we reached the head of the road we could see a large group of people moving towards our direction, so we turned back, with no groceries and no medicine.

I came home, had the damn mango, then my aunt called to say the government had announced a curfew. Curfew soon started and the streets fell silent. Then we started to hear about the terrible deaths, of people getting killed by the authorities, the number rising by the hour: 40, 50, 70, 90…

My cousin said on her way home that evening she’d seen actual tanks on the street. She said it was a matter of days before Sheikh Hasina fell and everyone knew it; the problem was that it was going to come at a tremendous cost of bloodshed.

The government shut off Facebook and Instagram. They switched off 5G and 4G, narrowing the bandwidth so phone calls weren’t possible on WhatsApp any more, only sporadic messages.

Then it was yesterday, Monday, 5th August. The curfew was still in force. But the students had already announced a march into and through our capital, Dhaka, despite it. Now they had only one demand: for Hasina to resign.

My aunt called and said to watch the news at 3pm when there was to be an announcement by the army chief. I turned on the TV and it showed millions of people gathering in Dhaka in protest. It was breathtaking. Then the news came: Hasina had resigned and fled the country!

I woke up the rest of the household from their afternoon naps so they could witness this historic moment. We all gathered in front of the TV and watched footage of an army helicopter which Hasina and her sister had boarded to flee to neighbouring India. The crowds on the street were jubilant. (A few resorted to looting the official residence of the Prime Minister, dismaying us all with this petty vengeful act.)

Then the army chief spoke to the country. There will be an interim government formed of the various political parties as well as the student leaders who’d led this movement; this caretaker government will oversee a fair and transparent general election.

The evening was bloody. Hasina had unleashed her goons before leaving, ordering them to destroy everything. The police had fled or were in hiding. It was the students who took up the mantle to protect the country (and also asked the looters to return items to the PM’s residence, which many did). My cousin said there was nothing more touching than seeing Muslim men guarding Hindu temples from vandals.

And this morning, I woke up to read the excellent news that Dr Yunus has been asked by the student leaders to head the interim government, and that he has accepted. He is a widely respected figure who doesn’t get involved in dirty politics. He is the best possible choice to lead the caretaker government into its next election.

It’s hard to say so early what will unfold over the next few months, weeks, days, even hours. It could move towards redemption and light as the country gathers momentum towards a new dawn. Or it could go down another, darker, path.

For now, there is urging from all sides to stand united, to use this historic opportunity to rebuild this nation into one of peace and true democracy.

And as for this morning, well – amazingly – internet bills are being paid, water filters are getting cleaned, and yoga teachers are teaching yoga again. I can hear traffic on the streets (I’ve never been so happy to hear car horns blaring). It’s quieter than usual but people are cautiously exhaling. And I am cautiously optimistic.

“The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.”

— Albert Camus

A river bank in Rajshahi, Bangladesh (2006)