This post is dedicated to the innumerable young students of Bangladesh who have lost their lives in the last few days of struggle. This wasn’t supposed to be our first post on the Bangladesh students’ struggle because our friend Sarwar Tusher, one among the group of dynamic young critical intellectuals associated with the journal Rashtrochinta, was supposed to write a first hand analytical account. Meanwhile, from Thursday night (18 July) the Sheikh Hasina government enforced a total internet shutdown as the Army moved in to quell the protests. Tanks had already been seen moving in some streets and the protesters were expecting an exponential increase in state violence. Another Tienanmen Square seemed to be in the offing.

From Wednesday night, first Dhaka University, then Jahangirnagar University followed by Rajshahi University had already been facing police firing and the death toll had risen to 41, according to friends in Dhaka, just before we lost all contact with them. BBC reports put the toll as of Friday at over 50. BBC‘s South Asia Regional Editor, Anbarasan Ethirajan reports that “the intensity of the demonstrations of the past week has been described as the worst in living memory”, in a country where street protests have been quite common. According to Al Jazeera, “the demonstrations started, and were initially peaceful, after the High Court on June 5 ordered the reinstatement of a quota that reserves 30 percent of government jobs for family members of veterans who fought for the country’s independence from Pakistan in 1971.” The protests escalated from around the 16th of July, reportedly after the government started labeling the protesters ‘Razakars’ – a term used for collaborators with the Pakistan Army during the Liberation Struggle.

A chilling video had circulated the whole day before that of police firing that killed the brave Abu Saeed who faced police bullets on his body without any trace of fear. Shaheed Abu Saeed they now call him has become a household name and the second gate of Begum Rokeya University in Rangpur has been renamed Shaheed Abu Saeed Gate by the students and teachers of the University. The area is now called Shaheed Abu Saeed Chottor.

Quotas, Corruption and Overdetermination

So what is going on in Bangladesh? What is this ‘Anti-Quota’ stir that has so moved literally lakhs and lakhs of students across the length and breadth of Bangladesh? For those interested in its recent history, this article of April 2018 by Ikhtisad Ahmed published in Scroll.in will give some background to the issue and the previous round of struggle in 2018. Following the struggle, the quotas had been withdrawn which the High Court reinstated in its recent June 5 order.

One thing should be stated right away: through this round of the movement, the focus has been on the 30 per cent jobs reserved for the freedom fighters and their descendants. All the speeches and the many songs that have come up in the course of the struggle have focused on that quota alone. Most of the segments in the movement have been demanding ‘quota reform’ rather than abolition – and this, it appears is because they do not want the abolition of all the quotas. On the 30 percent “freedom fighters and the descendants” quota, there appears to be total unanimity. Indeed, over the past few days, before all contact was cut off, we had been seeing videos where some surviving freedom fighters and their descendants too expressed their opposition to the quotas.

The problem clearly is not with “freedom fighters” in general but with the Sheikh Hasina’s Awami League, which seems to believe that it has ownership over the Liberation Struggle. So essentially what this means, one can easily surmise, is that it is the Awami Leaguers and their kin – or whoever they seek to certify – who corner all the quotas in the name of freedom fighters. In a sense, “Quota” is a code-word for a whole range of things that are seen to be wrong with the current dispensation. As Dr Samina Lutfa, sociologist from the University of Dhaka told the BBC, “We are witnessing so much corruption. Especially among those close to the ruling party. Corruption has been continuing for a long time without being punished.” Corruption allegations have been leveled in the social media, the BBC report goes on to say, “against some of Ms Hasina’s former top officials – including a former army chief, ex-police chief, senior tax officers and state recruitment officials.”

The escalation of the last few days, however, is linked to another issue. Protest coordinators told BBC, in the report linked above, that “police and the student wing of the governing Awami League – known as the Bangladesh Chhatra League – have been using brutal force against peaceful demonstrators, triggering widespread anger.” In fact, one of the first things that students were talking about in the social media, in exhilaration, after the first couple of days of the escalated protests was the freedom they experienced as they drove out Chhatra League goons from campus after campus. The control of the universities by Chhatra League is symptomatic of the larger problem with Bangladesh politics – the virtual destruction of democracy by the Awami League government. As Rezaul Karim Rony, editor of Joban magazine, put it to Al Jazeera, “I believe it has transcended mere quota reform at this point. People have found a platform to voice their frustration against the Awami League’s autocratic rule over the past decade and the erosion of their voting rights.” Let us also recall at this point that it has been a long while since Bangladesh has seen free and fair elections and the main opposition party, the Bangladesh National Party (BNP) had boycotted the 2014 and 2024 elections as it held that free and fair elections were not possible under the current government.

This is a classic situation of ‘overdetermination’ – when a series of different conflicts and contradictions merge into an ‘explosive unity’. No mass movement of this scale – and it is really no longer merely a student upsurge but a popular one – ever materializes on any single issue. Often the apparently single issue assumes the form of an ’empty signifier’ that in fact communicates different meanings to different sections within a context that many outside that context may not be able to see. Thus some Indian commentators, even those sympathetic to the struggle, have made some immediate distancing moves because the the “quota” in India has very different, reactionary connotations of being against reservations. It is possible, in this kind of a mass movement, that there might be some who are opposed to all kinds of quota but that isn’t at all what the protesters at large are saying. That precisely is the point of an empty signifier.

We need to reckon with one more aspect of this overdetermination. On the 28th of June, long before the protests escalated, a friend who teaches in Jahangirnagar University sent me a long Facebook post by Prof Anu Muhammad, also formerly of Jahangirnagar University and currently editor of Sarbojonkotha. Anu Muhammad wrote a long response in many parts (of which this was only one) to the statements made by the prime minister Sheikh Hasina, soon after her visit to India, from June 20-22. The friend who sent this statement also sent the photograph of a wall writing in Dhaka by Chhatra Union that read (in English translation) “We have Broken Pindi’s Chains (Pindir Jinjir), Will Not Accept Delhi’s Slavery” with the note “People across the boundary are very angry.” Prof Muhammad’s post reflected this same perception, which I have witnessed also on the page of legendary photographer Shahidul Alam – that Bangladesh under Sheikh Hasina is a vassal state, a puppet of India. There are many issues that Muhammad raises, of which I want to mention just one here. And on this, Mamata Banerjee and the Trinamool Congress too should take note, given their utterly intransigent attitude on the question of river water sharing. Prof Muhammad says “we need river waters but you agreed to their [India’s] proposal that their team will teach us river water management.” The fact is, he goes on to say, that “be it the Teesta waters or the waters of Ganga-Padma and other rivers, the only internationally accepted framework for establishing Bangladesh’s due is the United Nations’ Water Convention. But why has your government has not signed that Convention? Because India too hasn’t signed it?” In this devastating statement, we get a glimpse of the fact that over and above the unresolved issue between the nation-states that once were part of the Indian Union, there is a whole new conflict brewing globally where water wars will take centre-stage as the ecological crisis assumes monstrous proportions.

Mass Movements and the Implosion of the Political

It is interesting that in over the hundreds of photographs and videos that I have seen over the past week or more, I have only seen literally thousands of student youth – with huge contingents of women as part of these protests, spread in virtually every district of Bangladesh. Not one of the friends I was in touch with in Bangladesh could see what some left-leaning Bengalis in West Bengal and elsewhere could see – an Islamist (Jamat-i-Islami) take over of the movement. Don’t get me wrong – there are large numbers of students and youth out on the streets in West Bengal (and in Delhi today), demonstrating in support of the Bangladeshi students. The ones I am talking about seem to have fished out one video (of doubtful provenance) that shows Islamists marching for the Kingdom of Allah – and then use that for a ponderous discussion lamenting the ‘hijacking’ of the movement by the Jamat. The lakhs of women in the struggle, we are supposed to be believe, are marching for their own slavery. Others, equally well-meaning, have started hallucinating about the coming of a Khomenei or Taliban type raaj in Bangladesh on the basis of no evidence except their own inability to ideal with spontaneous mass struggles. It will not be too far-fetched to speculate that this discourse of the Jamat/Islamist capture (often the Pakistan supporting lot) has been retailed by Indian intelligence quarters, given the speed with which it started circulating.

However, this last is only a matter of speculation – we certainly do not have any proof of it except that people suspect that the regime being backed by the Indian government, the latter might be interested in delegitimizing any struggle against it.

Our point here is different. I am pretty certain that in a mass movement like this, all kinds of forces might want to jump into it and there is no reason why the Jamat would not be there. However, as far as we know, they are nowhere in the decision-making committees nor in the overall mass participation in the movement.

It is however, the larger question that I want to briefly address here – one that goes beyond the purely empirical question regarding this movement, This is the question of the implosion of the political and the virtual destruction of politics in the political domain. This is a global phenomenon now witnessed for instance in the struggles that we have come to recognize as the “Arab Spring” or the 15-M and the Indignados movement in Spain and anti-austerity protests in Greece and the Occupy Wall Street movement, and at the same time, the India Against Corruption (IAC) in India and more recently, the anti-Citizenship Amendment Act and the farmers’ struggle. In Sri Lanka, more recently, power virtually lay on the streets with no one to take it over.

In all of these movements, what we saw as the common denominator, was the utter collapse of politics in the political domain – parties had become ineffective, incorporated into the system and utterly incapable of relating to the popular. Neoliberalism added the final topping on the cake in this respect – a story we cannot pursue here. It is of course, tragic that the exhilarating moment of the Arab Spring ended with either the military taking over or the system finally asserting itself – except where, for the time being, a new political force could emerge (Syriza in Greece, Podemos in Spain, AAP in India). These too were either short lived or are still struggling to reconstitute themselves. Asef Bayat wrote his Revolution without Revolutionaries; Making Sense of the Arab Spring (2017), almost lamenting the non-existence of a vanguard that could have taken over power after the moment of struggle. Jodi Dean went two steps further to argue for an unreconstructed Leninist vanguard in her Crowds and Party (2016). Unemployed vanguards (ideologues) in search of mass movements they can lead have found they have been spurned by precisely those mass movements – smarting as they are under the experience of their movements being hijacked ever so often in the past. If they will not allow Leftist vanguards to hijack their movements, they certainly do not want Islamists to do so. But can we say that because they did not have an alternative organization and platform, the people should not have revolted – though the political parties and the system had failed them?

This is the tragedy of our times. As Antonio Gramsci put it so well: the old is dying and the new cannot be born. In this interregnum, a great variety of morbid symptoms appear. Everywhere, the challenge is the same and its expression too the same: At that precise moment when the political implodes, politics emerges outside its sanctioned borders – to face the tanks and the armed forces. At that precise moment, other reactionary forces attempt to step into the breach and hijack these movements. Many of those referred to above would like us to quietly acquiesce to the dominant structures of power, lest the demons come and take over. But that fortunately is not how things work. The struggles of the twenty-first century from the Arab Spring to the Indignados and Occupy Wall Street – and now the heroic struggle of the Bangladesh students are the signs that the people are not dead, even if their parties may be. This is perhaps an inevitable phase in our search for a new way of doing politics – a phase that is long and tortuous but which will hopefully yield something more just and democratic.