The Utopian impulse: Contextualising student protests in Bangladesh

Recent events in Bangladesh surrounding the ousting of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, following widespread student and youth-led protests, have evidenced a deep discontent among the national citizenry and actively signalled the impact of popular uprisings on corrupt governments. Even in 2018, after Hasina’s government was sworn in for a third time after elections that took place under the shadow of election fraud, violent intimidation of opposition candidates and sudden internet shutdowns to limit the flow of information, there was seething anger against the governing party and its increasingly autocratic ways. 

In August of 2024, the South Asian nation numbering 171.2 million people saw an outpouring of youth-led demonstrations triggered by the ruling party Awami League’s attempts to legalise employment quotas in a move that was seen as politically self-serving. Hasina is the daughter of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, sometimes known as ‘Bangabandhu’ (friend of Bengal). His Awami League had given political leadership for the to secede from Pakistan and found a secular, Islam-majority independent nation that recognises its linguistic, geographical, religious and cultural differences from its South Asian neighbours. 

In August, the rising unemployment rates, surface-level economic growth that does not reflect on improvements in quality of life, and the autocratic regime’s indiscriminate use of police force and party militias to control dissenting voices finally managed to incite widespread protests, marking a crucial historical moment in contemporary South Asian regional politics and kindling a faint optimism (and signalling a new turn) for Bangladesh’s political future. In the ensuing police violence that saw police officers shoot down students point blank with over seven hundred dead and many incarcerated, there is no doubt that the uprising was not only threatening in its sheer extent of mobilisation and violence but long overdue given the injustices perpetrated by successive corrupt ruling governments and military interventions. The flight of Hasina to India following the mass protests and the subsequent inclusion of some student leaders (Nahid Islam and Asif Mahmud) in the new interim government led by Muhammad Yunus, the Nobel laureate who is internationally popular, is indicative of a new direction, if not some fresh hope, in Bangladeshi national politics. 

Despite this, the ambiguity of Yunus as a political leader and the deeply entrenched ways of power in national-level political structures (along with the authority of the military and its historical role in political coups in the country) should make one wary of assuming that these protests can organically give rise to an entirely new direction in national politics. Instead, the focus can be on what has led to these particular set of events to unfold, including the fixation on economic growth, i.e., the employment quotas being the trigger and the selection of an economist, a microfinance expert, to lead the country. These facts need to be contextualised to understand further that these youth-led protests are not parallel to student protests in India against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) in 2020 or the more recent pro-Gaza student protests that spread like wildfire on university campuses all over the world. 

The Bangladeshi student protests need to be read along with the nation’s economic history and priorities as well as current economic circumstances, specifically perhaps with a feminist political, economic focus on social reproduction and the subsequent utopian impulse of focusing on the national economy, be it employment as a core issue, or the reinvention of microfinancing as a solution for women entrepreneurs. Only then can these protests and the politics that emerge as a consequence, be seen as a vigorous reshaping of political priorities. The student uprisings, the effectiveness of which can be debated for a long time, have certainly caught the interest of regional experts, international journalists, and the rest of the world. At the same time, such a utopian impulse in action in youth-led protests does not just arise due to a single event or reason; the anger has usually been brewing for a long time. 

In some ways, these protests have captured how long-term grievances can spill over to shape a possibly new form of disillusioned utopian politics that is not only youth-focused but is brought about by the complete ousting of nepotistic structures built by power-entrenched political practices of senior nation-builders. Tithi Bhattacharya of Purdue University notes how these protests have been “decades in the making” given the economic disparity between Bangladesh and its South Asian neighbours exacerbated by the Structural Adjustment measures of the IMF, which promised economic growth through export-oriented manufacturing that deprioritised public expenditure on welfare sector. In Bangladesh, this meant gradually dismantling the existing education and healthcare facilities and a renewed focus on meeting demands of cheap labour for garment manufacturing that supplied international clothing brands, and for exporting blue-collar migrant workers. 

The history of previously colonised countries in the Global South suffering from Structural Adjustment measures that gradually drain public expenditure from citizen-centred programmes is replete with stories of male emigration to the West following poverty and consequent woman-led initiatives in the home country to make up for labour requirements. The stress on the sphere of social reproduction in such scenarios has demanded an exorbitant amount of labour from women of colour, as seen, for example, in the Jamaica of 1970s and 1980s when entire communities were fragmented and families shattered by male emigration to the West. To draw a South-South historical parallel, the postcolonial Jamaican government also sought IMF interventions, which only exacerbated poverty, unemployment and anger, with the discontent spilling out in the form of riots and student protests, much of which is reflected in the reggae music of the 1970s and 1980s Jamaica that advocates for and imagines a utopian politics that is youth-led, politically engaged locally and internationally, and affirms the Afro-Caribbean identity. 

Utopianism in postcolonial nations has increasingly evolved to mean defining progress in response to changing neoliberal conditions dictated by the previously colonising nations, and specific postcolonial circumstances have determined specific postcolonial utopian responses to such contemporary challenges. In Bangladesh, more recently, the increasingly louder voices were those of the unemployed youth who have grown up seeing the effects of such sustained dependencies on international economic institutions on their communities. The youth also knows how their government’s own autocratic measures and police violence significantly add to these worries. The most important fact to note here is that the student protests were not focused on freedom of expression or academic freedom as such. They were triggered by employment quotas in the public sector, which speaks volumes about how the nation’s recent economic history, including the exploitative manufacturing sector, needs to be studied to contextualise what this has meant on the ground for the Bangladeshi youth. 

Although there needs to be an awareness of the significance of this political moment, already touted as ‘The Monsoon Revolution’, there must also be a serious engagement with the context that has led to this and the specific priorities of the youth-led movement that led to the ousting of a dictator. It is heartening that the utopian political impulse in this historic moment has revealed the historical materialist basis of economic growth and the stress on the welfare sector as forming the long-term context for not just economic disparities with regional neighbours and the international community but for decades-long discontent that has finally found its political expression on the streets of Dhaka.●

Athira Unni is a utopian and posthumanism scholar.