Ali Raza
The student protest movement in Bangladesh has forced Prime Minister Hasina Wajid to resign and flee to India by helicopter. This is a great victory of student struggle in which they resisted the government’s massacres, torture, and arrests. The movement originated as a protest movement against the quota system, granting supporters of Hasina’s Awami League, which was in office since 2009 and was granted privileged access to public administration jobs.
From June to August, it turned into a mass movement against the authoritarian rule of the Awami League and Hasina. Hundreds of students were killed in the protests, but they carried on fighting and gained mass popular support, including shut down strikes in many cities at the beginning of August. The situation threatened to turn into a general revolt against the entire political system.
In this situation the military high command stepped in. The army chief, General Waker-uz-Zaman contacted the various political parties, declaring that social peace should be restored since their wishes would now be implemented.
However, the central spokesperson of the 158-strong student leadership, Nahid Islam, stated, ‘No government will be accepted except the one we propose. We will not betray the blood of our martyrs. We will build a new democratic Bangladesh through our commitment to security of life, social justice and a new political landscape.’
The students demanded the dissolution of the old parliament and a new government led by Nobel Peace prize winner Muhammad Yunus, founder of the microcredit movement and promoter of ‘social entrepreneurship’. Since the military accepted these demands, the new government is seen by many in the students’ movement, and certainly by its leaders, as a complete victory. But what does the new government really stand for?
Interim government
Clearly Yunus has great political credibility, given the continuous political vendetta against him by the Hasina Wajid regime against him over the last decade. His public support for the student movement has turned him into a patron saint of the protesters. Students see him as a honest figure, even though his economic politics are at odds with the students‘ main demand, which is for jobs – and even more so with the demands of the Bangladeshi working class.
Whilst Yunus can be presented as break with the past, his government cannot. The cabinet is composed of neoliberal officials from the Bangladeshi bureaucracy, academia and the NGO sector. The Finance Ministry is in the hands of former Bangladesh Bank Governor Salehuddin Ahmed, who is a supporter of neoliberal economic policy. No social welfare agenda can be expected from him.
On the economic level the cabinet’s purpose is to assure the textile manufacturers and other capitalists that, though Hasina is gone, her neoliberal program will continue. For the interim government, the capitalist class and the military the most important issue for the country is stability, i.e. to demobilise the movement of the workers and the students.
In general, the interim government is composed of state officials, former ministers and diplomats, former army officers, business and banking executives, NGO executives and two member of the student movement, Nahid Islam and Asif Mahmud. It also includes supporters of the opposition parties, in particular the Bangladesh Nationalist Party but also Islamists.
In the short term the new government will focus on ‘stabilisation’ and the preparation of new parliamentary elections. But the latter will depend on achieving the former. Whilst the government is headed by Yunus, it is also clear that, de facto, the strongest force backing it is the military. Secondly, it incorporates the state administration, business, the bourgeois and Islamist opposition parties. The representatives of the student movement are there to ensure that disillusionment and protest against the government can be averted and, if need be, resisted by a broad bourgeois coalition.
Currently the masses have illusions in the new government. Revolutionaries must warn against these; they must urge the masses not to trust the government, or support its capitalist policies or the bourgeois and even reactionary parties which back it, or the military. As the example of Myanmar and Aung San Suu Kyi shows, it is a tragic illusion to entrust the ‘democratisation’ to Nobel Prize winners, who ultimately delude the masses.
Challenges
The government will face challenges from different social and political forces. Firstly, the inner divisions in the new cabinet will come to the fore in the next months. Whilst the military and Bangladeshi capital want a secure transition to a new government, the Nationalist Party in particular is pressing for an early election, which they would almost certainly, win since the Awami League is discredited and the Islamist parties are, as yet, much less organised on a national level.
Then there is pressure from below for thoroughgoing democratic reform of the state, rather than just a transition from one political party to the other. Though the government will try to incorporate the student leaders to sell delays and rotten compromises to the movement, an important challenge could come from the movement and the structures of self-organisation developed in the struggle against the Quota system and the Hasina government.
Given the attacks by the police and paramilitary forces from the ranks of the Awami League, the students have created action committees and organs of self-defence. Moreover some of those have also taken up other tasks, like organisation basic relief and the defence of Hindu temples which had been threatened by reactionary mobs during the protests. Moreover, a number of them are not limited to students and are also organised at district level.
Thirdly, and maybe most importantly, the economic situation has worsened in the last few years. Millions and millions are hit by inflation and growing unemployment. The student protests are themselves sparked by the simple fact that Bangladeshi semi-colonial capitalism is unable to provide qualified jobs for its 4 million students, with or without a quota system.
This was the social basis for the protests, which reached pre-revolutionary dimensions in July and August. Due to the crisis of the Bangladeshi economic model millions turned against the regime. But whilst Hasina has gone, the model and its crisis persist. Last year, the national debt exceeded $100 billion, while the economy slowed. The government had to go to the IMF.
The looting of state assets and the transfer of capital abroad increased enormously. Many capitalists close to the government fled the country, taking huge sums of money with them. Along with this, the country’s food and fuel prices have skyrocketed. Millions of people are food insecure and the garment sector, which is dominated by women workers, earning just $80 a month, less than what the workers were protesting for last year. Wages are also not being paid in many factories.
Workers struggles
The fall of Hasina Wajid with the proof that the state can be challenged and defeated, has encouraged a surge in class struggle, in which government workers, daily contract workers, workers in private companies have all taken action. Demonstrations demanding immediate payment of wages are spreading.
On 14 August unemployed garment workers in Tongi blocked the streets and started a protest, demanding equal opportunities in employment. The workers of Yerak Apparels Ltd have not received their salaries for three months and, when they demanded payment, the owner threw them out of the factory. In response, the workers staged a sit-in on Dhaka Mymensingh Highway, which lasted for several days. On 19 August workers also staged a sit-in at the entrance of the Dhaka Export Processing Zone.
There are countless such protests. Workers have learned from the glorious days of July that, if they want to improve their lives, they must fight for it. Factories and properties belonging to capitalists associated with Awami League are being attacked. That is why capitalists are now demanding their debt repayments and reduced utility bills so they can get export orders.
Where from here?
‘Those who did not dare to speak in the last 16 years, those who did not dare to come to the streets in 53 years, they want all issues to be resolved immediately,’ said Sergis Alam, coordinator of anti-discrimination for students. The students have been in the forefront for the struggle for democracy in Bangladesh. This opened a new period of mass struggles and with enormous revolutionary potential.
But at the same time distinct class interests have emerged. On one side are the forces that do not want to do any fundamental damage to the old system and on the other side are the workers and common people who want job security, increased wages and an end to poverty. Key leaders of the student movement have been incorporated in the new interim government.
Until now this awakening of the working class has focused on struggles to overcome the misery and poverty, the burden of unemployment, low wages and rising prices. But to really address the roots of the over-exploitation imposed by Bangladeshi capitalism, this struggle needs to go further.
The struggle for democratic demands, for the smashing of the corrupt regime needs to be completed. This will only be possible if the incipient democratic revolution is made permanent, linking it with the struggle to overthrow capitalism in Bangladesh and the fight for a workers’ government, based on workers’ councils, breaking up the corrupt state apparatus, expropriating the capitalist class, cancelling the debt and introducing an emergency plan to satisfy the basis needs of the masses.
It would be utopian to think that students, who are mainly of petit bourgeois and middle-class background, can lead a revolution to the very end. Only the workers of the country can do this. But for this they to build a mass revolutionary working class party. And such a party must not confine the struggle to Bangladesh alone. It can only succeed if the revolution sparks and spreads throughout the subcontinent, leading to the creation of a socialist federation of South Asia.