Bangladesh saw a mass student protest against job quotas which morphed into a nationwide uprising against Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s 15-year regime.

As protesters clash with authorities, the government has enforced a curfew, imposed an internet blackout, and declared Monday a public holiday in an attempt to maintain order, according to an article of Foreign Policy.

The American journal on Tuesday mentioned the official death toll to 174 people, though the actual number is likely to be much higher. On Sunday, Muhammad Yunus, a Bangladeshi economist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, appealed to the international community to help stop the ‘killing spree’.

"The protests started last month after Bangladesh’s High Court reinstated quotas that set aside up to 30 percent of government jobs for the relatives of the freedom fighters who participated in the country’s 1971 war of independence from Pakistan. On Sunday, the Supreme Court reduced the quota to 5 percent, but resentment has not abated," writes Salil Tripathi, an Indian-born writer and author based in New York.

Bangladeshi communities have also rallied to support the protesters with demonstrations in Australia, Britain, the United Arab Emirates, the United States, Qatar, and the Indian state of West Bengal. According to Ali Riaz, a politics professor at Illinois State University, the movement now constitutes “the most formidable and serious challenge to Sheikh Hasina’s rule” to date.

How did this happen? The answer lies partly in the roots of the quota system—and its connections to Hasina and her party, the Awami League. But the causes of the unrest go much deeper, as widespread discontent over economic despair, rampant corruption, rigged elections, and human rights abuses has come to the surface.

The quota system was set up more than five decades ago by then-Prime Minister Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, Hasina’s father, to ensure jobs for veterans of the liberation war as well as people from underrepresented districts.

Today, descendants of freedom fighters make up only a small portion of Bangladesh’s population—around 0.12 percent to 0.2 percent, according to local media.

The Awami League played a major role in the liberation struggle, and the system has disproportionately benefited the small number of people associated with the party. As Naveeda Khan, an anthropologist at Johns Hopkins University, recently wrote, the “quota for freedom fighters was undoubtedly for [Hasina’s] own chosen people.”

Resentment against the quotas has long been brewing, particularly as the country faces high rates of youth unemployment and inflation. (The quotas also reserve jobs for minorities and disabled people, although these measures are not as controversial.)

Bangladesh has made impressive economic strides, with an average GDP growth of 6.6 percent over the past decade. Poverty declined from 11.8 percent in 2010 to 5 percent in 2022, and the country is expected to graduate from its ‘least developed country’ status at the United Nations in 2026.

However, job growth has slowed. According to the World Bank, more than a quarter of jobseekers are between the ages of 15 and 29, and 1 in 8 young people is jobless.

After student demonstrations in 2018, the quota system was abolished, but the High Court’s decision to reinstate it in June sparked the most recent wave of protests.

Bangladesh has a long history of student protest movements. The 1952 student demonstrations over Pakistan’s refusal to recognize Bengali as a national language ignited the Bhasha Andolan (language movement), which culminated in the struggle for independence two decades later. Students were among the first to be killed by Pakistani troops in 1971 during that war.

In 1987, students resisted the military dictatorship of former President Hussain Muhammad Ershad, and in 2013, thousands protested at Dhaka’s Shahbag Square, demanding harsher punishment for those who collaborated with Pakistan during the war.

More protests followed in 2015 against taxation and in 2018 for road safety. These movements have a mixed record of success: Ershad eventually resigned, and the collaborators were tried and convicted, but later protests were not as effective.

Students Against Discrimination, a new organisation, has led the current movement. Because the group is unaffiliated with a political party, protesters have managed to come together under a common, nonpartisan banner. “It is not spearheaded by any political party, so more people are inclined to join,” Riaz said.

The opposition wasn’t initially involved with the protests, but since then, members of political parties and people from all walks of life have joined in with the students. “The criticism against the government cuts through all sections of the society,” said Rumi Ahmed, a physician at the University of Texas at Austin, who writes frequently on Bangladeshi politics.

The state’s response over the past week has been forceful and brutal. A searing video of Abu Saeed—an unarmed protester, who stretches out his arms and thrusts his chest forward as the police shoot him to death—has come to symbolize the uprising against the state.

Authorities have given police ‘shoot-on-sight’ orders during curfew hours and deployed paramilitary forces. An anonymous diplomat told the AFP that Bangladesh’s foreign minister refused to respond to a UN representative at a diplomats’ briefing who asked about the reported use of UN-marked armored personnel carriers and helicopters to quell the protests.

Protesters have retaliated at times with violence and destroyed and burned property, including the state broadcaster’s offices and a few police stations; several police officers have died.

Now, the protests are no longer about just the quota system or even the economy, as Shahidul Alam, an award-winning Bangladeshi photojournalist, wrote in an Al Jazeera piece that he managed to send and publish despite the internet blackout.

Those issues, Ahmed said, have been “overshadowed by the movement to replace this regime that has usurped power through illegal elections.”

Hasina was once seen as a harbinger of democracy. Her election as prime minister in 1996 marked the end of a transition period after Bangladesh had been under military rule for nearly two decades.

After losing reelection in 2001, she returned to power following the 2008 election, when she won a second five-year term. Since then, her victories have been marred by allegations including voter intimidation, ballot stuffing, and violence against political opponents.

In fact, opposition parties boycotted the elections in 2014 and 2024, giving the Awami League lopsided majorities, and the 2018 election had rampant irregularities.

“We must recognize this is not an elected government in the traditional sense. They have amassed a lot of power,” said Ahmedur Rashid Tutul, a Bangladeshi writer and publisher who founded Shuddhashar magazine and now lives in exile. “It is like the Mughal shamrajjo [empire], where there is a ruler and there are satraps [provincial governors].”

When Hasina attempted to ridicule the protesters with a tasteless insult late last week, calling them razakars—a pejorative slur used to describe those who supported Pakistan during Bangladesh’s liberation war—the students responded by calling her Shairachar (the autocrat).

Widespread corruption has also contributed to collective anger. In recent years, the Bangladeshi government has faced serious allegations of nepotism and corruption in the judiciary, armed forces, and senior levels of the bureaucracy.

In a surreal moment, Hasina admitted earlier this month that a former low-level employee in her household made off with around $34 million. But graft in Bangladesh goes much deeper—from senior officials being accused of amassing wealth far beyond their official salaries to what the World Bank has called a ‘high-level corruption conspiracy’ in the construction of the massive Padma Bridge. Little is known, moreover, about a bizarre theft of $81 million from Bangladesh’s central bank in 2016.

And there are widespread human rights abuses. Editors and journalists have been threatened by government officials and arrested or charged. Digital censorship is rampant, especially since the Digital Security Act—a vaguely worded law that allows authorities to detain people and search equipment without warrant—entered into force in late 2018.

Hundreds of people have disappeared since 2009, and in a spate of violent incidents between 2013 and 2017, several dissident bloggers who criticized religious fundamentalists or the government were killed or brutally assaulted. Some survivors now live overseas in exile.

Despite the unrest, Hasina has so far managed to maintain her grip on power. Support and investment from Western countries and India have helped Hasina shore up her government during her tenure. Over the years, she has portrayed herself as the only leader in Bangladesh who stands firmly with the West in the so-called war on terror.

“Hasina leveraged the war on terror to her advantage,” said Pinaki Bhattacharya, a Bangladeshi writer and activist based in France. “She projects herself as a champion of secularism and says whoever opposes her is an Islamist.”

Although Bangladesh, a Muslim-majority country, has Islamic political parties, their vote share exceeded 10 percent only once, in the 1991 election. Raising the bogeyman of Islamism helps Hasina garner the support of Bangladesh’s biggest backer, the Indian government, which is run by a coalition led by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party. Close ties between the two governments have stoked anti-India sentiment among the general public in Bangladesh.

It’s hard to know how destabilizing the current movement will be for Hasina. But it’s clear that a large swath of the population has turned against the Awami League. How the public reacts once access to the internet resumes—and protesters are able to post more photos and videos of state repression—will be telling.

In the 53-year history, Bangladesh has experienced several successful (and a few failed) military coups. An outright coup is unlikely now, but the possibility of the army playing a role in shaping the crisis’s outcome cannot be ruled out.

The army could, for instance, facilitate a civilian caretaker government to oversee new elections, as it did in 2008. There is precedent for this elsewhere in the region; in Indonesia, for instance, wise elders from Java and the army told longtime leader Suharto in 1998 that it was time to leave.

Regardless of the form it takes, Hasina’s critics hope that a new kind of leadership will emerge from this moment—not from the traditional political parties, but from the young citizens who spearheaded the movement. And if Hasina does survive this crisis, she will need to prioritize Bangladesh’s vulnerable people and make their lives better.

The young people on the streets today were barely 5 years old when a leader other than Hasina was in power, and few Bangladeshis have memories of the 1971 liberation war; 80 percent of the country’s population is under the age of 50.

Even if the Awami League loses power, Bangladesh’s future need not be the religious state that Hasina warns about. Ideally, it would become a nation closer to its founding ideals—of a Bangladeshi republic that is multireligious and multiethnic. That’s what the 1971 generation fought for.