By 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 for the student struggle which resisted massacres, torture, and arrests. The movement originated as a protest against the quota system, granting supporters of Hasina’s Awami League privileged access to public administration jobs.
From June to August, it turned into a mass movement against Hasina’s authoritarian rule. Hundreds of students were killed in the protests, but they gained mass support, including 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 stepped in. Army chief General Waker-uz-Zaman declared 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.’
The students demanded a new government led by Nobel Peace prize winner Muhammad Yunus. Since the military accepted these demands, the new government is seen by many, including the students’ leaders, as a complete victory. But what does the new government really stand for?
Clearly Yunus has great political credibility, given the decade-long vendetta against him by Hasina and his public support for the students. They see him as an honest figure, even though his economic politics are at odds with the students’ main demand for jobs—and even more so with the demands of the working class. Yunus’ cabinet is composed of neoliberal officials from the Bangladeshi bureaucracy, academia and the NGO sector.
On the economic level the cabinet’s purpose is to assure the textile manufacturers and other capitalists that, though Hasina is gone, her neoliberal programme will continue. The most important issue is stability, i.e. to demobilise the movement.
Alongside former ministers and army officers, business and banking executives, the interim government contains two members of the student movement, Nahid Islam and Asif Mahmud, as well as the opposition parties. However, whilst the government is headed by Yunus, the strongest force backing it is the military. The representatives of the student movement are there simply to ensure that disillusionment and protests can be averted.
But currently the masses have illusions in the new government. Revolutionaries must warn against these and urge the masses not to trust the government, or support its capitalist policies or parties or the military. As the example of Myanmar and Aung San Suu Kyi shows, it is a tragic illusion to entrust ‘democratisation’ to Nobel Prize winners.
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 is pressing for an early election, which they would almost certainly win.
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 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 of the Awami Party, the students have created action committees and self-defence organisations. Some of those have also taken up other tasks, like basic relief and the defence of Hindu temples that 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.
The economic situation has also worsened in the last few years. Millions and millions are hit by inflation and growing unemployment. The student protests were 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 economic crisis 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. The garment sector is dominated by women workers earning just $80 a month. Wages are not even 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 and 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. On 19 August workers also staged a sit-in at the entrance of the Dhaka Export Processing Zone.
The workers of Yerak Apparels Ltd have not received their salaries for three months. 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.
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 the Awami League are being attacked. That is why capitalists are now demanding their debt repayments and reduced utility bills, so they can compete for export orders.
Where next?
‘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 of the struggle for democracy in Bangladesh. This opened a new period of mass struggles 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. On the other 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 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 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 basic 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.
