Last week, the Prime Minister of Bangladesh, Sheikh Hasina, was forced to resign from her position and flee the country. Throughout July, she had been cracking down on mass protests, led largely by college students, against her increasingly authoritarian rule. More than three hundred people were killed, and thousands were jailed. The protests continued to intensify, and Hasina soon lost the support of the country’s military and left for India. An interim government has been sworn in. It is led by Muhammad Yunus, an economist who, in 2006, won the Nobel Peace Prize, and includes some of the student protesters who had risen up to oppose Hasina; many of these same students can be seen directing traffic on the streets of Dhaka, the capital.
Bangladesh, formerly East Pakistan, achieved independence in 1971, after a bloody war during which the Pakistani military killed hundreds of thousands of Bengalis, who eventually prevailed with help from India. Prior to Hasina’s downfall, she had ruled Bangladesh for fifteen years. Her father, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman (known as Mujib), was the most prominent leader of the country’s independence movement, and became Bangladesh’s first Prime Minister, and then its first President.
I recently spoke by phone with Subho Basu, an associate professor of history and classical studies at McGill University, and the author of the book “Intimation of Revolution: Global Sixties and the Making of Bangladesh.” (He is currently writing a biography of Mujib.) During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed what led to Hasina’s ouster, the complicated religious and political dynamics behind the latest uprising, and Yunus’s vision for Bangladesh’s future.
Why was Sheikh Hasina overthrown now? What was the breaking point?