Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s 15 years of rule ends

Sanjoy Kumar Barua

Sheikh Hasina, Bangladesh’s prime minister of 15 years, fled the country after protesters demanding that she step down stormed her residence on Monday.

Ms Hasina, 76, reportedly handed over the country’s reins to the military before flying out on a helicopter to India, her strongest ally, bringing to an ignominious end her iron-fisted rule.

In an address to the nation, army chief General Waker-Uz-Zaman announced that an interim government will now run Bangladesh and called for calm.

Hasina, who ruled the country for close to two decades, boarded a military helicopter on Monday.

Her resignation came after 300 people died in weeks of protest that the authorities sought to crush. A night of deadly violence on Sunday killed nearly 100 and a curfew was called.

The message from the protesters is that whoever comes to power next “will now know that they won’t tolerate any kind of dictatorship or mismanagement and that the students will decide.”

Bangladesh suffered many years of military rule in the 1970s and 80s following the war that secured its independence from Pakistan in 1971, and many are wary of the danger of a return.

Army chief Waker-Uz-Zaman was eager to try to reassure the country. He urged citizens to keep trust in the army, which, he said, would return peace to the country.

Bangladesh, a country of 160 million people, plunged into a turmoil in late June when Ms Hasina’s government launched a crackdown on mainly student protesters demanding the rollback of a contentious quota system for government jobs.

The crackdown saw dozens of protesters killed, many more injured and thousands detained.

The protests subsided after the supreme court slashed the jobs quota for relatives of the veterans of the 1971 war of independence with Pakistan from 30 per cent to 5 percent, only to erupt more strongly this weekend.

At least 100 people were killed on Sunday as the protesters clashed with security forces, taking the death toll in the demonstrations to over 300.

The protests subsided after the supreme court slashed the jobs quota for relatives of the veterans of the 1971 war of independence with Pakistan from 30 per cent to 5 percent, only to erupt more strongly this weekend.

The unrest that forced Ms Hasina to flee was an eerie reminder of the mob rampage at her home during the bloody military coup almost 50 years ago that ended in the assassination her father, Bangladesh’s first prime minister Sheikh Mujib Rahman.

That fateful night, while 28-year-old Hasina was in Germany with her younger sister, a group of army officers burst into the family’s Dhaka home and killed her parents, three other siblings and the household staff — 18 people in all.

Some say the brutal act pushed her to consolidate unprecedented power. It was also what motivated her throughout her political career, analysts say.

Proudly wearing the label of being the daughter of Bangladesh’s founder, Ms Hasina came to power in 1996 but lost the next election in 2001.

She returned as prime minister in 2009 and promptly went about tightening her hold on power. She was widely accused of muzzling dissent, carrying out extrajudicial killings, shrinking press freedom and cracking down on civil society.

Her Awami League party won the 2014 election almost unopposed after opposition parties boycotted it over allegations of vote rigging. It was the same story in 2018.

Hasina’s government allegedly arrested nearly 20,000 workers of the Bangladesh Nationalist Part in January this year national election. The mass arrests led to protests by the main opposition party’s members, inviting a violent state response.

The party’s leader, former prime minister Khaleda Zia, was “on the brink of death” under prolonged house arrest, the opposition alleged in June last year.

Hasina was among the world’s longest-serving female heads of government, a secular Muslim in colorful saris who fought Islamist militancy, lifted millions out of poverty and deftly kept both India and China at her side.

However, Human rights groups accused Ms Hasina’s administration of forcibly disappearing her critics, an allegation denied by her.

After her inauguration as prime minister for a fourth consecutive term, observers noted many red flags of impending trouble in Bangladesh.

In 2023, Amnesty International criticised the Hasina government for human rights violations, not least her jailing of critics and journalists under the draconian Information and Communication technology Act 2006.

“The government intensified its crackdown on the rights to freedom of expression and peaceful assembly ahead of general elections scheduled for January 2024,” the group said in its annual report.

“Authorities used powers in Digital Security Act and other legislation to target journalists and human rights defenders, subjecting them to arbitrary detention and torture. There was a concerning increase in enforced disappearances and lack of accountability for deaths in custody.”