Notes on the Student Movement in Bangladesh

Disappointment with the changing power dynamics in Bangladesh stems from the misapprehension of students as a class, which they are not. Students form a nebulous category, hailing primarily from the bourgeoisie, petit-bourgeoisie, and the upwardly mobile strata of the proletariat, and their class interests, or lack thereof, reflect this.

In June 2024, following the reinstatement of a quota system favouring the descendants of freedom fighters from the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War, Bangladeshi students took to the streets in protest, demanding significant reduction in quotas and the instatement of a merit based system. In July, the protests began receiving wider media coverage as the Anti-Discrimination Students Movement clashed violently with the Bangladesh Chhatra League, or the the student wing of the ruling Awami League. These clashes were compounded with police violence directed at the students protesting the quotas, and over the course of the belligerence, firearms were deployed, culminating in the deaths of hundreds of protesting students and their families. These events prompted the Anti-Discrimination Students Movement to issue a revised list of nine demands to the government.

As casualties grew, the Bangladeshi government led by Sheikh Hasina instated a curfew on 18th July, cutting off all communications, commencing a total blackout and closure of all educational institutions across the country. This period marked heavier casualties and increased police violence, and amidst this, negotiations were inaugurated between the government and the leaders of the protest movement. On 21st July, the Supreme Court of Bangladesh decreed a reduction of the quota from 56% to 7%. This promulgated a temporary suspension of the protests, and a partial lifting of the curfew and communications ban, though social-media sites remained inaccessible.

During the heights of the protests and the ensuing retaliatory violence by the state, several student leaders and large numbers of supporting students and citizens had been arrested. In response to this, protests demanding the release of the political prisoners, as well as restitution for the violence unleashed upon Bangladeshi citizens, broke out soon after the Supreme Court's verdict. Mounting opposition to the current leadership, with no hope of reconciliation, prompted Sheikh Hasina to abdicate her position as Prime Minister of Bangladesh and flee. An interim government led by Mohammed Shahabuddin of the Awami League, with some support from the military was instated in Hasina's absence.

Having achieved their goal of partially repudiating the quota system and the additional goal of forcing Sheikh Hasina's resignation, the protesting students seem to have declined seizing this revolutionary moment altogether, save for protesting military intervention into the government, and supporting the ascension of Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus to the position of Chief Advisor to the Government. Muhammad Yunus is best known for founding the Grameen Bank, which delves into the untapped market of the rural poor to draw out profits in the form of interests on micro-loans, an activity lauded by the World Bank. In short, Yunus is a beacon of neoliberalism and the continued ruin of economically backward nations.

So, how could a student population that had effectively incensed the masses to unseat a head of state that had ruled autocratically for fifteen years, squander the power it had sacrificed so much for? Precisely because students as a category do not have consolidated class interests that extend beyond the narrow goal of limiting quotas so they may take up their rightful place in institutional positions within the existing machinery of the capitalist state.

Now, the anti-discrimination protests have not been the only protests that have demanded change from the Bangladeshi government. In November 2023, garment factory workers from the Gazipur industrial district took to the streets protesting abysmal wages, resulting in the violent death of at least one protestor, mounting casualties reported thereafter, and mass lay-offs at factories by the end of December. Student participation in these protests were not significant enough for the media to report on it, or it might not have occurred at all. During the anti-discrimination protests, however, the garment factory workers of Gazipur did support the students, based on common interests vested in ousting the current machinery of state. Unfortunately, the solidarity remained unreciprocated, as the students abdicated their power just as soon as they gained it, inaugurating nothing more than a minor change of regime, rather than a decisive overthrow of the state machinery.

According to Vijay Prasad, Students have been a decisive demographic in political struggles in Bangladesh, having taken part in the War of Liberation from Pakistan, and aided the politicization of the masses that would go on to populate the Awami League, the Bangladesh National Party, and the Jamaat-e-Islami. The fact that the student population is comprised quite substantially by the bourgeoisie and its supporting appendages contributes to the power they are able to wield. Infighting within bourgeoisie factions and (productive) dissent from proletarian factions will continuously impede the cohesive politicisation of student bodies, and this lack of cohesion marks the students' divergence from proletarian class interests, and outlines their constitutive inability to guide a political movement to completion. That these conditions will remain such is of course, indeterminate. Thoughtful organisation can change circumstances.

But as it stands, the university and educational institutions within a bourgeois regime are structured to produce citizens that partake in protecting the interests of the capitalist state, for these very students to independently organise around the destruction of the very same state they one day hope to inherit is quite farfetched. Now, if the students had entered into a coalition with workers organisations, allowing the workers to take the reigns of political transition, the situation could have been starkly different than what we are witnessing at this moment. Instead we must watch as they hand the reigns of political change to a neoliberal economist and members of the very same Awami League they professed to oppose.

Addendum, November 2025

I wrote this in the immediate aftermath of the student movement that unseated Sheikh Hasina from the government of Bangladesh. Since then we have witnessed a similar movement take place in Nepal, this time unseating a stagnating revolutionary government. Thus, I have compiled a small list of additional articles: a statement from the Central Committee of the Proletarian Party of Purbo Bangla (this is a translation, if anyone happens to have access to the original statement in Bengali, please email me, I would really like to read the original), one that sheds light on the events that followed the so-called revolution in Bangladesh, and one that summarises the backdrop of recent events in Nepal.

Yes, I know Kunal Chattopadhay is a Trotskyist, the summary of Nepal's history in the article though, is quite apt