Turmoil in Bangladesh: the fury over a quota system

A “weird nationwide disaster” has shaken Bangladesh, stated Sharmeen Murshid within the Every day Star (Dhaka). It started when college students staged protests demanding an finish to an outdated quota system that requires 30% of civil service jobs to go to descendants of those that fought within the nation’s 1971 struggle of independence from Pakistan. 

The protests, although peaceable, have been met with a wave of police brutality that left round 200 individuals useless and hundreds injured. That led to violence spreading throughout this nation of 174 million individuals, so a nationwide curfew was enforced, with troopers ordered to shoot on sight. In a number of days, the chaos abated, however how on earth did “official” protests set off such an appallingly disproportionate response? 

Entrenching energy

The hated quota system was arrange greater than 50 years in the past, by the then prime minister, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the daddy of the current PM, stated Salil Tripathi in International Coverage (Washington). The concept was to reward veterans of that bloody struggle and their descendants – the individuals who shaped the spine of his personal get together, the Awami League (AL). However nearly 50 years after Rahman was killed within the 1975 navy coup, the system’s results are being felt by the 400,000 younger graduates who annually compete for the three,000 or so much-coveted civil service vacancies. 

The quota is broadly seen as a approach of entrenching the ability of Rahman’s daughter, Sheikh Hasina, who has been PM for the previous 15 years. She’s a compelling determine, stated Mujib Mashal in The New York Instances. A secular Muslim given to sporting vibrant saris, she has fought Islamic militancy, lifted hundreds of thousands out of poverty and by some means managed to maintain on good phrases with each India and China. However her rule has been marred by voter fraud, corruption and, most of all, her unwavering tendency to reward AL supporters whereas searching for vengeance in opposition to heirs of the 1975 coup plotters.

‘Calamitous’ harm 

Her response to the protests was characteristically ruthless, stated The Economist: she lower off the web, and had some 61,000 individuals charged by the authorities. A minimum of her authorities has now had the great sense to scale back the quota to five%. However college students’ grievances are about greater than the quota. 

Virtually each job for educated Bangladeshis “runs by way of the AL”, the scholar wing of which acts as a “murderous vigilante pressure” exercising sway over college life: it even controls the “distribution of scarce rooms for undergraduates”. The AL and Hasina will “in all probability survive for now”; however the harm to her get together, and to her personal standing, might but show “calamitous” in the long run.