How Hasina could stage an unlikely comeback?

Time :

When Sajeeb Wazed Joy’s mom got into hot water, he did what many of us do these days: he messaged the family WhatsApp group. But the trouble in question wasn’t a parking fine or mystery ailment.

Joy’s mother, Bangladesh’s Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina Wazed, was facing a popular uprising intent on forcing her ouster. The cause was the reintroduction of employment quotas for descendants of heroes of the South Asian nation’s 1971 independence struggle led by Joy’s grandfather, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman.

“We were all surprised at the quota movement,” Joy tells TIME in his first U.S. media interview since his mother’s toppling. “In fact, I said in the WhatsApp group, ‘30% quotas are too much; we should reduce it to 5%.’ And someone chimed in, ‘Hey, we’re grandchildren of freedom fighters too.’ And I jokingly replied, ‘That’s why I left 5%!’”

In the end, the quota issue was simply the spark that ignited a powder keg of public discontent over inequality and political repression that exploded over two weeks in July.

After a violent crackdown on peaceful protesters that claimed at least 1,000 lives, the last the world saw of Hasina was as she was being bundled into a military helicopter with protesters closing in. As intruders ransacked her official residence in Dhaka, carrying away keepsakes like clothes and ornaments, Hasina floated through the smoggy skies to India, where she remains till this day, licking her wounds far from public view.

“She’s quite upset and frustrated at the situation in the country that all her hard work over the last 15 years is pretty much coming undone,” says Joy, who runs an IT business in the U.S. and formerly served as an honorary adviser to his mother on technology matters.

Back in Bangladesh, an almighty reckoning is underway. Following 15 years of uninterrupted rule, practically every government institution has been politicised by Hasina’s Awami League party, engendering deep distrust of the military, courts, civil service, and especially security services. The job of piecing back together South Asia’s second biggest economy of over 170 million people has fallen to a motley band of student leaders and the military generals who finally forced Hasina’s resignation.

They enlisted Muhammad Yunus—a Nobel peace laureate and social entrepreneur, who under Hasina faced hundreds of civil and criminal charges he insisted were politically motivated and have now been quashed—to lead the interim government toward fresh elections, which they say may take around 18 months.

In the meantime, a six-pronged reform process is taking place, focusing on the election system, police administration, judiciary, anti-corruption commission, public administration, and national constitution. “The aim of these [reforms] will be the initiation of an accountable political system against corruption, looting, and genocide,” Yunus said in a televised address on Aug. 26. “If we lose this opportunity now, we will be defeated as a nation.”

The weeks since Hasina’s departure have indeed been chaotic given the political and security vacuum. The Awami League has been purged at all levels of government and its members arrested.

Thousands of police deserted lest they be targeted in reprisals (at least 44 officers were killed.) Meanwhile, Khaleda Zia, leader of the main opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) and Hasina’s longtime nemesis, was released from house arrest, and a ban was rescinded on Bangladesh’s main Islamist party, Jamaat-e-Islami.

But the euphoria over Hasina’s exit has since metastasised into bickering over which direction the country should take. On Sept. 31, Transparency International Bangladesh labeled the government’s decision to dissolve a committee charged with reviewing textbooks as a “concerning and dangerous” compromise with Islamic fundamentalists. In response, leaders of the conservative Hefazat-e-Islam advocacy group denounced those concerns as “fascist.”

It’s febrile, messy, and rancorous: all the hallmarks of true democracy, reformists say. Though the fact that no political party is part of the interim government means calls for fresh elections will only get louder. “This government has legitimacy, it has public support, but it doesn’t have popular mandate,” says Mubashar Hasan, a Bangladeshi scholar at the University of Oslo in Norway.

Indeed, reformists are in a quandary. To enact meaningful reforms and hold to account those responsible for abuses will take time, but a rudderless country whose ordinary people struggle economically will soon lose patience. Last week, the Asian Development Bank lowered its growth forecast for Bangladesh’s economic growth from 6.6% to 5.1% due to the political tumult as well as recent catastrophic flooding.

If unrest and paralysis continue, a beleaguered populace may look more fondly at Hasina’s record. Bangladesh was the Asia-Pacific’s fastest growing economy over the past decade, with GDP rising from $71 billion in 2006 to $460 billion in 2022 (even if inequality and political repression equally soared).