Bangladesh Protests Inequality of Opportunity

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Bangladesh Protests Inequality of Opportunity

The video, taken this month, shows a Bangladeshi protester wearing a ****** T-shirt and standing on one side of an empty street. His arms are outstretched, and he is holding a stick in one hand.

Across the street stand several police officers, wearing bulletproof vests and helmets and pointing their guns at him. He does not move, daring the officers to ******.

They begin to *****.

As Bangladesh was going through one of its worst bouts of ********* since it gained independence in 1971, the video — verified by the news agency Storyful and carried by multiple television channels in the country — came to symbolize the helplessness and defiance of student protesters demanding the reform of a system of preferential treatment for coveted government jobs.

The government of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina responded to the escalating protests by deploying ever greater force. Officials shut down the internet. Paramilitary troops were called in. A curfew was declared. Protesters were beaten, and more than 100 were *******. Late on Friday, the government declared a nationwide curfew and brought the army in to restore order. On Saturday alone, the police reported that 12 people had *****.

On Sunday, the Supreme Court of Bangladesh stepped in with a ruling that was a significant concession to the protesters — and one that could open up job opportunities for thousands of students.

The streets of Dhaka, the Bangladeshi capital, were mostly empty after the verdict came down. A few protests were still going on, and helicopters were circling overhead as military patrols drove around the city. Some students said that they would continue to protest until the bill supporting the ruling was formally passed.

The protests erupted out of students’ anger at a quota system for public-sector jobs that benefited certain groups, including the families of war veterans. Collectively, the quotas added up to 56 percent of all government jobs.

Under the Supreme Court’s orders, Bangladesh will now reserve only 7 percent of those posts, a move that will open up many more civil service jobs to university students, who had called for a merit-based system.

The children and grandchildren of those who fought for the country’s independence from Pakistan in 1971 will have a quota of 5 percent, down from 30 percent. The ruling abolishes quotas for women and for those from certain districts. It also cuts the quota of jobs for ******* minorities to 1 percent, from 5 percent, but leaves in place the 1 percent of jobs that are currently reserved for people with disabilities.

Analysts say the weekslong revolt reflected a broader resentment over the uneven distribution of wealth and opportunity in an economy that has begun to wobble after years of rapid growth.

The protests expressed the “frustration many people feel about how economic growth has been uneven, and there is huge inequality and ***********,” said Pierre Prakash, director of the Asia Program at the International Crisis Group. “The quota protest is just the manifestation of a widespread malaise that’s not just about quotas but also economic and political.”

In recent decades, Bangladesh’s economy has lifted millions out of ******** on the back of a robust garment-export industry. But the coronavirus pandemic hit hard, with consumers around the world cutting back on clothing purchases and remittances from the diaspora falling. At the same time, consumers endured an inflationary burst, with food and fuel costs rising sharply.

Inflation ******** high at 10 percent, and the pace of job creation has slowed. As of 2022, the youth unemployment rate, at 16.1 percent, was about

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.

Public-sector jobs are desirable because they are stable and prestigious, and they come with generous benefits. But they are tough to obtain. Every year, roughly 4,000 government positions open up, and more than 300,000 students compete for them.

Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the country’s founding leader and father of the current prime minister, Ms. Hasina, created the quota system in 1972 to ensure that the thousands of men and women who fought in the war of independence from Pakistan would be taken care of.

The quota was extended in 1997 and in 2010 to include the children and then grandchildren of war veterans, leading to the perpetuation of a favored class that many deemed unfair, especially since many of the fighters had retired or *****.

Ferdie Hossain, 34, an alumnus of the University of Dhaka, where the protests started, said the idea of quotas for those known as freedom fighters made sense as a reward at the time. People were even willing to tolerate the extension of those quotas for the offspring of those fighters, said Mr. Hossain, who left Dhaka in 2009 and now works as a financial analyst in Wales. “If it’s the family and children, it’s fine,” he said.

But the anger began building after the quota was extended to the freedom fighters’ grandchildren in 2010, he noted.

Over time, guaranteed government jobs created a “political class” and a hierarchy, as well as a class of wealthy people, said Saad Hammadi, a policy and advocacy manager at the Balsillie School of International Affairs in Waterloo, Ontario. That, along with the rising cost of living and clampdowns on free expression, brought Bangladeshis to this moment, Mr. Hammadi added.

“It was a volcanic eruption of all the frustrations people had been living with,” he said.

Other factors fueled the anger, including ***********. Last year, Bangladesh was

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out of 180 countries on an annual *********** index released by Transparency International, a global nonprofit.

Students and analysts said it was not unusual for someone to bribe an official for a government post or for the questions to an exam. Local papers recently reported on a long-running scheme to ***** exam question papers, including those for the Bangladesh Civil Service exam, which is the qualifying test for a government job.

Anti-quota protests have erupted many times in the past two decades. The most recent demonstrations had their roots in a student movement that started in 2018 and that led Ms. Hasina to abolish the system. But after a lawsuit by the descendants of some freedom fighters, a court in June reinstated the quotas, which set off renewed protests.

Initially peaceful, the demonstrations intensified after a news conference in which Ms. Hasina called the protesters “razakars” — a derogatory term for those who supported Pakistan during Bangladesh’s independence war.

“We demanded rights, but we got called ‘razakar,’” students chanted for days on the streets of Dhaka. As their cries faded amid the government’s crackdown, some Bangladeshi emigrants took up the cause. Last week, around 1,000 protesters gathered in Times Square in Manhattan, chanting, “We want justice.”

Mr. Hammadi, who is from Bangladesh, said he had felt helpless and heartbroken, especially when he saw the video clip of the student with his arms outstretched.

“It could be a heroic representation of a student protest for justice,” he said of the images.

Saif Hasnat contributed reporting from Bangladesh.

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