With many parallels drawn to the storming of the presidential residence in Colombo by protestors of the ‘aragalaya’ movement, the images from Bangladesh yesterday (5), cast a long shadow on the future of the South Asian nation. The storm had been gathering for former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina who was at the helm of the country for nearly one and half decades, and the incidents and suppression exercised by her government over the last few months did little to mitigate the growing crisis, which came to a head yesterday with protestors storming the PM’s residence. 

Bangladesh had been suffering from serious unemployment issues, and that of poverty and economic stability for some time. While Hasina cut and ran, over the border to India, taking flight and arriving at Hindon Air Force base, much to the joy of the protestors, the crisis in Bangladesh, like that of Sri Lanka when Gotabaya Rajapaksa was forced to quit, has not changed much.

Clashes between police and anti-government protesters in Bangladesh resulted in at least 90 deaths on Sunday (4), as initially peaceful student demonstrations morphed into a nationwide campaign of civil disobedience aimed at unseating Premier Hasina, who many observers have labelled autocratic. The protestors were not deterred by announcements of curfews, and despite the Hasina Government once again cutting mobile internet nationwide, hundreds of thousands of protesters took to the street over the weekend with calls to march on the Ganabhaban, the Prime Minister’s official residence in the capital Dhaka. In response, the Police and para military forces had set up roadblocks at major arteries into the city, but students say thousands have already slipped past the security cordon in order to join the demonstrations. According to reports from Dhaka, Hasina had been characteristically defiant till the last moment when she decided to leave. Earlier Hasina had charged that the demonstrators were “not students but terrorists who are out to destabilise the nation.” Nevertheless, the scale and extent of public anger towards her and the ruling Awami League party ultimately saw her vacate post and take flight to India. The ruling party had returned for a fourth term in January elections which were boycotted by the opposition and denounced by observers as neither free nor fair.

Last evening, Bangladesh Army Chief Waker-Uz-Zaman announced that Sheikh Hasina has resigned as the Prime Minister of the country and said he will form an interim government to run the country. “I am taking full responsibility,” the General said in a broadcast to the nation on state television. “We will form an interim government” the General in combat fatigues, stated. There is no clarity of who will be in the said caretaker government. “We will return peace to the country. We ask citizens to stop violence. We will investigate all killings that have happened over the past few weeks,” Reuters quoted Waker-uz-Zaman as saying, adding that he has reached out to the President and the other political parties to consult on forming a government. General Waker-Uz-Zaman has reportedly said that there was no need for curfew or any emergency in the country and promised to find a solution to the crisis by tonight.

Experts have opined that Bangladesh will be heading into a greater crisis situation, and a period of instability. This had also been fuelled by allegations of foreign influence operations and involvement of various foreign intelligence agencies. Sri Lanka also saw similar allegations at the time of unrest, but are yet to be proven. Like in what transpired in Sri Lanka, some experts have called for preliminary steps of establishing order, and law enforcement to be made key issues to be dealt with within the next week or so. 

However, the formation of ‘interim government’ and political upheaval has a dark history in Bangladesh, from 1975 when 1975 the country's first Prime Minister Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, Hasina's father, was assassinated along with most of his family members in a military coup that brought in a long period of military rule. Two more coups in the same year ended with General Ziaur Rahman seizing power in November. Uprisings in 1981, and a bloodless coup in 1982, followed by another army coup in 2007, following which Hasina regained control in 2009, and a half-baked coup attempt in 2012 which was stopped by the Army after a  campaign to introduce Sharia, or Islamic law, throughout the country gives little faith in stability being restored. 

Bangladesh will likely have to return to free and fair polls to regain an ‘acceptable-credible’ mandate to move forward. Until it does, the complete crumbling of authoritarianism remains incomplete.