Bangladesh’s Protests Have Been Decades in the Making

In early July, thousands of protesters took to the streets of Bangladesh after Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s proposed 30% reservation, or quotas, in the public sector jobs for descendants of muktijoddhas (freedom fighters), or veterans of Bangladesh’s 1971 war of independence. Previously, the government had reserved a certain number of jobs for minority and oppressed groups, including disabled people, women, and people from underdeveloped districts. The largest number of seats, 30%, however, was controversially reserved for children of 1971 veterans, and the new law now expanded to include grandchildren of muktijoddhas.

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The connection between Hasina and the 1971 war of independence was personal. She was the daughter of the legendary Sheikh Mujibar Rahman—who led the country to liberation from Pakistan in 1971, becoming its first Prime Minister, only to be assassinated in 1975 in a military coup. Hasina first came to office in 1996, serving until 2001, and then again in 2008, serving until her recent ouster.

Protesters rightly understood this new law as a way to secure even larger number of jobs for those connected with the ruling party, the Awami League. The protests began largely with students and young people. Sheikh Hasina’s administration responded with violence. Police shot down unarmed students in the street.  

But such strong-arm tactics only bolstered the protests, which then spread to almost the entire nation. Hasina fled the country and is now in exile, and the ruling party, Awami League has been driven from government.

Such a dramatic turn of events may be shocking, but it is not surprising. For over 40 years, a dark history of austerity in the global south, orchestrated in part by institutions based in the global north, has targeted a generation of workers, whose lives have been devastated by successive regimes of government. The resentments that surfaced in recent months were decades in the making.

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Bangladesh’s rapid rise on the development ladder over the past four decades has obscured a sharp decline in living standards and conditions for the vast majority of citizens, especially workers and peasants. In 1986 Bangladesh was one of the first countries to come under the Structural Adjustment Facility set up by the IMF. For decades the country’s economy was subordinated to the guidelines and targets laid down by the IMF and the World Bank. “Garments” and “microfinance,” both of which fueled Bangladesh’s rapid economic growth, were projected as magic bullets to poverty.

Structural Adjustment programs demanded public expenditure be redirected from the welfare sector to export-oriented trade. While health and education sectors were deregulated, export-oriented textile factories— “garments”—mushroomed, employing close to 4 million workers, mostly women.

Low wages, unsafe working conditions, and rampant sexism defined workplace culture in these factories, reminiscent of textile factories of 19th-century New York. Wages for Bangladesh’s garment workers, now 12,500 BDT ($113) per month, are still among the lowest in the world. It’s less than wages in neighboring Pakistan and India, and less than Cambodia and Indonesia.

In 2013, more than 500 workers died and 2,500 were injured in the collapse of a building at Rana Plaza in Dhaka. The building had housed five garment factories that made clothes for leading global north retailers. In response, Hasina commented: “Accidents happen.” They certainly did. But some of the leading industry bosses, including the owner of Rana Plaza, had links with the Awami League, some had even served as MPs for the party.

Much like the garment industry, the push to strengthen the economy through microfinance also had negative outcomes for the most vulnerable, especially women. Microfinance became a global buzzword when, in 1983, U.S.-trained entrepreneur Muhammad Yunus established his Grameen Bank in Bangladesh. It provided loans to the rural poor with no collateral requirement. Advocates argued that such loans gave women control over their lives and allowed them to start small businesses independent of patriarchal pressures.

Soon however, economists began to raise alarm bells, drawing attention to the limitations of these market-based empowerment strategies which often pushed women into a debt spiral. Qazi Kholikuzzaman Ahmad, Director of Palli Karma-Sahayak Foundation (PKSF), a monitoring body in Bangladesh, went as far as describing microcredit as a “death trap” for the poor in which interest on loan repayments could be anything between 40% and 100%.”

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Further, the privatization of energy hurt working people in both urban and rural areas, putting energy security out of reach for most. Land grabs and deforestation, encouraged by successive cycles of profit-minded government regimes, uprooted people from their homes and forced many to leave the country altogether. In an extraordinary development, more people worked abroad than in the country’s factories, thus leading to a rapid feminization of the labor force. The GDP grew, but people’s livelihoods and ecosystems were destroyed.

The protests of today are deeply rooted in this history, and the decades of political and economic insecurities it has produced. Hasina has ruled with an iron fist, arresting opposition leaders, sanctioning widespread extrajudicial killings and muzzling the press. According to Amnesty International, her reign saw over 600 cases of enforced disappearances along with an alarming rise in custody deaths and torture. Following the lead of other populists on the global stage, the Awami League rigged elections and used force to determine electoral outcomes.

In 2023, garment factory workers, most of whom are women, started a campaign to raise their poverty-level wages. The government retaliated against them, with the tacit support of the international clothing brands, with arrests, terminations, and killings. According to the international labor rights group Worker Rights Consortium, more than 40 popular brands supported the baseless criminal charges local suppliers brought against these workers.

While students and youth today rightly see the new law of quotas as a way of garnering and institutionalizing support for the Awami League and its affiliates, the government thought it could try its time-honored repression measures on the movement. This time they were wrong.

There are many challenges for the movement ahead. Among them is the anointing of Muhammad Yunus, of microcredit fame and a corporate favorite, to lead the nation. Any new government will also have to contend with a past history of army coup d’etats. And yet, be it in their toppling of an autocrat or in their forming national committees to protect minorities, the students and youth have given the world a glimpse of what real democracy looks like.

Tithi Bhattacharya is an associate professor of South Asian history at Purdue University. Her most recent book Ghostly Past Capitalist Presence: A Social History of Fear in Colonial Bengal has just been published by Duke University Press.

Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.