Students take over Bangladesh’s megacity after ousting Sheikh Hasina

Early on Friday morning, the start of the weekend in Bangladesh, 15-year-old Sania Mahabub Moon and her family members traveled from a nearby village to Dhaka to spend their rest day sweeping roads.

They were among hundreds of schoolchildren, students and volunteers now taking to the streets of Bangladesh’s capital after the sudden fall of the autocratic regime of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, who fled the country on Monday after weeks of anti-government protests.

As police hide in fear of retaliatory violence, children and students are cleaning and repainting Dhaka’s streets with revolutionary slogans, stopping cars for inspection and even guarding Sheikh Hasina’s ransacked official residence, where stray dogs now roam the razed vegetable garden.

“Our country has been destroyed,” Sania said as she swept a main road in central Dhaka, the heart of an urban area of ​​more than 20 million people. “We want to rebuild it.”

After their astonishing success, the students have embarked on a utopian project to transform Bangladesh, a country of 170 million people, the world’s second-largest garment exporter and a strategic partner for India, China and the US.

A new interim government led by Nobel Peace Prize-winning economist Muhammad Yunus, along with student leaders and civil society members, took office on Thursday, promising to reform institutions, end corruption and revive Bangladesh’s economy.

“We don’t want the kind of fascism that Sheikh Hasina practiced ever to return,” said Asif Mahmud, 25, a linguistics student at Dhaka University and a member of the new government. “We want the constitution and other institutions that were compromised under Sheikh Hasina to be restored. We want reforms and research-based policies… We want a system where whoever comes to power is accountable.”

Speaking ahead of his installation as interim leader, Yunus said the government would continue on “whatever path our students show us”.

But despite the students’ enthusiasm, they face enormous challenges in implementing their ambitious vision. Some experts believe they are doomed to fail, risking plunging the country into even more chaos.

Since Sheikh Hasina fled, Bangladesh has suffered an alarming breakdown in law and order, with more than 230 deaths reported by Wednesday evening. The country’s once-celebrated economy is in crisis. And as state institutions are purged of loyalists to Sheikh Hasina’s Awami League, rival parties such as the Bangladesh Nationalist Party are regrouping for a bid for power that some students fear will only prolong the cycle of revenge.

“Professor Yunus is really standing on very shaky ground, however noble the ideas may be,” said Mahfuz Anam, the editor of the leading newspaper The Daily Star. “There needs to be amendments to the constitution, there needs to be a restoration of the balance of power between the legislature, the executive and the judiciary… Name an institution and it has been politicised.”

Yunus said his first priority was to restore public safety and prevent “anarchy.” With police absent and the military overstretched, hundreds of prisoners have escaped from jail and criminal gangs roam the capital at night.

Minorities, particularly Hindus who make up about 8 percent of the population, have been attacked and hundreds have tried to flee to neighboring India, where Hindus are in the majority.

Protesters, angry after years of repression by the Awami League, set fire to police stations, party members’ businesses and symbols of the regime, including a museum in the former residence of Sheikh Hasina’s father, assassinated independence leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman.

The central Dhaka museum is now a charred shell, its floor strewn with ash and broken glass. Crowds explore it with morbid curiosity, snapping photos of wreckage, including a shattered tile mosaic of Sheikh Mujibur.

Sheikh Hasina “ended up as a dictator,” said Farhan Alam, a 20-year-old business student, as he wandered through the burned-out building. “But setting fire to her father’s house was wrong. I am happy that we are finally free from dictatorship, but I am sad about what happened here.”

Sheikh Hasina, the world’s longest-serving female leader, claimed that she had boosted Bangladesh’s economic growth through infrastructure and other development projects.

But her critics blamed her government for extrajudicial killings, rigged elections and rampant corruption. She stacked institutions from the judiciary to university boards with Awami League loyalists and persecuted the BNP, with whom her party traded power for decades in a corrosive and often bloody rivalry that undermined democracy.

Economists have also accused Sheikh Hasina’s government of exaggerating the size of exports to mask the scale of the country’s financial crisis, which has forced Bangladesh to seek IMF aid in 2022 to stabilise falling reserves, inflation and unemployment.

Public anger reached a fever pitch after authorities demanded a tougher crackdown on students who began protesting last month over a controversial job quota system, sparking an uprising against her regime.

Protest leaders see Yunus, founder of the pioneering microfinance institution Grameen Bank and hated by Sheikh Hasina, as a potential rival, and see him as their best candidate to get Bangladesh back on track.

“Dr. Yunus has a worldwide reputation as a trustworthy and honest personality,” said Manzur Al Matin, a Supreme Court lawyer who represented the protesters. “He is known as a good administrator (and) we need someone who can have a direct link with Western powers and the international community.”

But time may not be on Yunus’s side. Some experts say elections should be held within 90 days of the dissolution of parliament on Tuesday, and the BNP — the likely favorite as it stands — is calling for a snap vote.

This has created a potential stalemate. Advisers to Yunus’s interim government insist they need more time to put in place institutional safeguards to end Bangladesh’s toxic political cycle and protect the country from future autocracy. Analysts say history suggests that the BNP, without checks and balances, could be little better than the Awami League.

“If you just go into an election, you are just replacing one party with another,” said Syeda Rizwana Hasan, a prominent lawyer and another new member of the government. “That is not the intention… We have seen that many times before.”

For the students of Dhaka, this week’s uprising was just the first step in their self-proclaimed revolution. Yet even the most sanguine are acutely aware of the enormity of the task.

“We have put our trust in the interim government,” said Amina Akhtar, a 25-year-old who helps direct traffic at an intersection in Dhaka. “But we are afraid that if another government comes, there will be no reforms and the same things will happen again… We have to rebuild this nation.”