By P.K.Balachandran
Colombo, August 8: In a revolutionary move, the Interim Government formed in Bangladesh on Thursday after Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s ouster by a student agitation, includes two student leaders, Nahid Islam and Asif Mahmud.
This may well be the first time in the world that student agitators who had toppled a government have been included in the successor government’s Council.
The 17-member Council of Advisors (the de facto cabinet) formed to assist President Muhammad Shahabuddin is completely non-partisan and representative of diverse interests in Bangladesh.
It has Nobel Laureate Dr.Muhammad Yunus as Chief Advisor. Other members are human rights workers, civil society activists, academics, former bureaucrats, professionals, two student leaders, and an Islamic scholar. For the sake of religious diversity, there is a Hindu and a Buddhist.
The Chief Advisor Dr. Yunus is founder of the Grameen Bank. A Nobel Laureate, he is recognised for his work in making cheap credit available to small farmers and rural artisans. Dr Salehuddin Ahmed is an economist and former Governor of the Bangladesh Bank. Brig.Gen. (retd) M Sakhawat Hossain is a former election commissioner of Bangladesh.
Dr Md. Nazrul Islam is a law professor, constitutional law researcher and civil society activist. Adilur Rahman Khan is human rights activist and founder of Odhikar. A.F Hassan Ariff is a former Attorney General. Md. Touhid Hossain is a former Foreign Secretary.
Syeda Rizwana Hasan is CEO of the Bangladesh Environmental Lawyers Association (BELA). She is a member of the Environmental Law Alliance Worldwide and the Environmental Law Commission of International Unions for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN).
Supradip Chakma is a Buddhist and Chairman of Chittagong Hill Tracts Development Board (CHTDB). He has been diplomat. Farida Akhter is a researcher in agriculture. Dr. Bidhan Ranjan Roy, a Hindu, is Professor of Psychiatry at the National Institute of Mental Health & Hospital. Dr AFM Khalid Hossain is a Deobandi Islamic scholar and a former Vice-President of Hefazat-e-Islam Bangladesh.
Sharmeen Murshid is CEO of the election observation group Brotee. Farooq-e-Azam is a former naval commando and freedom fighter. Nurjahan Begum is a long-standing associate of Muhammad Yunus in Grameen Bank.
The Students
Nahid Islam, a Sociology student at Dhaka University, was a key member of the 13-member coordinating committee of the anti-quota and democracy movement which overthrew Sheikh Hasina. Asif Mahmud, another key student leader in the Council of Advisors, is a Linguistics student in Dhaka University.
Both Nahid and Asif had given the month-long agitation a democratic and inclusive content which attracted wide social support and enabled it to attain its objective of overthrowing the dictatorial Hasina regime.
Nahid Islam was left battered and unconscious under a bridge on 21 July. On, 26 July, he was abducted from the Gonoshasthaya Nagar Hospital in Dhanmondi by persons identifying themselves as personnel from various intelligence agencies.
Asif Mahmud Bhuyain was abducted and tortured on 19 July. He went through interrogation for four days until his release. But on 26 July, Asif was taken from Gonoshasthaya Nagar Hospital by persons who claimed to be personnel from various intelligence agencies and the Dhaka Metropolitan Police.
Nahid, Asif and others in the coordination committee had made it very clear that they were not working for any particular political party. But they insisted that no government could be formed in Bangladesh with persons the committee did not approve. They also stated that they did want army rule either.
It is the coordinating committee headed by Nahid and Asif that invited Dr. Muhammad Yunus to come back from Paris and be the Chief Advisor of the Interim Government.
Students Historical Role
University students have been pioneers in agitation politics both in East Pakistan and in independent Bangladesh. Students were in the forefront of the “Bhasha Andolon”, the language movement of 1952, which had, as its aim, the installation of Bengali as an official language of Pakistan in addition to Urdu.
Twenty-nine students were shot dead in the language movement. April 21 is now observed as the International Mother Tongue Day.
The language movement led by students created freedom fighters like Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and Tajuddin Ahmad. Mujib and Tajudden, among many others, led the freedom movement of 1971 which led to the birth of Bangladesh.
During the latest students’ agitation against Sheikh Hasina, the students proclaimed: “We have not witnessed 1971, we have not witnessed 1952, but we are witnessing 2024, our freedom struggle.”
The 2024 movement is popularly hailed as the “second freedom struggle”.
Occupying streets and public spaces had been a feature of students agitations in East Pakistan and Bangladesh since 1948.
In 2018, school students took up the cause of road safety – after the death of two students in traffic accidents – by occupying streets as part of a collective agenda to reform governance which had been insensitive to peoples’ lives.
Universities and their associated hostels turned into centres of intense student activity and planning from the language movement of 1952 onwards, to the liberation war, and the 1990 agitation that brought down the military strongman General H. M. Ershad.
Universities both in the past and the present have been institutions that are the first to be shut down by the authorities to nip demonstrations or movements in the bud.
Hasina, who won her fourth consecutive term as Prime Minister in January, to become the longest-serving leader in Bangladesh, saw the July 2024 student movement as one instigated and led by her bete noire, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, and the Jamaat-e-Islami. While the BNP matriarch Begum Khaleda Zia was under house arrest on corruption charges, the Jamaat-i-Islami was banned.
Hasina’s decision to use the police and her party, the Awami League’s student leaders to launch brutal attacks on agitating students secured an unprecedented and unexpected backlash which was too much for her to take, especially after the army refused to shoot on students.
“The Prime Minister could have intervened early and restrained the trigger-happy police,” commented political scientist Prof. Imtiaz Ahmed of Dhaka University.
If she had done that, she might not have suffered the ignominy of fleeing the country with only half an hour to go before a massive invasion of her official residence by students.
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