Quota or merit?” a young woman shouted into a microphone at Dhaka’s busy Shahbagh intersection as I walked by a few days ago.
“Quota or merit?”
She was sitting on the road, surrounded by students and young university graduates.
Cars and buses crammed with home-bound commuters veered around the roadblocks set up to separate the group from the traffic
“Quota or merit?” she shouted again.
“Merit! Merit!” responded the crowd.
Since late June, groups of protesters like this one had been occupying parts of Bangladesh’s capital city, demanding an end to a quota system that reserves 30% of Bangladesh’s government jobs for descendants of those who fought in the country’s 1971 war for independence from Pakistan.
In the following days, a government crackdown on such protests has caused at least 147 deaths.
University campuses become battlegrounds
Shahbagh, which sits at the entrance to the University of Dhaka, has been one of the main protest venues. It has been a major staging ground for public protests for more than a decade.
These demonstrations had been largely peaceful until mid July when the atmosphere began to get tense. Social media sites like Facebook were heating up with posts for and against the protests – the latter mainly coming from the government loyalists.
On July 15, a day after my visit to Shahbagh, the situation took a sharp turn as activists from the Bangladesh Chhatra League (BCL) – a student group affiliated with Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s ruling Awami League Party – descended on the protesters with sticks and batons.
Dozens were injured.
“BCL has decided to handle the quota movement politically,” said Saddam Hussain, who leads the government-loyalist student group, speaking to a group of journalists.
Pictures of injured, blood-soaked protesters – including female students – went viral on social media.
“I could not sleep that night after seeing those pictures – I wept,” Golam Shimul told me over the phone. Shimul had coordinated a previous anti-quota movement in 2018 in Narayanganj – a city about 29km south of Dhaka.
A demonstrator gestures as protesters clash with Border Guard Bangladesh and the police as violence erupts across the country after anti-quota protests by students, in Dhaka, Bangladesh, July 19, 2024. REUTERS/Mohammad Ponir Hossain
“It may not be safe here”
The next evening, as I headed out for a walk after work, a series of molotov cocktails exploded on Purana Paltan lane – a street right by my house.
A young man on a motorcycle sped away through a crowd of shocked onlookers.
That night, all eyes turned to the university campuses – as many of the pro-government BCL activists were forced out of the dorms of public universities.
Protesters from the Jahangirnagar University had a standoff with the police and BCL activists which lasted all night, many of them posting live updates to Facebook.
On July 17, authorities cordoned off some of the public university campuses and the protesting students were removed from their dormitories.
I returned to Shahbagh that afternoon. There was not a single protester to be seen.
A large number of police stood at the entrances to the campus, with government loyalists holding a public meeting right beside them.
I watched from across the street as a group of men with sticks and batons chased a young man and beat him until he managed to escape.
“Recording or taking pictures of all this may not be safe here,” Towhid Jewel told me. A recent graduate from the Shah Jalal University of Science and Technology in the northeastern city of Sylhet, Jewel told me he had moved to Dhaka to look for work.
According to the World Bank, unemployment among young people like Jewel, aged between 15 and 24, is higher than 15%.
Jewel was in Shahbagh that day to join a protest meeting that had cancelled after government loyalists and police had taken control of the area.
The protests spilled onto the streets after police evacuated the campuses.
University students came out in large numbers denouncing the crackdown – and now they were joined by large crowds – including opposition activists and people from nearby neighbourhoods and commercial areas.
The armed police cracked down with force.
The death toll surged.
Thousands were wounded.
“A childhood friend of mine – who worked in a bank – was shot dead in Badda,” Monzur Moin, a trade union leader, told me. His tone was matter-of-fact, but his voice trembled.
The clashes escalated and several public buildings in my city, like the state-owned Bangladesh Television office and several metro stations were set on fire.
We began hearing news from other parts of the country about similar clashes.
Helicopters patrolled overhead as I rushed home to my family in a cycle rickshaw.
Men ride on a motorbike past a damaged vehicle that was set afire by a mob during clashes after violence erupted following protests by students against government job quotas, in Dhaka, Bangladesh, July 22, 2024. REUTERS/Mohammad Ponir Hossain
A curfew and no internet
On the night of Thursday, July 19, the government imposed an indefinite curfew, bringing out the military in armored vehicles who had shoot-on-sight orders.
Tanks were seen at several places in Dhaka.
They also imposed a comprehensive internet outage, and Bangladesh went offline.
Three days later, the Supreme Court scrapped most of the quotas and ruled that 93% of government jobs should be based on merit.
The Prime Minister met up with the country’s business leaders and told them she had to impose the curfew to protect the lives and property of citizens, and blamed opposition parties for stoking the unrest.
The curfew was relaxed for a few hours at noon that day and I went out to visit the places that had seen protests and police crackdowns.
People were out in the streets and lanes, buying essential items.
But the main roads were mostly empty, with barely a pedestrian or rickshaw to be seen.
Wanting to enter the Dhaka University campus I walked up to a checkpoint being guarded by armed troops and showed them my press card.
“We cannot allow anyone in for the time being,” said one soldier.
The internet was still out so I decided to file my stories via text messages.
The government finally restored broadband internet last Wednesday.
Many offices and factories had also reopened.
In business areas like Motijheel, workers and white collar employees were bustling around during the day – as if everything was back to normal.
But the evenings are still a different story.
The curfew resumes at 5 in the evening and runs until 10 the next morning.
The city’s thoroughfares become empty again.
And everything goes quiet.
