Originally posted in The Indian Express on 30 August 2024
The economic reality that brought Bangladeshi students to the streets also made it a mass movement later on. The interim government must heed the spark that lit the fire
Among the different drivers underpinning the victorious students-mass movement in Bangladesh, the economic factors stand out on their own for a number of reasons. This is true both for why the students had launched the movement in the first place, and why the common people joined the students in the final phase in such overwhelmingly large numbers.
As is known, the student movement was triggered by the quota system concerning access to government jobs. The agenda acquired heightened importance in Bangladesh in recent years in the backdrop of an increasingly tight jobs market, particularly for the educated youth. Tension around access to jobs was, in fact, brewing for some time.
According to government data, about a third of Bangladesh’s workforce is not in employment, education or training. And while the average unemployment rate is shown to be low, the unemployment rate among the educated youth is three times higher than the national average. There was a lot of frustration among the educated young because not enough jobs were being created in the economy. Private sector investment has stagnated at around 23-24 percent of the GDP over the past several years. Consequently, employment opportunities in the corporate and the formal sectors of the economy, where educated youth could be absorbed, were highly limited.
Students from non-affluent families were getting admitted to private universities in a very large number to get higher education at considerable expenses to their families. The public education system itself was also preparing graduates in large numbers owing to the unplanned establishment of institutions of higher learning and the national university system. However, there was no strategic vision on creating opportunities for employment or entrepreneurial activities for the young people graduating from these institutions. The higher the level of education, the higher the level of unemployment among his or her cohort—that was the new normal. The dreams of many students for a secure job remained unfulfilled. They were not being able to attain their aspirations, and live up to the expectations of their parents.
In this backdrop, government jobs offered one of the very few openings for the young graduates coming out of the education system. For every opening for government jobs, the number of applicants, however, ran into hundreds. As 30 percent of these government jobs were reserved for the children and grandchildren of freedom fighters, other students demanded that the quota system be reformed. They felt that the tight job market was becoming even tighter and the window of opportunity for them was shrinking further because of this.
The quota was also seen as a tool to distribute favours to the party faithful who sometimes undeservedly took advantage of the system. Students wanted the issue of access to public jobs to be decided more on the basis of merit than a quota system that provided perpetual advantage to a specific group. Note that in the initial phase, the students’ movement centred on the demand for reformation of the quota system—that is, a reduction of the quota, not its abolition.
Gradually, the students began to see the quota system and the discrimination it represented as a reflection of the pervasive discrimination and inequalities existing in the society. In the face of the government’s insensitivity to the students’ demands, and its high-handed and brutal treatment of protestors, the students began to realise that the quota system was a symptom of greater malaise in the economy, society and polity—a reflection of increasing authoritarianism and autocratic attitude on the part of former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina.
They saw her regime as promoting crony capitalism that was built on a powerful alliance of loan defaulters and bank plunderers, tax dodgers, corrupt political elites and complacent bureaucrats who were looting the nation’s resources and transferring them overseas through money laundering and capital flight. The government was perceived as perpetrators and originators of a system that was founded on economic and social injustice. Soon, the protest for ‘reformation of the quota system’ transformed itself into an ‘anti-discrimination students’ movement’.
The students’ perception was shared by large segments of the society who were having to bear the brunt of a corrupt system on a daily basis. They experienced the reality of a parallel narrative of distributive injustice and growing disparity in terms of income, consumption and wealth, as against the government narrative of high GDP growth, accelerated poverty alleviation and development of infrastructure. Alarmingly, the difference in income between the top 5 percent and bottom 5 percent of the population rose from 31 times to 82 times between 2010 and 2022, according to official data.
The double-digit inflation of the last two years further exacerbated the hardships of not only the marginalised, vulnerable and low-income groups, but also the middle class. Food inflation in July 2024, on a month-on-month basis, was more than 14.0 percent. The masses were experiencing a gradual decline in their purchasing power and standard of living. Common citizens were silent witnesses to a system that rewarded the corrupt and the politically connected, and did not value merit and talent.
Thus, it was perhaps to be expected that the students’ demand for justice would find ready resonance with the sentiment of the general populace. When the people joined the students, the movement quickly transformed into a one-point demand—the removal of Sheikh Hasina. It took immense courage and unprecedented sacrifice on the part of the students and the people, but their demand met with success on August 5, the day the students called the “36th of July”—to commemorate the movement’s beginning the month before—when Hasina was compelled to flee the country and take refuge in India.
Thus, without doubt, there was a strong economic rationale from which the students-mass movement originated and drew strength. As the new interim government gets on with the formidable task of governing the country at a most challenging time, it will need to prioritise initiatives and actions to address the aspirations that informed and inspired the movement launched by the students, and then joined by the masses, in the first place.
– Mustafizur Rahman | Distinguished Fellow, Centre for Policy Dialogue, Dhaka