Turmoil in Bangladesh: the fury over a quota system

A "bizarre national crisis" has shaken Bangladesh, said Sharmeen Murshid in the Daily Star (Dhaka). It began when students staged protests demanding an end to an outdated quota system that requires 30% of civil service jobs to go to descendants of those who fought in the nation's 1971 war of independence from Pakistan. 

The protests, though peaceful, were met with a wave of police brutality that left around 200 people dead and thousands injured. That led to violence spreading across this nation of 174 million people, so a nationwide curfew was enforced, with soldiers ordered to shoot on sight. In a few days, the chaos abated, but how on earth did "legitimate" protests trigger such an appallingly disproportionate response? 

Entrenching power

The hated quota system was set up more than 50 years ago, by the then prime minister, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the father of the present PM, said Salil Tripathi in Foreign Policy (Washington). The idea was to reward veterans of that bloody war and their descendants – the people who formed the backbone of his own party, the Awami League (AL). But almost 50 years after Rahman was killed in the 1975 military coup, the system's effects are being felt by the 400,000 young graduates who each year compete for the 3,000 or so much-coveted civil service vacancies. 

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The quota is widely seen as a way of entrenching the power of Rahman's daughter, Sheikh Hasina, who has been PM for the past 15 years. She's a compelling figure, said Mujib Mashal in The New York Times. A secular Muslim given to wearing colourful saris, she has fought Islamic militancy, lifted millions out of poverty and somehow managed to keep on good terms with both India and China. But her rule has been marred by voter fraud, corruption and, most of all, her unwavering tendency to reward AL supporters while seeking vengeance against heirs of the 1975 coup plotters.

'Calamitous' damage 

Her response to the protests was characteristically ruthless, said The Economist: she cut off the internet, and had some 61,000 people charged by the authorities. At least her government has now had the good sense to reduce the quota to 5%. But students' grievances are about more than the quota. 

Almost every job for educated Bangladeshis "runs through the AL", the student wing of which acts as a "murderous vigilante force" exercising sway over university life: it even controls the "distribution of scarce rooms for undergraduates". The AL and Hasina will "probably survive for now"; but the damage to her party, and to her own standing, could yet prove "calamitous" in the long term.