“Mental Sickness”: Facing Authoritarian Implacability in Bangladesh
Naveeda Khan, Johns Hopkins University, nkhan5@jhu.edu
This is a short thought piece on what the current student protests in Bangladesh can tell us about a certain aspect of government, even one democratically elected, that of authoritarian implacability in the face of legitimate claims upon it. And what it can show us on how to be nimble in the face of such a lack of recognition, no matter how outpowered one may be. Sitting at a Dhaka movie theater in a mall in Rifles Square, renamed Shimanto (Border) Square on account of it being managed by the Border Guard Bangladesh (go figure), I can’t help feeling a bit queasy about my decision to seek out entertainment while student protests and attacks on them rage in every district in Bangladesh. At the same time, the film is none other than Toofan (Storm) a 2024 runaway blockbuster directed by Raihan Rafi, a young filmmaker in the cast of Quentin Tarantino, which charts the rise to absolute power and capture of the national government by a “born killer”.
This figure is catapulted into this trajectory of violence by the shocking murder of his father. He extracts righteous but brutal revenge on his father’s killers. It marks him as a beast, drawing him to the attention of other mafia dons who wish to instrumentalize his viciousness for their own ends, but which wish ends badly for them leaving Toofan as the all-powerful figure. It may be disappointing that he accrues all this power to merely demand a cut of every business transaction that comes into the country but it seems to say that the premature loss of a parent produces a deep psychic hunger within one that may only be soothed by a constant stream of offerings of illegitimate financial gains.
The origin story of the figure resonates with that of Sheikh Hasina, the prime minister of Bangladesh, although Rafi likely did not intend this given that the psychic wounds of male thugs are a persistent element in all his films. Faced with such a protagonist, people accompanying me at the movie theater exchange knowing looks while sharing text messages that report that there are shootings at the protests and that specific universities are under attack, presumably by police forces and university goons sympathetic to the sitting government. Others in the theater shout out lines from the film ahead of the actors, indicating that they have seen it many times before. Likely the film provides a cypher to the country’s leader and the political infrastructure she has erected about her.
A consistent theme in Toofan is that there is an irreducible relationship between power and the capture of the economy to feed oneself and one’s clients. Cuts of every deal, manifest in bundles of money in bags, not even briefcases as that would make it too white collar, lead to access to an incredible personal arsenal with what is called online as “exotic weaponry,” uniformed men with guns, fancy cars, beautiful women, and palaces with lush grounds, now scarce and enclosed in a once green Dhaka. The film proclaims, big is beautiful.
It is precisely the largeness of a real-life sacrificial goat bought for the enormous sum of Takas 12 lacs (TK 1,200,000, approximately $10,000) whose picture, posted by its eager buyer on Instagram, that first drew the attention of Bangladesh’s newspapers and Anti-Corruption Commission (ACC) to the government official, Matiur Rahman, the President of the National Board of Revenue’s Customs, Excise, and VAT Appellate Tribunal, whose son was the eager Instagrammer. While Rahman initially denied that the young man posing with the goat was his son he was revealed to be the “goatfather”, and he and various members of his immediate family were found to have wealth that far exceeded his monthly salary of TK80,000 (approx. $681).
I enumerate some of the wealth found to be associated with Rahman to give a sense of the sublime of greed at work in this milieu, as these revelations have been followed by newspaper exposés of many others within the current administration with more exposures expected. Newspapers report that a Dhaka court has ordered to seize Rahman’s moveable properties of TK 13,44,36,471 (approximately $1.14 million) from 116 bank accounts and to freeze 23 beneficiary accounts dealing with share markets. Immoveable properties include 2367.05 decimals (approx. 23 acres of land) and four flats (7,248 sq. ft.). The ACC contends that Rahman has acquired wealth of hundreds of crores of taka (with TK 100 crore being $8 million, possibly up to $80 million) in a country where the per capita income is approx. TK 300,000 or $2500, most of this through insider trading.
While there is a travel ban on Rahman and his family, no such ban was extended to Benazir Ahmed, the Inspector General of the Bangladesh Police previously Director General of Rapid Action Battalion (RAB), the notorious elite force of the police. The ACC is also investigating him following a newspaper exposé of his land holdings disproportionate to his earnings. However, he was able to leave the country with his family members with no one aware of his whereabouts.
As an aside Benazir Ahmed features in All the Prime Minister’s Men, a 2021 Al-Jazeera documentary on the corrupt army official and policemen loyal to Sheikh Hasina, who are linked to criminals and shadow economies, and who she is said to assiduously protect for their loyalty. It is noteworthy that having the army in one’s pocket is quite a feat in praetorian states like Bangladesh and Pakistan. And, not unlike Toofan, Hasina is known to be both vengeful and loyal, a brand of politics well on display in her responses to the present quota-reform movement with which the student protests and the violence against them are associated.
As with recent social movements associated with Bangladeshi youth (see the 2013 Shahbag Movement and the 2018 Road-Safety Protests), the quota-reform movement is more than the sum of its parts. Under Sheikh Hasina, freedom fighters, as those who fought in in the 1971 liberation war against Pakistan are called, have been made a special class, and given a wide range of social welfare benefits, including generous old age funds, and scholarships for their children’s education and that of their grandchildren. In 2018 she further declared that 30% of all jobs within civil service would be given to freedom fighters’ descendants. There was countrywide protest at that time as that would make 50% of all public jobs be allocated through quotas, including 10% for women and another 10% for various other categories (differently abled, indigenous groups, etc.). The protest led her to unilaterally scratch all quotas, even those of women and other groups. While clarifying that they had not asked for this, but for a more reasonable quota system, such that civil service positions earmarked for those who fell within a quota would not go indefinitely unfilled, and that such jobs were not bureaucratically impossible to apply for within the wider context of rampant joblessness, students nonetheless expressed gratitude for Sheikh Hasina’s decision. They hailed her as the “Mother of Education”.
In June 2024 at the writ petition of a group comprising descendants of freedom fighters, the Dhaka High Court decided that the abolishment of quotas through a mere circular was not correct procedurally and reinstated the quota system, while asking the government to undertake procedurally correct reform. The students from the various universities in the districts of Dhaka, Chittagong, Comilla, Jessore, Rangpur and Rajshahi again took to the streets to protest this increase of quotas, now demanding that merit be reinstated as the criterion for getting a job. While such emphasis on merit usually hints at the resentment of middle-class youth being edged out of spaces of privilege, the students involved in the protest are far more economically and sociologically diverse. For instance, Abu Sayed, a student of English at Begum Rokeya University in Rangpur, gunned down by policemen on 16th July, was reported to be the youngest of a family of nine, whose brothers and sisters were investing in his college education because they were unable to afford educations of their own and wanted to have one brother enjoy an educated life.
I arrived in Dhaka on July 2, 2024 exactly as the protests took off and have been tracking the conversations around me. In the early days I was told by my friends and acquaintances that these were largely peaceful gatherings of students who refused to be associated with any political parties, including the ruling party, Awami League, and the usual opposition party, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), so that their demands not be instrumentalized by either, or any imputed association made the pretext for the usual violence that the parties train on each other. This strategic apoliticism also made it possible for them to band together across class, gender, region and the usual public institution vs. private institution, and religious vs. secular divides. An artist acquaintance who is my age said that she had been glued to the screen since the start of the movement. What particularly riveted her were the large numbers of women at the frontline of this movement. She said self-mockingly, “It took so much courage and reading Taslima Nasrin for us to speak in public and these young women just speak spontaneously, eloquently and from their hearts.” I asked what channels she was watching. She laughed, “I don’t think anyone at the house I am staying at even knows where the remote for the television is. We watch everything over YouTube on our computers.”
I too took to watching streamed interviews of students, including of a few claiming to be from families of freedom fighters, giving impassioned speeches on the need for quota reform. Although inspired by the students, people were also nonplussed as to why the state was allowing the students to gather and hadn’t unleashed violence on them. Some tried to speculate on an angle from which it suited the state to have the students gather. They didn’t have to wait too long. At her first press conference upon returning from her official trip to China on 14th July, Sheikh Hasina was asked about her reaction to the quota reform movement. She had already been complaining about those raising questions as to whether she had returned earlier than expected from Beijing because she had failed to get the deals for which she had gone, saying that she wondered why people said such nasty things.
I found her response interesting because instead of taking criticisms of her visit to be par for the course of being a politician and giving an account of her visit, she personalized them, seeing them as only a bid to humiliate her, projecting “mental sickness” onto her critics, and saying that she generally ignored them. In effect, she was saying that she ignored all criticism of her as only the mentally sick would criticize her. Irate at these unfair representations of her, Sheikh Hasina appeared to snap when asked about the students. She said, “If the grandchildren of the freedom fighters don’t get quota benefits, should the grandchildren of razakars get the benefit?”
As an aside, razakar’ refers to those who helped the then-West Pakistani forces in their death-dealing attacks on the then-East Pakistan, later Bangladesh, in 1971. It is a term that has acquired more and more baleful elements across Bangladesh’s history to indicate not just traitors in that historical juncture, but enemies within the body of the nation who need to be excised. And with these fateful words, perhaps inadvertently uttered, an entirely new dimension was added to the quota-reform movement.
In what follows I track how the students quickly grasped the possible import of Sheikh Hasina’s words and attempted to deflect them, so that the title of ‘razakar’ would not stick to them. In interviews they speculated that they had been allowed to grow in numbers to enable the Prime Minister to point to them as reactionary forces against the founding of the country and those who fought for it to be birthed. And as if to prove them right, the police who had previously stood by now attempted to disperse them by shooting tear gas at them and injuring several of them. Abu Sayed, the erstwhile student of English, was killed in this first round of violence. They produced a new slogan:
Who am I? Who are you? We are razakar.
We went to ask for our rights. We became razakar.
In other words, Sheikh Hasina had fallen back on the oldest language game in Bangladesh, that of pointing out traitors, instrumentalizing it for her own benefit to disacknowledge sincere claims upon her by the young. It was left unsaid that if she could make razakars of those she considered her opponents, then she could make freedom fighters of those who were her loyalists. Her quota for freedom fighters was undoubtedly for her own chosen people. And on cue, Sheikh Hasina gave out a statement referring only to the first line of the slogan to complain, “What is this country in which even girls would refer to themselves as razakars?”
In other words, she continued to play her own version of the game, not recognizing that she had been elicited into showing how her words only refer to realities of her framing. A second version of the slogan also made its rounds (see poster below). It went like this:
Who am I? Who are you? We are razakars.
Who said this? Who said this? Autocrats, autocrats.
Poster bearing the protestors' slogan (Photograph by author)
As we have seen before, Sheikh Hasina takes words of criticism of her very personally. ‘Autocrat’ or ‘Shoyirachar’ functioned like a personal slur, insulting to her and by extension to her loyalists. In her name, purportedly to protect her from such defamation, members of the Chatro League (Student League), the youth arm of the Awami League, otherwise considered university goons, went on a country-wide rampage against the unarmed student gatherings in the second round of violence against them. Fitted with helmets and hockey sticks, they beat the students, many of whom fought back. In one day, July 17, 2024 during the second round of violence, hundreds were wounded and at least six dead, including men of the Chatro League. And now the students shrieked with demands for justice. One young girl, with bandage around her arm, said in an impassive tone to the interviewer, “I came out even though I was injured last night. I told my father that if I am killed, not to bury me until after this movement has succeeded. And I will be buried with my fellow students.” Overnight the students added a retraction of Hasina’s slur and a public apology to the students among their demands.
On the religious holiday of Ashura, on the 12th day of the Islamic month of Muharram on July 18, 2024, Sheikh Hasina appeared on television in a black sari. Likely she did this to commemorate the tragedy at Karbala, but undoubtedly to disallow any theological parallels being drawn between herself and Yazid, the king who had Imam Ali’s son and grandson killed to destroy any familial claim upon succession within Islam. Yazid is the figure of injustice within Islamic History. She now provided a narrative of events to show how quota reform was being conducted through due process, to paint the students as immature and irrational. She called for all universities and colleges to be shut, showing that the Mother of Education was a devi, capable of both beneficence and malevolence. Displeased with them, she would now take away their access to education. She asked also that student hostels, called “halls,” be shut. In response, the students took possession of the halls.
In interviews with them conducted through bars secured by them, they said that they had purged all goons associated with political parties from the halls, that they would not tolerate being associated with any political party or agenda, that they were representing only themselves and their legitimate demands. To reclaim the narrative of 1971, they drew a direct parallel between themselves and the students who had stood up to the Pakistani establishment and military, who had seized the halls, purged them of razakar, and who were killed for their actions. A document dated July 17, 2024, titled “An Urgent Announcement” from the “General Students, University of Dhaka” circulated online in which they parodied state enforced university notices of hall closures to say to university teachers and administrators that on account of the university being closed, they, the officials, were to leave their university offices and housing forthwith.
Parody Letter from the "General Students, University of Dhaka"
The students persisted within the halls. And now the full force of the state has come down on them. We received this parody of a circular and learned about gun shots and possible deaths while still in the cinema hall on July 17, 2024. Yesterday, July 18, 2024 the internet was so slow as to be impossible to use. Sheikh Hasina has said that her government is going to take a firm hand in quelling violence by the students. Today, there is a total internet and data blackout on the entire country with no way to get news except through the newspapers and people walking off the streets, dazed and shocked at the violence against students, passersby, ordinary citizens by the Chatro League, who are calling everyone razakar. I received a text travel advisory from my university asking if I needed assistance in leaving the country.
There is much more to say here but I want to stop to point to the fact that yet again we see a ruler, as we have seen with Joe Biden in the face of student entreaties to him to prevent the massacre in Gaza, whose disposition is implacability in the face of youth demands. Such an aspect cannot but be called authoritarian. The students here as elsewhere show themselves to be eloquent, organized, supportive of one another, strategically nimble, funny, and very very brave, as were a few in Toofan’s immediate circle: that’s all it took.
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Note from 27th July: Please also see:
Seuty Sabur and Shehzad M Arifeen's article "The Shifting Political Field and the Price of Permanent War" in The Daily Star (Dated 26th July)
Navine Murshid's article "Searching for Answers" in The Dhaka Tribune (Dated 25th July)