Lal Morich
Lalmorichnews@gmail.com
JULY 25, 2024
We are Lal Morich, a Bangladeshi anti-oppression mass base organization supporting genuine democratic movements just like the students in the quota reform movement who are fighting for something they genuinely believe. We educate, mobilize, and organize the Bangladeshi diaspora on the issues in our desh. Let us update you all on the current situation in Bangladesh since July 15.
Lal Morich stands with the students and masses who are waging a genuine anti-fascist movement against the Hasina-Awami League regime. Since early July, students have taken to the streets to courageously demand reform to the discriminatory civil service job quota system. The protesters are calling for a logical quota system that solely considers gender-oppressed, disabled, and indigenous people and removes the 30 percent quota for the children and grandchildren of freedom fighters, which mainly favors loyalists of the current fascist government.
The Hasina-Awami government initially responded to the protests by calling the protestors “razakars”. This furthered violence against protesters from the ruling party’s student wing, the Chatro League. A few days ago, the government dispatched the military.
The people of Bangladesh are now subjected to military curfew, checkpoints, and shoot-on-sight orders. The government shut down internet access and all but selective state-affiliated media is being censored. The media shutdown makes it difficult to gauge an accurate death toll but reports point to more than 170 deaths and more than 2500 injured by Chatro League, police, BGB, the armed force, and the US-UK trained paramilitary death squad RAB. There are accounts from families that agents from the Indian Intelligence agency, RAW, are carrying out activities in select areas.
The High Courts came to a decision on July 21 to scrap the quota system and create a new quota system, lowering the 30 percent quota for descendants of freedom fighters to 5 percent, and the remaining quotas down to 2 percent. This will open up the remaining 93 percent of jobs for all other Bangladeshis.
However, after the government’s brutal response on the protestors, different sections of students and youth have come to the realization that this is not just a battle for a logical quota system anymore but a fight against Awami League fascism. This is why Lal Morich rallied the Bangladeshi diasporas in Brooklyn, New York to do a mass teach-in on the root causes of the Quota reform movement.
On Saturday, July 20, in Kensington, Brooklyn, Lal Morich held a solidarity action and teach-in about the ongoing quota reform movement. The NYPD surrounded us immediately when we began our protest, attempting to herd and corral us. We responded by pointing to connections between the Bangladeshi police, NYPD and US military. There was a small group of community members, affiliated with the non-profit organization Desis Rising Up and Moving or DRUM, who confronted us in defense of the NYPD. The group began derailing our event, snatching mics from our organizers, and interrupting the march. They insisted that the issue is unrelated to the police in the United States and it’s solely about the police in Bangladesh. However, we understand these struggles are interconnected and our struggles are not isolated from one another. The faster we grasp this, the stronger our unity will be in the long run. The first question for any revolutionary movement is to understand: who is the friend of the people and who is the enemy?
The police exploited the situation and targeted Comrade Moh for Disorderly Conduct as they were using a microphone and criticizing the pro-American police element that drenches our community. Mid Speech and without warning, the comrade was arrested with physical force. Comrade Moh was taken to the 66th precinct where he faced humiliation. He was ordered by police to take off the lace from their pants before going inside the cell. The lace was not coming off so the cops cut the lace holding up his pants. The comrade recalls his pants fell off and he stood exposed for several seconds, while the officer made a joke while touching the comrade in a sexual manner without permission. These sexual and psychological abuse tactics are similar to what Bangladeshi police utilize on protestors to silence them. Additionally, these tactics are no different to tactics used by the IOF on Palestinians.
Let us repeat:
We do not work with cops.
We do not work with politicians.
We will not fall into NGOism.
Regretfully, this disruption derailed us from finishing our teach-in. We did not have the chance to fully highlight the brutal assaults and murders by the Awami League goonda. We did not get to honor the more than 170 martyrs with the vigil they deserved. We want to reiterate our solidarity and our commitment to this fight till the end.
We will not let our genuine solidarity with the mass movements against the fascist Awami regime in Bangladesh be co-opted by supporters of equally reactionary political such as the BNP and Jamaat. We will not tolerate NGOs attempting to cease momentum and misdirect the community’s rising revolutionary consciousness with state-approved pacification. We will continue to help build a movement by the masses for the masses, for a true liberation of the people of Bangladesh and its diasporas.
The fascist regime recognizes that the movement is no longer just about the Quota system, which is why they are doing everything in their power to weaken it. They have kidnapped and tortured leaders of the central movement. They have arrested over 500 people and filed over 60,000 reports against dissenters. Hasina is currently going on a PR tour to appease the foreign powers she sells the livelihood of the Bangladeshi masses to. If it was not enough for the Awami government to opportunistically posture against the genocide in Gaza, despite purchasing Israeli spyware, the Bangladesh Ministry of Information and Broadcasting is now taking a page out of the Israeli toolkit to accuse opposition parties of using student protestors as “shields”.
We must fight the tyranny of the fascist Sheik Hasina and Awami League. We must not let this fight end in yet another regime change between Awami League and its equally Fascist counterparts. We must build a united front against fascism, in all its forms, in Bangladesh.
We call for the resignation of the Hasina-Awami League and the call to build an anti-fascist front in Bangladesh against Awami-Hasina Fascism.
Bangladesh: The defiance continues (plus statements from South Asian left)
First published at Asian Marxist Review. Edited for clarity by LINK International Journal of Socialist Renewal.
Despite the state crackdown on protesting students and shutdown of all educational institutions throughout the country, on July 17 hundreds of students gathered in Dhaka University to pay their respect at the public funeral of six fellow students who had fallen the previous day. At least 105 protestors have been killed so far by state and paramilitary forces. Videos being shared on social media depict a civil war-like situation emerging in the country.
Students across Bangladesh are grieving, but their anger and grief is fueling a heroic movement of resistance and defiance. As these lines are being written, protesters are setting fire to the state broadcasting station, moments after despotic prime minister Sheikh Hasina Wajid appeared on state television. In another incident, the Rapid Action Battalion police force reported rescuing 60 policemen from Canadian University via helicopter. Such is the extent of rage and the will to fight the brutal Hasina dictatorship.
As reported by the Guardian, the government has now declared a national curfew and announced plans to deploy the army to tackle the country’s worst unrest in a decade, after student protesters stormed a prison and freed hundreds of inmates. On July 12, a communications blackout was imposed across the country, with mobile internet access and social media blocked by the government.
Over the past weeks, students in Bangladesh have been protesting the Supreme Court’s restoration of an unfair and politically motivated quota system in government jobs [first introduced in 1972]. The new wave of protests is the continuation of the 2018 protest movement — which resulted in more than 250 casualties — against the same quota system. At the time, Hasina was forced to revoke the controversial quota system. However, after six years she was able to reinstate it through the conventional backdoor of the capitalist state: the higher judiciary.
According to the quota system, 56% of government jobs are reserved, with 30% allocated to the grandchildren of veterans of the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War and 26% set aside for women, disabled individuals, ethnic minorities and those from backward districts. Students are primarily calling for the revocation of the 30% reserved for freedom fighters’ grandchildren, while supporting the limited retention of quotas for the other categories.
The quota was originally established to honour and support the families of veterans who had died or were injured during the liberation war. However, contrary to the original intent, the quota system has gradually become a political tool for Hasina and her Awami League to maintain their control over the state by filling key posts with loyal supporters, rewarding stooges at the expense of the deserving, corrupting the youth, and sowing seeds of division among the working masses.
In Bangladesh, first and second-tier government jobs are among the few decent employment opportunities available for youth, particularly new university graduates. Other important sectors include the agriculture, garments and information technology industries. However, employment opportunities in these sectors are fairly limited. Moreover, working conditions are horrible and wages are terrible. Most workers are grossly underpaid and overworked to the extent of exhaustion.
According to official sources, 41% of youth in Bangladesh are inactive. This means they are neither in education or employment, nor receiving job training. Moreover, up to 66% of university graduates are unemployed. So much for the economic miracle of Bangladesh under Hasina’s administration being touted everywhere by the apologists of neoliberalism!
Junior employees at workplaces often face abuse from higher-ups, which can include physical mistreatment and sexual harassment. A vast majority of private sector employees fail to make a decent living for themselves and their families. Rising unemployment since the COVID crisis — 5.1% in 2023, up from 4.5% in 2018 — has made conditions even worse. The actual situation on the ground is obviously far more unpleasant than official unemployment figures. The gap between labour supply and demand not only suppresses wages but also contributes to an overall social environment of underemployment, precarious working conditions, uncertainty and insecurity.
The situation is expected to worsen as the crisis of global capitalism lingers on. Economic indicators for Bangladesh from the last few quarters depict a decline in economic growth. In these conditions, government employment presents a significant attraction for young graduates, despite the relatively modest pay, because of its job security and few additional benefits.
Like other South Asian countries, Bangladesh possesses a youth bulge with 65% of the population under 35, including 45 million or 30% aged 15-24. With only about 1.2% of the population being university graduates, a vast majority is already excluded from competing for relatively decent jobs. Of the few who are included, only about 10% — mostly from the few urban isles in a mostly underdeveloped country — are employed in multinational corporations or their local counterparts, and are therefore able to earn a somewhat reasonable living to afford comparatively decent shelter, food, electricity and other basic needs. For the rest, there are almost no opportunities for upward social mobility, and no hopes for improvement in living standards.
Moreover, the promise of “growth” and “progress” has been oversold to the youth, who now realise that such promises will not materialise for a vast majority of them. In this regard, the current protests are mostly emerging from layers of youth belonging to the middle class or upper crusts of the working class, who see their future plunging into darkness and despair.
Another significant reason for the protests has been the suffocating dictatorship imposed by the Awami League’s government, in power since 2009 and getting more authoritarian with time. Hasina — the 75 years old daughter of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, founding father and first president of the country who was assassinated in a 1975 military coup a few years after taking office — has emerged as another authoritarian figure of neoliberalism in the past decade and a half.
The government frequently attacks dissent on and off campuses, arrests and detains those who criticise its policies, and pursues a policy of repression to the extent of imprisoning teenagers for alleged defamation of the prime minister on social media. The notorious Digital Security Act, adopted in 2018, allows the police to arrest anyone without a warrant. Under this draconian law, numerous political workers and rights activists have been detained and tried merely for speaking out against the regime.
The opposition boycotted the January general election after more than 20,000 of its activists were arrested, allowing Hasina to “win” with virtually no opposition. In this regard, democracy in the country has turned into a façade even according to bourgeois standards.
However, the scenes of brutal state oppression being witnessed in Dhaka and other urban centres, along with the marvellous resistance being offered by Bangladeshi students, are not something unseen and unheard of in the country’s history. The glorious history of rebellion and resistance by the Bengali masses in recent times goes back to the very inception of the country.
Incidentally, the Bangladesh Liberation War against the Pakistani state — now officially being used as a pretext to insult the protesting students by labelling them as Pakistani agents — began with an uprising of students. In November 1968, students in East Pakistan (today’s Bangladesh) and West Pakistan, outraged by the police murder of a fellow student, began protesting against the military dictatorship of Ayub Khan, a lackey of US imperialism. Soon afterwards, workers and peasants across the country — disgusted by the extremely exploitative and repressive state capitalist policies of the regime, which were resulting in ever sharpening class antagonisms — joined the movement, turning it into a popular uprising which not only overthrew the Ayub dictatorship but started challenging the relations of ownership. However, the absence of a revolutionary party with a vibrant program of socialist transformation meant that the state was able to divert the revolutionary movement into the channels of elections and civil war.
In 1970, Mujibur’s left-nationalist Awami League swept the general election in East Pakistan, while Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s radical-left Peoples Party emerged as the biggest electoral party in West Pakistan. Nevertheless, the Awami League was denied the right of forming government by the martial law administration of Yahya Khan. The situation rapidly deteriorated due to a brutal military operation in East Pakistan. The military along with Islamic fundamentalist militias consisting of “Razakars” (“volunteers”) — the label Hasina now uses for protesting students— initiated a frenzy of rape and murder throughout East Pakistan, with estimates of victims ranging between 300,000 and 3,000,000.
In the ensuing civil war, Bengali students, especially from Dhaka University, were at the forefront of struggles for national and class emancipation. The mass revolt, mainly organised through revolutionary people’s militias, defeated the state forces, resulting in the emergence of Bangladesh as an independent country. Yet, the system of class oppression and exploitation was not overthrown, and continued to torment the Bengali masses with ever-increasing intensity, ultimately leading to the current scenario.
The current movement poses an existential threat to Hasina's regime, which may ultimately be forced to offer some concessions and reforms to protesting students. Students, on the other hand, must recognise that reforms, no matter how significant, will eventually be reversed under the worsening crisis of capitalism. The ruling classes, whether represented by Hasina or someone else, will always find ways to counter previous reforms with more vicious attacks. This happened with the victory won by the 2018 protest movement.
History also shows that while students are often the first to rise against oppression and exploitation, their efforts can only go so far without the active participation of the working masses in class struggle. In recent years, the workers of Bangladesh have proven their revolutionary potential through numerous strike and protest movements on burning issues. In this regard, the present movement, by shaking the consciousness of the working masses, could expand in its scope both qualitatively and quantitatively, inevitably putting the question of leadership on the agenda and possibly resulting in new political formations. Advanced layers of the youth with revolutionary aspirations and outlook will have a vital role to play in these political and social processes.
All over the globe, the exploited masses — particularly the youth belonging to the toiling classes, whether students, young workers or unemployed — are going through the most difficult times of the past 70 years or so. Most of them are struggling just to survive, let alone entertain the hopes of a prosperous future. In the post-2008 world, even in developed countries, the new generation is living a life below the standards enjoyed by their parents. This is happening for the first time since World War II, and depicts a deep systemic crisis of capitalism being reflected in protest movements and rebellions in one country after the other.
The current movement in Bangladesh, ongoing mass protests in Kenya, worldwide resistance against the Zionist genocide of Palestinians and the victorious struggle of the masses in Pakistan-administered Jammu Kashmir, along with many similar cases, represent an emerging revolutionary process on an international scale, which will only be able to achieve victory in overthrowing the obsolete capitalist order under a revolutionary leadership.
All-India Students’ Association stands with student protestors in Bangladesh
First published at AISA's website.
When thousands of students hit the universities and streets of Bangladesh demanding a complete strike down of the discriminatory quota system in government jobs, they were met with violent state repression, not just by the police, but also the Bangladesh Chhatra League, the student wing of the ruling party Awami League, who have attacked students with rods, sticks and rocks.
The students and youth are protesting against a job quota system that allows for 30% reservation in government jobs for the children of freedom fighters of the 1971 war of independence. While there are reservations for women, indigenous communities, people with disabilities and others, the students are specifically opposing the quota for children of war veterans, terming it to be discriminatory and not based on merit. Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has arrogantly labelled those opposing the quota as “Razakar” — a term used for those who allegedly collaborated with the Pakistani army during the 1971 war — prompting more widespread protests.
Bangladesh, which has failed to generate more secure and dignified government jobs, pushed its youth to the brink when it introduced this policy in 2018, which was met with protests at the time and came to be challenged before court. The Bangladesh High Court recently upheld this discriminatory policy, which triggered the protests.
The lack of dignified jobs and unemployment resonates with the students and youth of India, who too are facing unprecedented challenges such as unemployment, lack of recruitment, paper leaks, massive privatisation, contractualisation of jobs, sale of PSUs, among others.
We stand in absolute solidarity with the fighting students and youth of Bangladesh, especially the student leaders of the Socialist Students’ Front, who are being hounded and arrested in their just demand to strike down discriminatory employment policy and ensure dignified and secure employment.
NIlasis Bose, National President
Prasenjeet Kumar, General Secretary
Radical Socialist (India): On the raging student movement in Bangladesh
First published at International Viewpoint.
Right now, Bangladesh has been functionally turned into a prison and a graveyard. Students have observed a nationwide strike across Bangladesh on Thursday (18th July 2024) which have been called “Bangla blockade”.
What is the reason behind this movement? Is this primarily a movement of traitors, Razakars? Is this protest just against quotas?
This movement was sparked off by the recent judgement of the country’s high court that has ruled to bring back the quota system which was halted in the year 2018. Government education and jobs in Bangladesh are 56% under quota, out of which 30% consists of the freedom fighter quota. The Bangladeshi system is not a quota system for marginalized or deprived peoples, which we are used to in the Indian reservation system.
Rather, this is an attempt by Awami League to permanently create a voter bank for themselves through the creation of a privileged class that receives preferential treatment. It is worth noting that this time many descendants of freedom fighters have spoken in support of the movement.
In 2018, the government under pressure from a mass movement was forced to order a halt this quota. This order was challenged in court. Why had the government not passed a clear cut law regarding the same issue where affirmative action for genuinely deprived peoples is initiated and separated from the “muktijoddha quota” (freedom fighter quota)?
In 2018, students had demanded a reform of the 30% quota for the families of freedom fighters. The Hasina government completely removed the 26% reservations kept for marginalized and deprived peoples along with these quotas.
When the same was taken to court, the quota system in its entirety was brought back. It is not impossible that some people in the movement are conservative, and some are against quotas for women.
However, the arrowhead of the movement is pointed at the freedom fighter quota.
This movement is so strong because under late capitalism there are very few jobs in underdeveloped Bangladesh, resulting in hundreds of thousands of young people hopefully applying annually for a few thousand secure government jobs.
The Bangladeshi government does not look after the interests of the many. They serve international capital, including big capitalists of China and India and look to line the pockets of the ruling party and political leaders with profit. One of the slogans of the student movement is “Bhuya! Bhuya!” (Fake! Fake!). The underlying meaning is that “freedom fighter family” is often a bogus label given to those close to the Awami League.
Sheikh Hasina has tried to label this movement as one of Razakars. In 1971, Razakars assisted the Pakistanis and were traitors to the Bangladeshi cause. The protesters have responded with the slogan “Ami ke? Tumi ke? Rajakar! Rajakar! Ke bolechhe? Ke bolecche? Shwoirachar! Shwoirachar!” (Who am I? Who are you? Rajakar! Rajakar! Who says so? Who says so? Who says so? Dictator! Dictator!) The word Razakar from the mouth of Sheikh Hasina is similar to the utterance “antinational” or “terrorist” from the mouth of [Indian Prime Minister] Narendra Modi.
Masses of students have joined this movement in Bangladesh. As of 6pm on July 18, 64 people have been martyred. But this movement has not been able to organise itself in a clear leftist direction. Organisations like Jamaat-e-Islami exist in Bangladesh.
Haseena has labelled the movement as one completely of Razakars in order to exploit the presence of these organizations. This is, of course, a failure of left organisations that have not been able to create a strong counter pole in their favour. Out of these, the Workers’ Party (known to be close to the Communist Party of India-Marxist) and sections of the JASAD/JSD [Jatiya Samajtantrik Dal, or National Socialist Party] are completely subservient to Hasina. Others are supportive of the movement but we cannot claim that they are giving any direction to it.
We support the democratic movement of Bangladesh against unjust quotas and, at the same time, support the system of reservation directed at removing social discrimination. We support the democratic movement of the people against the authoritarian Bangladeshi government and support the demand for democratic and free and fair elections, which was raised by a united left in 2023.
It is an important task in India to stand in solidarity with the movement in Bangladesh for history will read the progressive movements of both countries as intertwined.
We also strongly condemn the actions of the Kolkata police who detained protesters in solidarity with Bangladesh and sent them to Lalbazar (HQ of Kolkata police). May the democratic movement of the people stand strong against the union of dictators!
Radical Socialist, July 19, 2024.
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