Three decades ago, I hosted Alimullah Miyan at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. No one else in my department was interested. Distressed by the political polarization at the University of Dhaka, Miyan had resigned his comfortable tenured position in 1991. Instead, he founded a university – IUBAT (International University of Business, Agriculture and Technology), the first private university in Bangladesh. The Canadian High Commissioner in Dhaka gave Miyan a small grant, enough to finance a trip across Canada in search of Canadian university support for his fledgling university. After an hour-long exposition on the flaws of his country’s education system, he invited me to visit his campus – three classrooms, six computers, a small chemistry lab and offices squeezed into an old rented building. I accepted the invitation.
Since 1993, I have been visiting his country annually. After Miyan’s death in 2017, I continued visiting. I was in Bangladesh a month after Sheikh Hasina’s fourth election victory in January 2024. Sheikh Hasina is the daughter of Sheikh Mujib, Bangladesh’s first prime minister. My IUBAT colleagues loathed the authoritarian, corrupt nature of her regime, but assumed nothing could be done about it. They were wrong.
The straw that broke the regime
Hasina decided to collect more “boksheesh” by increasing the payments to her party required of applicants wanting a government civil service job. It was the straw that broke her regime. Throughout June and July 2024, university students demonstrated against the status quo. By “bloody Sunday,” August 4, the estimate of student deaths was nearly 1,000; that Sunday the police and the student wing of Hasina’s party killed another 100 students. Students responded by calling a “march for justice” on Monday, August 5. When tens of thousands began to march toward the prime minister’s residence, Hasina called on the army to stop the marchers. Gauging the public mood and fearing a massacre, the generals refused. They insisted Hasina go into exile. She is now living somewhere in India.
The student leaders, generals and notables opposed to her regime invited Muhammad Yunus to head an “interim” government. Yunus, age 84, is one of the major “social entrepreneurs” who, upon Bangladesh’s independence from West Pakistan, undertook major improvements in social services ranging from schools to health clinics. Yunus founded Grameen, a large NGO known primarily for its extension of microcredit. Most recipients have been women. Grameen also trained nurses and partnered with a Norwegian mobile phone company, among many other projects. In 2006, the Nobel committee awarded Yunus the peace prize for his extensive social programs.
On Thursday, August 8, after three days of no government, Yunus and his cabinet took the oath as members of the Council of Advisers, which nominally reports to the figurehead president of the country, a nod to constitutional continuity. Among the 16 cabinet ministers, two are student leaders. Some are academics, some are lawyers, one a woman, one a Hindu, one a deeply religious Muslim. To my knowledge, all are honest.
Perhaps the most knowledgeable of her portfolio is Rizwana Hasan, minister of environment, forest, and climate change. Wherever they live, Bangladeshis are condemned to polluted rivers and urban air, illegal logging and corporate “grabbing” of public land. Before August, Bidhan Roy was director of the psychiatric division of the national mental health hospital. He knows about managing large institutions; managing 15 million children in government primary schools will test his administrative capacity. Hopefully, he is a fast learner. Asif Nazrul, novelist, journalist and law professor, is the minister of law, justice and parliamentary affairs. In an interview with Dhaka’s Daily Star, he describes his 10-to-12-hour days at his office, seven days a week.
Party before country
In the 1960s, the fundamental reason East Pakistanis wanted to secede from West Pakistan was the desire to be independent of fundamentalist Islam and the overbearing presence of the Pakistani army. The 1971 “liberation war” freed Bangladesh from Pakistan. Sheikh Mujib, Bangladesh’s first Prime Minister, was a powerful political orator who rallied support for the new country, but he turned out to be an incompetent administrator. In 1974, Bangladesh suffered a famine. His response was to create a one-party state. By 1975, the optimism of “liberation” had degenerated into a Shakespearean tragedy of assassinations, bitter revenge, corruption, violence and refusal of elites to compromise. In August 1975, a group of young military officers assassinated Sheikh Mujib and all his family, except the two daughters – one of them Sheikh Hasina – living outside the country. In a New York Times article, Tahmima Anam, a Bangladeshi novelist, has described the tragedy inherent in Bangladesh’s politics:
Ever since our young nation was born 53 years ago in a traumatic war of liberation from Pakistan, historical amnesia and censorship have afflicted Bangladeshis like a chronic illness. When a regime is toppled, its successor moves quickly to erase the symbols and legacy of the previous one as if it had never existed.
That is why, for decades, when one of the two political parties that have dominated Bangladesh – the Awami League and the Bangladesh Nationalist Party – was in power, the other would often boycott Parliament or refuse to participate in elections it alleged were rigged. There has never been a healthy relationship between the people in power and those who oppose them. Party was always placed before country.
This has been a curse, preventing solid democratic institutions from flourishing in Bangladesh and making our politics fractious, hateful and peppered with violence and counterviolence. The unexpected revolution that toppled the increasingly autocratic and corrupt rule of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina this month offers Bangladesh a chance to break free of this cycle. What makes this revolution unprecedented and so meaningful is that it was a grass-roots movement led by idealistic university students, not one of the warring main political parties. As a Bangladeshi, I am watching with jubilation.
Is jubilation justified?
if the interim government achieves little, cynicism will return. Reform events such as the August coup arise rarely in the life of a nation. Sensibly, the interim government’s first priority is to restore nonpartisan professionalism in the police and the courts. That is not enough. The complex network of corruption and inefficiency has condemned the majority of children to remain illiterate as adults, and those who are ill to seek often-dubious overpriced private care.
Shakespearean tragedy is one description of Bangladesh politics; another is the Sicilian mafia. The two major political parties play a role similar to mafia families. For example, the party in power expects “boksheesh” in the range of $5,000–$10,000 USD from a trained nurse wanting a job in a government hospital or a trained teacher wanting a position in a government primary school. In exchange for paying boksheesh, nurses’ and teachers’ unions expect minimum accountability of work undertaken. Admittedly, basic education outcomes in Bangladesh are not much worse than in India (see box).
Measuring corruption is a difficult exercise. One credible measure of national governance quality is the World Bank’s annual Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI). The WGI entail synchronizing numerous public surveys of governance quality across 200 countries. Among the six WGI governance indicators is “control of corruption.” In 2003, Bangladesh held the dubious WGI rank as the world’s most corrupt country. Bangladesh had improved somewhat by 2008, with 15 per cent of countries ranked worse in terms of controlling corruption, and peaked in 2013, with 21 per cent of countries ranked worse. However, Bangladesh then slid back, with 17 per cent of countries ranked worse in 2018, and in 2023 it had returned to its 2008 rank with 15 per cent of countries ranked below.
Both the Awami League (AL), led by Sheikh Mujib’s daughter, and the Bangladesh National Party (BNP), led by the widow of a charismatic 1971 “freedom fighter” assassinated in 1981, are guilty of massive corruption. In 2003, the BNP was in power. In 2008, Bangladesh was under a caretaker government of nonpartisan professionals. From 2008 to July 2024, Sheikh Hasina’s AL was in power.
The student demonstrators in the summer of 2024 are the parallel of the Parisians who conquered the Bastille, symbol of arbitrary government under the ancien régime, in 1789. Initially, moderate elites governed France. They did not survive. Napoleon transformed a democratic revolution into a dictatorship that engulfed continental Europe in war. Many of my Bangladeshi colleagues are pessimistic and fear the future. Predictably, leaders of the AL and BNP have undertaken no self-criticism. As Anam fears, political leaders will continue to place “party before country.” They expect to restore the status quo ante in due course. If the interim government fails to place “country before party” and realizes few reforms, the coup in August 2024 will be deemed a failure.
Most of the political problems facing Bangladesh are present throughout South Asia. In India, government schools are not much better than in Bangladesh, and corruption is pervasive. At the time of writing (December 2024), Gautam Adani, the wealthiest of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s corporate cronies, has been prosecuted in New York. Adani sold bonds in the United States to finance a renewable Indian energy project. It appears that $250 million USD raised by Adani supplied boksheesh for Modi’s political colleagues and senior bureaucrats in Delhi. A further dilemma faces Yunus. Many of Hasina’s cronies are in India fomenting opposition to his government. Elements of Modi’s government are interpreting the August coup as an anti-Hindu pogrom.
Were Edmund Burke alive writing to a Bangladeshi student demonstrator opposed to Sheikh Hasina’s regime, he would say roughly what he said to a French correspondent in 1790. Burke is hard to classify as a conservative or as an exemplar of the 18th-century Enlightenment. He supported radical reform in France, but opposed revolution: “What is the use of discussing a man’s abstract right to food or to medicine? The question is upon the method of procuring and administering them. In this deliberation I shall always advise to call in the aid of the farmer and the physician, rather than the professor of metaphysics.” Coincidentally, Burke pursued with passion the long impeachment trial of Warren Hastings, the first governor-general of the Bengal colony, who was accused of corruption. The trial lasted seven years (1788–95). Hastings was exonerated but fell deeply into debt, and died in 1797.
Sooner or later an election will take place. The outcome looming over the present interim government is that one of the mafia political families will win the election and restore the status quo ante. Maybe there will be a more positive outcome. This is not the time to abandon hope. I share Tahmima Anam’s “jubilation.”
“Learning poverty” in South Asia
The two regions of the world in which the majority of teenage children cannot read the local language are sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. In 2019, the World Bank published an estimated “learning poverty” rate for most of the world’s countries. The learning poverty rate is an estimate of children in the cohort aged 10–14 who are not able to read a simple text at Grade 2 level – whether they are out of school or in school but illiterate. In Pakistan, the learning poverty rate is 77 per cent (23 per cent can read the Grade 2 text); in India, the rate is 56 per cent (44 per cent can read); in Bangladesh, 58 per cent (42 per cent can read). Sri Lanka is the only South Asian country with a good primary school system. Its learning poverty rate is 15 per cent (85 per cent can read). Given the abysmal learning outcomes of government primary schools in South Asia, the elites rely on “high cost” private schools; a large minority among the poor, if they can afford it, send their children to “low cost” private schools. On average, the “low cost” schools perform far better than government schools.
