Waiting for Revolution in Bangladesh

Fourteen days before Bangladesh’s 2024 revolution, I arrived in Dhaka. The plane, half-empty, held Bangladeshi construction workers returning from Malaysia, one South Korean businessman, and myself. I had no real plans beyond spending a couple of weeks with activists and political scientists in Dhaka. They were friends, colleagues, and strangers I met through introductions and family ties. I was there as part of a longer piece of fieldwork on the long-term impacts of decolonisation, moving with a freedom not available to most—a freedom afforded not by skill, but by a UK passport and the assumptions extended to a Western researcher. In the fallout of the revolution, some would leave Bangladesh, for India or Europe. Most would not. To see them, I travelled slowly toward the border with India—the line which split Bengal in two, a final imperial imposition by the British as they fled in 1947.

It took three hours to go the 15 miles from my airport to my forlorn hotel. In Dhaka, “wait” was the overwhelming refrain, said repeatedly, about anything, with no indication of how long it would be or what we were waiting for. Sometimes it was banal—finding a bottle of water might take half an hour. But stagnation seeped into the state, seizing up its gears. For me, it meant “obligatory” forms—customs, Foreign Visitor Form C, registration with Special Branch—each taking 20 minutes to find, and hours more to fill, sign, countersign, file, and ignore. For the activists and researchers I stayed with, it meant a politics of waiting. Correcting an ID typo could take decades. Political scientists abstained from voting. State funding, for essential services or repairs, could be “delayed” arbitrarily and indefinitely. Any change was either distant or never coming. It was close to 5 a.m. when I finally got some sleep, with the frustrated honks and rickshaw bells mixing with the call to prayer in the old city outside my window.

By late morning, I was sitting on the stone ghat steps on the banks of the Buriganga, the wide, polluted river that runs through the center of the city. An old flaking ‘Orange Rocket’ paddle-steamer, the PS Mahsud, was still docked on the riverbank. A few old men lived aboard, in white vests and longyi robes. One invited me aboard. Like many elders in Bangladesh, they had orange beards and hair, dyed with henna: some auburn, others almost neon yellow. They were caretakers of a sort, they said. Each had taken up quarters in what had once been the Mahsud’s first-class accommodation. Lines drying washing hung in the open spaces of the first deck where cracking blue paint only partially covered worn timbers.

“The boat is old now, not safe,” one man lamented.

The Mahsud had crossed Bangladeshi history: built in Scotland for the British Empire, shipped to a region of what was then India, rebadged as the property of Pakistan, then finally sailing out its last days for the Bangladesh Inland Water Transportation Corporation. The heavy, sunken engine rooms had long since had their steam engines replaced with diesels, once modern, now aged, still dank and greasy despite their disuse. The boat lingered, rotting, its fate uncertain.

I met with an acquaintance, Rich, over a breakfast of fried flatbread and a little dhal. (For purposes of privacy, the names of my interlocutors have been changed throughout.) Rich, a businessman, owned a small fabric factory on the outskirts of the city. The garment industry was make-or-break in Dhaka. Bangladesh is the world’s second-largest producer of finished clothes, and at least 85 percent of that production happens in Dhaka. Perhaps five million Bangladeshis, mostly women, worked in the garment sector. The legal minimum wage was around $110 a month—many earned far less. I had wanted to talk to Rich to find out how business was in Dhaka. He said it was the same as always.

We walked through a meandering market. RMGs (‘ready-made garments’) were piled between mountains of turmeric and stalls selling old doors from the ship-breaking yards. Merchants lived in tiny upper floors of makeshift shacks. Rich made a few inquiries with them. A couple of public baths were dotted around, concrete pools ten feet by five. Besides them, a table of labeled soaps: a name for each bather.

A crowd surrounded a shouting pair of merchants who’d apprehended a thief. One of them produced a cane. There was no point waiting for the authorities, Rich muttered.

“The police will do nothing. They will not come,” he said, deflated.

They could not be relied upon. It was apathy, not malfeasance. We walked away as the beating started.

13 days before the revolution, Bablu was in the middle of a tirade.“It’s all connected; everything is political.”

Bablu, a short, baby-faced political scientist with a mess of dark hair, delivered every sentence as though it was the key line in a scholarly article. Like many in Dhaka, he spoke to me partly as a researcher, partly as a friend, and never fully as either. We sat drinking thimbles full of chili and tamarind tea beside a loud road on the campus of Dhaka University. It was muggy.

“The honking of the bus driver is a result of the trauma of the poverty state,” Bablu declared. “He might earn $200 a month. This is why he honks so much.”

He sipped his tea, then continued. “We are worn out by the corruption. It happens at all levels. The government made an error on my ID. I didn’t pay the bribe. It still hasn’t been fixed.”

“When did you first try to get it fixed?”

He thought for a moment.

“17 years ago.”

Graffiti covered the red brick walls, opposing the new Digital Security Act (DSA), the regime’s plan for silencing all online criticism. “Down with online censorship” and “down with the DSA” were written in English and Bangla. A communist protest went past, calling loudly for the death of the prime minister. Bablu was unfazed.

“They’ll try to block a road in the old city—but the police will beat them and arrest the leaders,” he said nonchalantly, taking another sip of tea. Just days before the revolution, he was too cautious to be explicit, to acknowledge his sympathy with the protestors. They were then still seen as radicals and outcasts.

High above the graffiti soared a mural: the neat mustache and calm eyes of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman staring down at us. As Bangladesh’s founding father, his face watched over the tea stall, as it did thousands of streetscapes across Dhaka. Mujibur’s daughter, Sheikh Hasina, was the same prime minister whose death the communist protestors were demanding at that very moment. Hasina came to power two decades after her father’s assassination. The intervening years had been marked by intermittent democracy and military coups. She led her father’s allegedly liberal party, mobilizing religious nationalism and Mujiburism, a cult of personality around her father. Save for an eight-year intermission, Hasina had been prime minister since 1996.

When talking of Hasina, Bablu spoke in English, “so government spies don’t understand.” He only spoke to a few close confidantes about the regime, and even then in code. Hasina was sister, the regime market stall. It was how his circle had adapted to the entrenched corruption of her long rule, during which time he, a political scientist, never voted. It was, he said, effectively one-party rule.

“I don’t think the existing regime knows where it’s going. It’s just floating without a direction,” said Bablu. “But I salute her—she has made her mark on world politics.” Then his face fell again. “No one can stop her now. We are waiting for her death. Only this can save us.”

Stacks of barbed wire lay ready to block protestors from marching down the roads to the university, and to encircle them for the inevitable “police response.”

Twelve days before the revolution, I received a call from Tajim, an academic-turned-community activist and colleague of Bablu. Over a poor phone line, he invited me to come stay in his village for Eid.

Tajim met me at the edge of a dusty highway 200 miles northwest of Dhaka. A relay of tuktuks and rickshaws took us to his hometown. There, a feast was waiting: yam and mutton curries, minced fish balls, spiced mashed potato. Sitting with us were Rahim, a whip-smart politico, and Farid, an affable textile engineer, both former colleagues of Tajim and Bablu. They had only one thing they wanted to discuss: the future of the regime.

Farid was practical. The regime was a fact, unchanging, like the sun rising in the east. The only option was emigration. “It means we want to leave Bangladesh. I’ll leave next year if I can. There is no hope for us here.”

Rahim spoke precisely, moving a little watery dhal around his plate. “It’s frustrating that international donors weren’t giving the money they had pledged to the developing world, for us to adapt to climate change,” he said. But he was also despondent that it wouldn’t be used effectively even if it came. “There’s simply too much institutional corruption and lack of trust for any adaptation to be different. I don’t see a change in the system in the next hundred years, let alone the next 40. It will continue after Hasina dies.”

I stayed at Tajim’s grandparents’ mud-brick farmhouse, a wattle and daub building, straw occasionally poking through the smooth red finish on its walls. Hessian sacks, often old seed bags, made up what carpet there was. A diesel generator powered a few lights and fans. Water was from a deep well in the courtyard, amongst the animals.

I joined the family in mango collecting in the yard. It was more game than chore: some threw stones, some used nets, some climbed trees. I was given a slingshot to fire chunks of mud into the branches. Around our knees, friendly goats trotted, eating the peels and stones left from the ripest mangoes, eaten as we harvested. Those goats would soon be on the table. Tajim talked about his time in the Rohingya refugee camps, on Bangladesh’s eastern border.

“I went twice, interviewing Rohingya about their security worries,” he explained. He said the people he met understood Bangladesh to be “a small country” and didn’t want to stay. They wanted to return to Myanmar/Burma, or go further, he said. The visits had scared him. It had been difficult to find a way to interview without officials—sometimes armed officials—watching. A fence had been built around the camps during the pandemic.

“It was easier to visit before. But now, young [Bangladeshi] people think that it is sadly a drain on resources to help them. Bangladesh is already under pressure: a growing population and not much money.” He tilted his head in thought, arms now laden with mangoes. “Before, we were the refugees. In 1971 [during the independence war], we went to India. Now it is our turn to take refugees.”

Ten days before the revolution, Tajim woke me early.

“Eid mubarak,” he smiled. He passed me a plain paper bag. Inside was a beautiful kurta tunic, in off-white, undyed cotton. We walked straight to prayers. Tajim disappeared into the crowd of men sitting on tarpaulin in the yard in front of the small village mosque. I tried to slink off but was pulled in by Tajim’s father and grandfather, and so went through the salah, the cycle of bows, standing, then kneeling. Families held together. A cool morning breeze blew through. Beside us, the paddies and palms extended to the horizon.

A black nanny goat and a cow were dragged into the mango yard by the house. The goat was dispatched first. Its legs were tied together, then the imam came. We all stood, watching him cut its throat, with hands half-covering our faces and a few murmurs of allahu akbar. The goat was hanged from a branch of a mango tree, the last of the blood draining out into the dust. Several men were needed to tie the cow. It let out gurgling groans and splutters of blood before the head cracked up at an angle that signified death. The imam moved on, leaving the butchers to work. There were dozens of families to help. It was a ritual of centuries.

“Now we can eat,” smiled Tajim.

A few days later, I was thousands of miles west, halfway back to Europe. Tajim and Bablu were in the streets of Dhaka. The wait had broken: They had joined the revolution. The protestors had a “one-point demand,” the total ousting of Hasina. Bablu, once so guarded about his own position, had decided that the time had come to throw himself into the movement. He faced down guns, tear gas, and iron rods. Just as the internet blackouts began in Dhaka, he managed to get a WhatsApp message through:

“This government, along with the police and the [regime-aligned] Student League, attacked the general students and scholars. Two students died already.”

A few gruesome, low-resolution photos followed: battered protestors, some in stretchers, others lying on Bangladeshi flags, drenched in blood.

“We are helpless, completely,” Bablu wrote. “They also attacked Dhaka Medical College, where most went to take medicine. They didn’t let them take medicines and treatments. Attacked them right there.”

I was stunned. It became known as the July Massacre: thousands would be killed or blinded.

“We need this,” he wrote. “There is no one to help us. Police are on their side.”

Five weeks later, it was over. The protestors had won. Sheikh Hasina fled to India.

The interim regime launched ‘Operation Devil Hunt’ to crush pro-Hasina agitants. Tens of thousands were arrested. A weapons stockpile, allegedly for a counter-revolution, was seized. The images of Hasina’s father that had once looked down on Dhaka, were no more, a textile boss wrote to me: “Most are broken, crashed with a bulldozer. Even any organization, street, or office named with Bangabandhu [Mujib] has been changed.”

Even the PS Mahsud, left mouldering by the old regime, started to be repaired—for the “rebirth and revival” of Bangladesh’s river heritage.

The optimism and vitality of the revolution passed soon into another stasis, the long anticipation of the new election. It was 18 months before Dhakaiyas could go to vote. Over that time, I saw some of the same faces again, and called others.

“There is fear among the people that [the Islamist right] Jamaat is going to win,” Rahim told me as we sat on the grass of a city park, in the political safety of a European capital. The interim regime meant that he had finally received the paperwork to leave the country for research.

Bablu was in Dhaka. Despite his fervent support of the student movement during its early days, he was already alienated, half-shouting over the phone in rage mixed with disappointment. “The student leaders have negotiated with Jamaat—a party which is condemned for participating in mass killing during our [1971] liberation war!” He paused for breath. “And they called it an electoral alliance,” he added bitterly.

The alliance that enraged Bablu had soured the bases of both Jamaat and the student leaders. Sheikh Hasina’s party, meanwhile, had been banned by the interim regime under the Anti-Terrorism Act. That left Hasina’s traditional opposition, the Bangladesh National Party. They could hardly help but win, and did so with a colossal majority. They were led by a former political exile, Tarique Rahman, whose parents had been a president and a prime minister. Another dynasty had returned.

“I think people are enthusiastic and the government is focusing on fulfilling its election manifesto,” said Rahim, a few days after the election. He had a quiet optimism. “For instance, giving a family card to the female member of each household.” The cards held BDT 3000, just $24. But Rahim was hopeful—it was an unconditional two weeks’ wages for the poorest families in the country.

On the patchy line from Dhaka, Bablu was declaratory as ever: “Another Eid here in Bangladesh and with obviously a new vibe, undoubtedly! I must call this a critical shift in Bangladeshi politics and its history! Many young and not so young, including me, have voted for the first time in their lives!”

Excitement passed into optimism, optimism into uncertainty, uncertainty into frustration: the pattern of waiting had set in again. Tajim spoke to me from the mudbrick house I’d stayed at two years before. “There’s loadshedding [deliberate electricity blackouts] 6 to 14 hours a day here in the villages. It’s all at random times. People are angry about it—angry at the government, for this and other things.”

I asked if there had been improvements in the official processes and endless paperwork that had once ground Bangladesh to a halt.

“Things have changed, but not much. Not enough.”

Rich put it simply. “Nothing has changed here. It’s new wine in an old bottle.”