DHAKA: Student demonstrators who ousted Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina have rejected calls from Bangladesh’s two main political parties for quick elections and are considering creating their own party to sustain their movement, according to interviews with four protest leaders.
Their hope: to avoid a repeat of the last 15 years, in which Hasina ruled the country of some 170 million people with an iron fist.
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In June, a handful of student leaders – most in their early-to-mid 20s – began organising demonstrations against a law reserving coveted government jobs for certain segments of the population.
Within two months, Hasina’s government was swept away by an upswell of popular anger at the brutality of its crackdown on anti-quota protesters. At least 300 people were killed in the single largest bout of violence since Bangladesh’s war of independence from Pakistan in 1971.
The movement was hailed as a Gen Z revolution, spurred by young Bangladeshis’ anger at years of jobless growth, allegations of kleptocracy, and shrinking civil liberties.
An interim government headed by Nobel Peace laureate Muhammad Yunus – which includes two student leaders in senior positions – now runs the country.
For most of the past three decades, Bangladesh has been governed either by Hasina’s Awami League or the Bangladesh Nationalist Party of her rival Khaleda Zia, both of whom are in their 70s.
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Student leaders have discussed forming a political party to end the duopoly, said Mahfuj Alam, who chairs a committee tasked with liaising between the government and social groups such as teachers and activists.
A decision would be made in about a month, the 26-year-old law student told Reuters, adding that protest leaders wanted to consult widely with citizens before deciding on a platform.
Details of the students’ plans for their movement’s political future have not previously been reported.
“People are really tired of the two political parties. They have trust in us,” he said, at the gates of Dhaka University’s Arts Faculty.
After the story was published, Alam said on Facebook his statement to Reuters “had come out wrong” and that the students’ main focus was to maintain the spirit of the mass uprising and to consolidate the government.
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“We are not thinking about political organizations right now,” he said in the Facebook post, adding that the priority was broad reform of the political system. “Everyone will know what the political structure will be at the appropriate time.”
Tahmid Chowdhury, another student coordinator who helped bring down Hasina, said there was a “high chance” they would form a political party. They were still working out their program, though he said it would be rooted in secularism and free speech.