Bangladesh After Sheikh Hasina

The biggest shortcoming of the commentaries on recent events is the excessive focus on events in and around Dhaka.

The reservoir of resentment that the Islamist opponents of the Awami League and Sheikh Hasina had kept was finally being opened.

(Photo: AP)

The stock market’s response to popular uprisings is usually negative.

In Bangladesh, as an uprising forced Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina to flee the country on 5 August 2024, the markets shot up — the bourgeoisie was jubilant that its movement to replace the nominally socialist, rurally-rooted Bangladesh Awami League was successful. There was another starkly contrasting celebration of the same moment: a protestor climbed onto a statue of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman — the Father of the Nation, the tallest leader of their freedom struggle, and Sheikh Hasina’s father — and urinated on its head.

The reservoir of resentment that the Islamist opponents of the Awami League and Sheikh Hasina had kept was finally being opened. This flood was a long time coming; ever since a tribunal appointed by the Awami League-led government gave top Islamist leaders death sentences and life sentences. Political movements are usually the victims of a fallacy: that one has to agitate and mobilise only on one’s own favourite issues instead of working on favourable issues in the present.

Islamists around the world have overcome this political fallacy. They follow Mao Zedong’s advice: true revolutionaries are supposed to be embedded among the people like fish in the water. Quota protests were not the favourite issues of Bangla Islamists. But once the protests had a chance for political hegemony, they found it favourable to be among the people like fish.

Thus, the Bangladesh uprising ought to be understood as a bourgeois upheaval with a structural embedding of Islamism, thanks to the presence of its organised forces at every stage in the movement. That is how radical formations function in societies where they don’t, or can’t, have hegemony. 

The biggest shortcoming of the commentaries on the recent events in Bangladesh is the excessive focus on events in and around Dhaka, while the most consequential issues such as ethnic cleansing and power-grabbing are unfolding outside Dhaka, in rural Bangladesh. This focus on Dhaka and other metropolitan areas is thanks to the oversized influence of the bourgeoisie on information dissemination. The bourgeoisie is interested in the events in Dhaka, and so it invites everyone else to look at Dhaka. The threats to the lives for which the bourgeoisie has little regard in rural Bangladesh are misreported, underreported or unreported. The new government too is keen on playing down the violence that affected them.

On the other hand, critical perspectives on the events centre on analogies to colour revolutions, with the uprising being allegedly engineered by the United States of America. This is unlikely to be true and, in any case, it does not contribute to a good understanding of the internal dynamics that drove the events. A comprehensive explanation of the social conflicts that drove the uprising has been sorely lacking. In particular, no one has been ready to name the process correctly: that this was a bourgeois counterrevolution and not a popular revolution.

The bourgeoisie is rarely visible as a political class in South Asia. An urban class with very little leverage in electoral politics, they are, more often than not, actors behind curtains who negotiate for their own economic benefits with the changing governments. Electoral and political mobilisations and contestations happen on other grounds like caste and religion. In the political arena, the bourgeoisie gets transformed into their constituent caste or religious identities. Across the subcontinent, the upper castes — or the Ashrafs, in the case of Muslim societies — form the bulk of the bourgeoisie.

It is no different in Bangladesh. This Bangladesh bourgeoisie was nurtured by the Awami League governments of recent times, but in a strange way, it turned against the party, which had now become its fetter.

The bourgeoisie, which had achieved a lifestyle and standard of living thanks to a spurt of economic growth, was increasingly discontent at the divergence of the regime’s nationalist interests and theirs. The economic growth stalled, and the government was struggling to pull it back on track. Bourgeois aspirations, however, did not stall. Investors know the Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO) in the markets; the Bangladesh bourgeoisie felt it in politics. It wanted better growth and better state support for its class. In its quest to ensure these, it undid much of the structural edifices that kept Bangladesh’s revolutionary independence safe. It made an unintended counterrevolution — firstly, by revolting against the reservation system in Bangladesh, and secondly, by allowing Islamism to come back into the mainstream. This might well be Bangladesh’s Anna Hazare moment, and the same classes that cheered on the anti-corruption movement against the United Progressive Alliance regime in India are optimistic about the recent events in Bangladesh. Even if it is not immediately tragic, it has opened the doors wide for future tragedies.

Until 2018, Bangladesh had a peculiar type of reservation system. Thirty percent of seats in the government sector were reserved for the kin of freedom fighters; initially their children, then extended to their grandchildren. In addition, twenty-six per cent of the seats went to various backward sections of Bangladeshi society — women, residents of impoverished districts, indigenous minorities and physically handicapped. This quota system, with all of its faults, was part of a social contract between the Awami League — the historic independence struggle against Pakistan, culminating in the creation of the state in 1971 — and the social groups which supported it.

The Bangladeshi quota system was a central institution in the great postcolonial project of the Awami League. Its primary aim was not to ensure the end of caste discrimination but to ensure that the state was under the control of those committed to Bangladesh’s mukti, its liberation. This was a political tool that was indispensable to the Awami League regime. The primary question was who controlled the state — and it had to be in the hands of those with a legacy of the independence struggle. Ashrafs and Bhadralok dominated the Awami League, too; nonetheless, it was the comparatively preferable party for the working classes and a bulk of the minorities: in general, the Chotolok. Moreover, the Awami League put forward a secular brand of nationalism.

The independence struggle is not just a pivotal chapter in Bangladesh’s history. It remains a founding contradiction, unresolved and apparent at every moment of its subsequent political history. It marked the national liberation of an Islamic polity from a country founded as a purely Islamic nation-state. The independence movement, of which Awami League was the vanguard force, had to immediately engage in a struggle to create a non-Islamic, democratic and secular polity in spite of the Islamic impulses of its majoritarian masses.

As much as Bangladesh was a Muslim-majority country, it could not be an Islamised polity if it had to survive independently. It had to sufficiently distinguish itself from Pakistan, from which it seceded. Thus, we get a Bangla-desh and not a Bangla-stan. Even the “Bangla” — a signifier of national identity — was different from the “Pak”, which means “holy” and has no national connotation. No analysis of a political conjecture in Bangladesh can bypass this contradiction between two visions of Bangladesh without losing sight of reality: the vision of a national, secular polity and that of a socially Islamic polity. The outcome of this struggle will determine whether Bangladesh becomes a Kosovo or an Afghanistan and whether its minorities could live as minorities or not.

The sharpest moment of this struggle was during the Liberation War and the Bangladesh genocide of 1971, which had its victims counted in the millions. Those displaced were many folds higher, with early estimates of refugees to India reaching up to ten million. Subsequent waves of refugees have taken the number much higher. This ethnic cleansing of minorities in such unimaginable numbers is the trauma that provides the key to reading Bangladesh’s politics, and its threat raises its head in every moment of its crisis. The cleansing peaked during the liberation war but has persisted to become a protracted phenomenon.

The major opponents of the Awami League for much of Bangladesh’s political history remain the misleadingly named Bangladesh Nationalist Party, which was actually driven by ex-establishment figures of East Pakistan, who refashioned themselves into Bangladesh nationalists in the wake of a changed hegemony. While they are not widely recognised as an Islamist force — analysts tend to look for signs of fundamentalist rhetoric as a way of identifying Islamists, which do not always correlate — they have been consistent in their attempts to undermine Bangladeshi independence in favour a of pro-Pakistan direction.

Their key social ally in recent decades has been the Jamaat-e-Islami, a pan-Islamist organisation that is increasingly influential in the Bangladeshi moral economy.

While the BNP is nonetheless a party rooted in democratic and electoral politics, the Jamaat-e-Islami carries the legacy of the notorious Razakars — the voluntary militias which committed mass atrocities of unimaginable brutality against Bangla nationalists, intellectuals, ethnic minorities and neutrals during the Liberation War. The historical connection of Bangladesh with these forces, beginning from the prominent roles they played during the era of Pakistan’s rule, means that they have a substantial presence in state institutions and law enforcement, allowing them to persecute their opponents in spite of opposition from secular governments. The struggle against this broadly Islamist coalition by the Awami League led to the establishment of a second International Crimes Tribunal in 2012, which tried and sentenced key leaders of the coalition for crimes against humanity as participants in the Bangladesh genocide. The Awami League succeeded in creating a second wave of hegemonic anti-Islamism, which was nonetheless persistently challenged by the opposing Islamist coalition.

The world tends to focus on armed Islamists, following the lead from security agencies. However, critical Islamizing interventions, especially in Muslim-majority countries, are carried out by unarmed Islamist organisations who only use violence tactically and sporadically. Such unarmed Islamists tend to outsource violence to opportunistic mobs in situations of chaos or to isolated shock-inducing werewolf attacks against writers or blasphemers. The Islamists in Bangladesh have been employing these strategies for years now. Bangladeshi Islamism is not restricted to one organisation. It is the common ideology of various small and big organisations that seek to make Banglas an Islamic people. They have engaged in different and even diverging methods to gain leeway in Bangladesh, from money laundering and smuggling of weapons and fighters to pushing their ideas more subtly.

The long reach of Islamism into Bangla society has meant that the Awami League too has had to negotiate with sections among them. The Islamist proselytisers are largely urban and educated, but their target base is the rural aspiring elites. This new rural Islamism under the vanguard of urban Islamists will eventually produce a more durable, mature Islamisation of the country. Their biggest obstacle is the presence of the Awami League, whose illegitimation will help them to no small extent. 

The Awami League had won four consecutive elections beginning in 2008. The lethargy associated with such a long term in power meant that there was natural anti-incumbency against them. A long rule had also pushed it towards a form of oriental despotism, the natural state of Asian political formations. In 2018, a small anti-reservation protest began to take shape in metropolises, led by students from public universities, who were later joined by those from private universities. The bourgeois press marketed it as a protest against the “unfair” quota for freedom fighters — but in reality, the protests demanded an almost complete rollback of the system, with only ten per cent to be retained.

The bourgeoisie was asking for a larger share of the social capital associated with the public sector institutions instead of limiting itself to acquiring economic capital. Even though the idea initially came from a small section at the fringes of the bourgeoisie, consistent propaganda eventually mainstreamed it. After the protests snowballed, the government withdrew the quota system. Petitioners went to court against the decision, and on 5 June 2024, the Bangladesh Supreme Court ruled that the government’s decision was illegal and that the quotas should return. This marked the beginning of the present agitation, which culminated in a bourgeois counterrevolution. 

Contrary to the hype that usually surrounds student movements, barely any have ultimately led to positive change. This one followed the trend. On the face of it, this was a weak bourgeois revolution, in contrast to the strong bourgeois revolutions that we take as exemplary cases — such as in France, Britain and the USA. Thanks to its weakness, it is unlikely to last long as a bourgeois revolution and will have to transmute itself into something else. It pursued an anti-materialist project by seeking political power without political organisation. Moreover, it lacks the numbers and capital to fortify itself quickly. 

The primary agitators were students from metropolitan bourgeois families. Naomi Hussain is one of the few to have noted this point correctly. They came from among the enriched and aspiring sections of the majority Muslims and the biggest minority Hindus, with a small representation of other minority ethnicities like Christians, Buddhists etc. They were the sons and daughters of lawyers, businessmen, doctors, traders, teachers, engineers, and the salariat — a growing middle class that has also been increasingly critical of the Awami League regime. The students were serving the function of petty-bourgeois footsoldiers, working on behalf of the entire bourgeoisie.

The easy solidarity afforded to the protests by the private university students — only families from gated bourgeois colonies can afford to send their children to a private university in South Asia — is a clear marker of the class nature of the protest, which the student leaders too realised. The initial violence happened in the major cities like Dhaka, Rangpur and Chattogram. The protest violence did spill over and take many working-class victims, but none of them seemed to be involved in the actual protests. One report names three working-class victims of the violence — a salesperson, a child labourer working as a mechanic, and a mason, all of whom were bystanders caught in the crossfire. Once again, they raised the demand to limit the quotas to five or ten percent, effectively ending the reservation system. As with any popular movement, this one also attracted many people from outside its core constituency. The Islamist coalition — primarily the BNP and Jamaat-e-Islami — too supplied bodies on the street.

The Bangladeshi bourgeoisie is nascent and has little social or political experience; the student leaders had even less of it. They presented themselves as apolitical and had no effective mechanisms to keep the protests disciplined. As the protests grew feeding on the anti-incumbency sentiments against the Awami League, it spun further and further into violence. The government deployed its police and instructed them to use force. Misrecognising the bourgeois protestors to be mere pawns of the Islamist coalition — a type of conspiratorial thinking that we will see more of later — the government showed no remorse in using lethal force to contain protests. The bourgeoisie was not used to such shows of force. The Islamists quickly took advantage of the situation. In one notable instance, they managed to make a section of protestors chant “We are Razakars.” Sheikh Hasina understood where the protests were going. Jamaat-e-Islami and its student wing were banned. 

The Awami League and its supporters turned the screw against the protests, and the violence seemed unstoppable. But, in parallel, the government had appealed the Supreme Court’s decision, and the Appellate Authority overturned the earlier decision, no doubt intimidated by the protests. The quotas were scaled back down to seven per cent, with a mere two per cent going to underprivileged social groups. The student protestors, who had been increasingly consolidating the bourgeois press behind them, did not call off the protests. They wanted Sheikh Hasina’s resignation as she was accountable for the violence. According to reports, more than three hundred were killed in these protests. 

The bourgeoisie was momentarily radicalised by the killing of its children. It smelled Awami League blood and lost its mild temperament and rational approach. In addition to its existing discontent towards the regime, it was now livid that the regime was not only indifferent to its demands but also had the gall to repress it. Their press ran stories of how conscientious students who had stood up for a moral cause had been butchered by the Hasina government and its police, with less attention paid to protestors from other demographies. The voices of the bourgeois intelligentsia who spoke about the autocratic and anti-democratic regime grew louder. The party cadres of the Awami League were increasingly isolated in their localities and were soon overpowered.

Faced with a mob of unruly Islamists and an indisciplined bourgeoisie, Hasina called for even more repression. This time, the army disobeyed. Given a short window to flee before the protestors invaded her official residence, Hasina escaped to India. Her party apparatus and police force lost the will to fight in the face of the terrible violence that they knew was coming for them. Many went into hiding.

There were three competing political players left: the bourgeois alliance led by students and intellectuals; the army; and the Islamist coalition. 

One of the legacies of Pakistan’s control over East Bengal was the habit of army intervention in politics. Bangladesh, in its short history of over fifty years, has seen no less than thirty different coup attempts. Being an institution with its own logic and ethos, the army is not driven by simple economic interests or greed for power. The last time the army took power, it actually organised an election in which the Awami League came out victorious. This time, too, it looked like the army was only interested in damage control and not creating an overt military regime. Still, in the last instance, any government that wanted to rule with a face of legitimacy needed the army on its side. As soon as Hasina fled, negotiations between representatives of the bourgeoisie and the army began.

The bourgeoisie, meanwhile, had christened its own victory, the second independence. It knew it had the unique chance to form its own government, but it had no political party or a sub-class of politicians whom it trusted. Its press and opinion-makers quickly projected a consensus to install a technocratic committee that would oversee an “interim government”.

As far as the bourgeoisie was concerned, this was a moment of tabula rasa, from where a new narrative and trajectory could be scripted. Their entire focus was on making a new government possible. In four days’ time, a committee to manage the affairs of the bourgeoisie was set up — its members drawn almost exclusively from the bourgeoisie itself, led by the economist Mohammed Yunus, who received acclaim for extending the credit system, and thus the bourgeois mode of production, to rural Bangladesh.

The others in the so-called advisory council are lawyers, professors, activists, and the ilk, who represent the high echelons of Bangladesh's civil society. They had ironically installed a bourgeois shura council. If the Islamic shura council is made up of experts in religious jurisprudence and theology, the secular edition of this form of government was made up of experts in the bourgeois sciences. 

In these four days, a parallel action was undertaken by the third important political player: the Islamist coalition. They saw here the opportunity for the Management of Savagery — the classic Islamist strategy for advancing Sharia rule and morality. In a state of chaos and state failure, the Islamists would forcibly begin to enforce Sharia, hoping to change the moral framework of society itself through mob enforcement of divine justice. The Islamist utopia is one in which there is no state; indeed, they are viscerally antagonistic to the state in any form, but even more so if it is a secular or Kafir state. They see the divinely ordained Sharia as an alternative to the state. State and politics are domains where the Law can be contested; Islamism envisions a society where the Law is final.

In Bangladesh, the Islamist strategy took on the goal of completely destroying the existing state apparatus associated with the Awami League. They had started acting on this goal even during the chaos of the protests, but the four days of state immobility gave them an opportunity to accelerate. This violence was covered widely as anti-Hindu, which is a mischaracterisation; this was a form of politicide. Politicide refers to the targeted annihilation of a political force, featuring mass murder of the members of that force. The peculiar form of politicide that we witnessed in Bangladesh could be called statecide, wherein the on-ground personnel of a state, including its police force and members of its ruling class and party, are targeted for extra-judicial killing. 

The very next day, after the bourgeoisie declared its revolution a success, the reportage in its press shifted its tone. It had taken note of the unforeseen violence, but bourgeois thought leaders explained it away as the work of miscreants. No bourgeois mind thought of asking back how miscreancy could be blamed for mob lynchings, pogroms, and nationwide snatching of property; because no bourgeois wanted to take the sparkle away from its victory. The scale of violence was stunning for an uninformed observer; a sober analyst could not have been surprised by the Islamist mobs.

Bodies were hanged for display in public. Many were burnt alive. More than two hundred were reported killed, but this is almost certainly an underreporting. We are yet to understand the full scale of this savagery. It is likely we will not for a long time. The bourgeois press had an interest in keeping count of the dead protestors. It certainly will not have any collective interest in keeping count of those killed by the protestors. As a massacre was unfolding across Bangladesh, the press was praising student revolutionaries for managing smooth passage on the city roads and playing up isolated cases of citizens standing in for police and security. 

The assault was primarily on Awami League infrastructure and personnel, as they provided the human content of the existing secular state in Bangladesh. The attacks on policemen went well beyond the normal response to police atrocities. According to some reports, around four hundred police stations have been attacked, with scores and probably hundreds of policemen killed. Multiple attacks on jails, with subsequent mass jailbreaks, have been reported. Almost all of the executions seem to have been public, with no resistance in sight. The Islamists justified it by saying they are not only agents of a Bangladeshi state — which is at least nominally run by Muslims — but go further to claim that they are agents of the Kafir states in India and the West. The punishment for treason, under Islamist law, is of course public execution. The killings peaked after the toppling of the government, but they had begun well before in the pockets where Awami League’s power had receded. 

The minorities in Bangladesh are mostly supporters of the Awami League; they do not have the protected status of lowly Dhimmis. Dhimmis are the class of minorities under the protection of an Islamic state, who pay the jizya tax in return for being allowed to continue with Kafir practices. In Bangladesh, only the ones who signal their renunciation of the Awami League have the chance of being blessed with Dhimmitude. As a result, minorities who were seen as supporters of the regime — or simply those whom local Islamists disliked — were attacked on the pretext of being traitors. There might have been explicit guidance to refrain from excessive killing of bystanders from leaders who learnt lessons from previous pogroms. The targeted killing of Awami League cadres, however, was well-planned and executed. For now, for the sake of effectiveness, the Islamists decided that this political front must disappear. The bourgeoisie by and large escaped this attack, except for a few isolated incidents where bourgeois individuals who were associated with the Awami League before had been targeted. 

By the time the new military-bourgeois government begins to assert its authority, the local dynamics in Bangladeshi society would have changed. Every Awami League supporter or political moderate will have received the message — do not get into arguments, property-related conflicts, or religious disputes with any Islamist. The lynchings, threats and abuses in this riot will serve as a reminder of what punishment awaits them. The supporters of BNP-Jamaat would feel empowered unlike ever before, now free of anti-Islamist repression. Groups that were hitherto laying low, such as the Hizbut Tahrir, are bound to feel a surge of confidence. Ousting of undesirables from education institutions is now easy in Bangladesh. An informal morality police is already in the making. In just a few days, the Islamist forces would have gained an incredible amount of micro-power, which would undoubtedly coalesce into the macro-power of Sharia rule sooner or later.

Meanwhile, the bourgeoisie, which was clamouring for democracy only a few days back, is suddenly satisfied with an unelected, army-backed government of technocrats. It is prey to the same illusions which plagued the Western bourgeoisie before the Second World War: an underestimation of the threats of extremist actors. Its media has, after a brief period of shock at the Islamist management of savagery, arrived at a consensus that the pogroms need not be covered extensively. Instead, there is a flood of celebrations of the so-called second independence and a show of support from the West, driven by what their journalists, bureaucrats and academics correctly see as an increased receptivity to the neoliberal ethos. The section of the press which had been supportive of the Awami League is being sidelined, facing the wrath of both the new state and the mobs. The same would be the situation of the deposed political leaders for the foreseeable future. By taking over the government machinery in Dhaka and other urban centres, it has created an illusion that it captured state power in the country.

On the contrary, the new military-bourgeois caretaker government has weakened state power and its exercise across Bangladesh. It is now in the business of trying to replace tens of thousands of elected and selected officials of the state. Naturally, Islamist sympathisers can easily use the vacuum of power to consolidate more power within institutions. It is only a matter of time before the significant Islamist forces spread across the country turn against the new neoliberal bourgeois rulers in Dhaka. They will be helped by the internal migration of progressive youth towards the cities who wish to join the ranks of the bourgeoisie, thus depleting the forces of secularism in the villages and towns.

The Islamists, meanwhile, will move out from the city and consolidate their hold in the villages through their religious and political organisations. This upheaval will result in the swift agglomeration of Islamic locales created by urban Islamists through years of painstaking labour. Among all this chaos, the Bangladeshi Chotolok is entirely defenceless, bereft of an independent press, organisation and leadership. Already, thousands have been reported to have tried to escape to India. The Indian Border Security Force has been instructed to turn them back, with the political echelons fearing a new refugee crisis. However, the long and porous border cannot be fully secured.

This urban-rural dialectic — of urban non-religiosity and rural religious extremism — is sadly as old as Islam itself. Ibn Khaldun noted a similar perpetual cycle well over six hundred years ago; Friedrich Engels arrived at the same conclusion as well. The rise of individualism, state and social freedoms in the city spontaneously spurs on the rise of fundamentalist forces in the rural regions. In Bangladesh, the urban movement did not require any political organisation, but religiously driven political organisations organised the rural persecution. This dialectic is the reason why this moment has a high chance of ending up with an Islamist takeover. It is not that the bourgeoisie are secretly in a nexus with the religious fundamentalists. Rather, the only organised force which can replace the receding Awami League is that of the Islamists. Something similar happened in the other Bengali state — the state of West Bengal in India — when doctors organised a similar protest aimed at bringing down Mamta Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress government. The doctors’ coup failed. Had it succeeded, it would have brought the Bharatiya Janata Party to power in the state. The lack of organised alternatives would have ensured this. The bourgeoisie will have to build a party with a broad support base, which would include minorities, women and a chunk of the disillusioned voters of Awami League; and it must happen before the time runs out for holding out on the promise of free and fair elections. 

The dust has settled for now, and the political lines of action seem to be clear for the next few months. The bourgeois government will attempt to delay an election that it is certain to lose, whereas the BNP-Jamaat will agitate for quick elections and attempt to fill the vacant parts of the depleted state with its own personnel. Already, the Awami League sympathisers are being driven out of state institutions, from the Chief Justice to lower-level officers. The Awami League will first have to take into account the damages and reconstruct itself. A wave of anti-refugee nationalism is likely to erupt in India, and we might see the revival of citizenship debates over the next months.

An exodus in any South Asian society would destabilise the entire region; a possible next wave of refugees would not be as easily integrated into India as they were in the 1970s. Bangladesh faces difficult issues in the hill tract regions, where armed militancy is on the rise. Hill tribes were already underrepresented in the state institutions; it is likely they will be further sidelined. An even worse-case scenario is the collapse of the peace treaties that have put a stall to the militancy that had been growing among them: the end of a period of “violent peace” and the arrival of a period of direct violence. The chaos that would ensue from any one of these factors spiralling out of control can only be imagined. There are too many ways things can go wrong. 

The period of lawlessness in Bangladesh has been incorrectly called anarchy. We might take recourse to Immanuel Kant to understand the changes in Bangladesh. In his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, Kant describes four different political conditions as the result of different combinations of force, law and freedom. Anarchy, for Kant, is the presence of law and freedom in the absence of force. This does not fully capture the situation in these interceding days. A republic is one where there is law, freedom and force. Bangladesh was never a full republic in Kant’s sense, as it always lacked freedom under successive despotic regimes. The despotism — the presence of force and law in the absence of freedom — of Sheikh Hasina was replaced by the bourgeois-military despotism. In the brief period of transition, when the laws of the state collapsed, Bangladesh witnessed a moment of barbarism — the presence of force in the absence of law and freedom. The force, and thus the barbarism, was of the Islamist kind. 

One of the foremost bourgeois publications in this struggle was Prothom Alo, which is Bangla for “first light”. True to its name, it had been an early bourgeois opponent of the Awami League, even in the times when the regime’s hegemony was virtually unchallengeable. However, this weak bourgeois revolution is something that can only be read in the Anthim Alo, the last light, which is when the owl of Minerva would take to the skies, as Hegel put it. The experience of the Arab Spring — which was only truly intelligible in retrospect after it led to disasters — should have taught us to be wary of such terrible unintended consequences of attempted popular revolutions. The present Bangladesh moment too is to be read in the light of what it leads to — and we seek to trace the possible path pre-emptively so that a life-saving, anti-persecution, anticipatory politics may be made possible. The military-bourgeois government is at present incapable of defending against the Islamist threat. Without the arrival of an organisation or coalition that can do so, there will be many more lives lost. Among them, the minority lives would be the majority. 

Arjun Ramachandran is a research scholar at the Department of Communication, University of Hyderabad.

Kuriakose Mathew is an Associate Professor at the School of Liberal Arts and Management Studies, P P Savani University, Surat. He has a Ph.D. from the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IIT-B).

Views are personal.