As a Student in Bangladesh, This is What I Want the Interim Government to Do

It will have to reform the state apparatus in a way that is bound by the free will of the people.

Dr Muhammad Yunus became the Chief Advisor of the interim government of Bangladesh after former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina resigned and fled the country.

The other advisors are:

• Dr Salahuddin Ahmed (an advocate of IMF’s Good Governance)

• Dr Asif Nazrul (former member of the ‘Ekattorer Ghatak Dalal Nirmul Committee’, although that ended with controversies and a critique of Indian Expansionism in water politics, border killing etc)

• Adilur Rahman Khan (the founder of ‘Odhikar’ that published an annual list of deaths along the Bangladesh–India border)

• Hassan Ariff

• Tauhid Hossain

• Syeda Rizwana Hasan

• Md Nahid Islam (students’ representative)

• Asif Mahmud Sajib Bhuiyan (students’ representative)

• Brig Gen (Retd) M Sakhawat Hossain

• Supradip Chakma (former bureaucrat of the fascist Awami League)

• Farida Akhtar

• Bidhan Ranjan Roy

• Dr AFM Khalid Hossain (the only advisor who was a politician; former vice-president of Hefazat-e-Islam Bangladesh, a party that proposed a 13-point program that included gender segregation and that has a previous history of spreading extremist views against other Hindus, Ahmadi Muslims, seculars and atheists)

• Nurjahan Begum

• Sharmin Murshid

• Farooqui Azam

If the advisors are selected on the basis of being ‘civil society’ representatives, then some questions arise:

• What was their role in the student-mass uprising?

• Did any of them have any roadmap for the transition from an interim government to a democratic Bangladesh?

• If it was a student-led mass uprising, where is the participation of the masses in the selection of advisors or policies of the interim government except for some of the ‘coordinators’ of the movement?

• Why aren’t there representatives from all social classes in the interim government?

The members of the University Teachers’ Network were present in the movement since the beginning and they even proposed an outline for transition to a democratic Bangladesh free of discrimination on 4 August 2024, but none of their members were called for a roadmap.

The advisors took an oath to the president (a former member of the Awami League Advisory Council) on the basis of the old constitution, whereas if it is to be treated as a mass uprising, its basis is the will and intent of the masses and not the constitution.

There have been counter-revolutionary activities by various political groups. For example, according to the New York Times, Hindus and artists have been attacked in various places. Sculptures have been destroyed. The Hefajot-e-Islam has been involved in anti-sculpture politics for a long time.

The banned Islamist organisation Hizb ut-Tahrir was seen demonstrating for the first time in public and drawing graffiti at the University of Dhaka. Here, the ‘coordinators’ of ‘Anti Discrimination Student Protest’ occupied a room at the Teacher-Student Centre illegally and there have been allegations of them occupying rooms in residential halls. Abdul Kader, a coordinator of ‘Anti Discrimination Student Protest’ acknowledged in an interview with Prothom Alo that everything is being done under their banner in the same way as that of the Awami League after 1971.

Along with the collapse of the state bodies, market syndication has collapsed too. As a result, the prices of perishable goods have decreased and are controlled by the student volunteers. Stocks see the highest rise in three-and-a-half years as the stock market is out of the hands of Salman F Rahman. The student volunteers have replaced the police in maintaining law and order to an extent and traffic control which gained appreciation by the people.

The basis of the uprising is the will and intent of the organised masses. The interim government will have to reform the state apparatus in a way that is bound by the free will of the people, not by the existing constitutional scheme that gave birth to the dictatorial administration of the last many years.

After restoring law and order with democratic administrative bodies, the first goal should be holding a Constituent Assembly which will form a committee to ensure the direct participation of the people in the making of a new constitution. Let me give examples of the parts of the Bangladeshi Constitution that need to be amended. Part I (Republic) of the Constitution, and the amendment of sections 2A and 3 should be taken into consideration as a modern democratic state can’t have a state religion and a state language.

An official state religion establishes a kind of authority of one religion over others and is contradictory to one of the fundamental principles of our constitution — Secularism. An official state language establishes the hegemony of a language over others and hinders the other language-speaking communities from being on a level playing field in the production system (education, employment etc) with the state language-speaking community.

Section 4A —The Portrait of the Father of the Nation, Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman shall be preserved and displayed at the offices of the President, the Prime Minister, the Speaker and the Chief Justice and in head and branch offices of all government and semi-government offices, autonomous bodies, statutory public authorities, government and non-government educational institutions, embassies and missions of Bangladesh abroad — gave political parties the scope to build a cult of personality on which they polarise the political sphere on the basis of Bengali nationalism and administrators get involved in party politics.

Fundamental rights and freedom of speech and media must be preserved. The bureaucracy should be made pro-people by decentralisation and by incorporating people of all social classes. The repressive institution of the state apparatus, ie, the military and the police among others must be made accountable to the people by the election of oversight committees. The formation of the Rapid Action Battalion is unconstitutional and this para-militia force must be abolished. The administration should be free of party politics.

The syndication of commodity markets must be abolished and farmers should be allowed to trade directly in the market. When democracy has been restored in the state apparatus, to save the working class and the economy, the minimum wage should be increased and factories (jute mills, sugar mills etc) should be reopened under state control.

Low-wage earners should get rationing and a democratic labour law should be made for the workers. The indigenous communities of Chittagong Hill Tracts have faced Bengali settler colonialism and oppression since the birth of Bangladesh. It is high time they got back their lands and the right to self-determination. Some of these recommendations have already been given by the University Teachers’ Network.

After the mass uprising, the people were freed of a fascist party but the state, which is not so different, is still there, the annihilation of which is a part of the ‘one-point demand’ of the people. The politically conscious masses must have the power to determine the future of the nation.

(The author is a student of the University of Dhaka and a participant in the recent mass uprising in Bangladesh. He is also the former Joint Convener of the Revolutionary Student Unity, University of Dhaka. This is an opinion article and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)