Dhaka, Bangladesh – For three days, Ahsan Habib, a private university student, was on the streets of Bangladesh’s capital Dhaka protesting against what he believes was a “violent assault” by police and ruling party supporters against common people like him.
The student protests seeking reform of the government’s job quota system have morphed into nationwide violent unrest, with demands for holding the government accountable for the loss of lives over the past week.
On Sunday, the Supreme Court scrapped most of the quotas, saying that 93 percent of government jobs will now be based on merit. But student leaders have pledged to carry on with the protests, demanding the release of jailed protesters and the resignation of officials, including Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan, who they say are responsible for the violence that left at least 131 people dead.
Al Jazeera spoke to medics and a network of journalists to compile a death toll, as authorities have not released casualty figures so far. Prothom Alo and The Daily Star, the two largest Bengali language and English dailies, have reported 146 and 127 deaths, respectively.
More than 70 percent of the deaths have been reported from Dhaka, where streets are strewn with the remnants of thousands of rounds of tear-gas shells, sound grenades, shotgun pellets, rubber bullets and brick chunks.
Aside from two policemen and two ruling party supporters, all of the deceased are either students or ordinary people.
“We were fighting against bullets with brick chunks,” said Habib, who joined protests in Dhaka’s Mohammadpur area on Tuesday. “There were not only police, but also people from the ruling [Awami League] party who were wearing helmets and were firing live bullets towards us.”
On Sunday, Habib’s parents prevented him from going out amid curfew and shoot-at-sight orders. Meanwhile, his close friend is being treated at a local hospital after sustaining severe injuries in the violence.
“What will I do with quota reform now? This government has used so much violence to suppress us. We want justice for our fallen brothers and sisters,” Habib told Al Jazeera.
Student leaders are also demanding an apology from Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, who initially defended the quota for veterans and whose party officials dubbed the protesters as “anti-nationals”.
Protesters have called Hasina, who has been in power since 2009, an “autocrat”. The last two elections (2019 and 2024) were marred by vote rigging, widespread irregularities and opposition boycotts.
“Of course, the quota reform alone is not sufficient now,” Asif Nazrul, a professor of law at Dhaka University, told Al Jazeera. “So many students and common people have died in this violent protest, which was definitely instigated by government at first. Someone has to take the responsibility for this tragedy.”
Curfew and crackdown
As violence escalated, the government imposed a curfew from Friday at midnight for an indefinite period, with intermittent gaps of two hours so that people could stock up on essentials.
The government also deployed the army in order to prevent the violence from spreading amid accusations of excessive use of force by the police against protesters. Soldiers were seen patrolling different city points and other districts on Saturday.
But defying curfew, thousands of protesters, both students and non-students, took to the streets on Saturday with processions, blocked roads and highways and torched tyres and planks of wood across the country and in different parts of the capital.
Rezaul Karim Rony, a journalist and the editor of the monthly magazine Joban, told Al Jazeera an overwhelming majority of protesters from the area where he lives in Dhaka were non-students.
“The protest is no longer confined within students as general people have joined them spontaneously,” Rony told Al Jazeera from Mirpur in Dhaka. “As there is pent-up anger among the common people under the autocratic regime of Sheikh Hasina, people have taken these student-led protests as a platform to express their dissatisfaction.”
Many establishments across the nation including important government buildings, Dhaka’s metro rail, and even a prison in the central district of Narsingdi came under attack from the protesters. Several ruling party offices and houses belonging to some of its leaders were also targeted.
State Minister for Information Mohammad A Arafat told Al Jazeera that the protest has been “hijacked” by vested interests. Students, he said, were fighting for “legitimate demands” of quota reform.
More than 50 percent of government jobs are reserved in the South Asian nation of 170 million. Protesters have been demanding the abolition of a 30 percent quota for the descendants of 1971 independence war veterans as job growth has stagnated and the cost of living has soared since the COVID-19 pandemic in 2019.
Rony, the editor of the local magazine, agreed that some opposition leaders have joined protests and indulged in “vandalism”. But he said that the government’s characterisation of protesters was “misleading”. “This is a protest of common people, by the common people now,” he said.
On Saturday, Nahid Islam, a key organiser of the students’ quota reform movement, was allegedly picked up by plainclothes police from a house in the capital. Islam’s family went to the offices of the detective branch of police, but his whereabouts are still unknown.
Internet blackout cripples the country
There has been a complete internet shutdown since Thursday, leading to an information blackout and disruption of normal life.
Ridwanul Alam, a private sector employee, has been frantically trying to recharge his prepaid electricity meter since Saturday morning, as there is no electricity in his home.
Alam first tried bKash, a mobile financial service, to pay the bill, but it didn’t work as there was no internet. His attempt to withdraw cash from an ATM was also unsuccessful.
“I don’t know what to do. My home has no electricity amid an internet shutdown,” he told Al Jazeera on Sunday.
Economic activities have also been completely halted. The customs house of Chattogram port – which handles over 80 percent of the country’s exports and imports – has not been able to clear any container for the past 40 hours.
Journalists are relentlessly trying to secure ways to gather and file news. Muktadir Rashid, a journalist from the digital portal Bangla Outlook, told Al Jazeera that enforcing the internet blackout is akin to crime now.
“It’s like the government is robbing the people’s right to know,” he said. “And this is a must in any democracy.”
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