Bangladesh in limbo: A country of 170 mn, where students run the streets

One female student, who looked no older than 16, tried to ease traffic on a busy street with the zeal of an overachiever, shouting what were more pleas than orders to ever bhaiya, Bengali for brother

By Mujib Mashal & Saif Hasnat

The two black VIP vehicles, their hoods adorned with Bangladesh’s national flag according to state protocol, idled late one recent evening in a ground-floor parking lot at the University of Dhaka.

The cars were waiting for two students, both 26. Just a week before, they were hounded leaders of a youth-driven popular uprising against the country’s seemingly unbreakable prime minister. Now, after her astonishing ouster, the two are cabinet ministers in the country’s interim government.

Inside the parking lot, young women and men milled around these unlikeliest of government officials, asking questions and posing for selfies. On a pillar at the entrance, spray-painted graffiti declared the moment: “Revolut­ion is not a dinner party.”

Outside, the streets of this country of 170 million people are run by students.

After overcoming a deadly crackdown and toppling Bangladesh’s iron-fisted leader, Sheikh Hasina, the student protesters are now seeking to set a new course for a nation born in bloody rupture five decades ago.

Hasina’s power had grown so all-consuming that her departure triggered a near-total collapse of the state. A wave of violence, including revenge killings and arson, persisted after her departure, with the country’s long-persecuted Hindu minority, in particular, gripped with fear. Almost all of the country’s police officers went into hiding, afraid of reprisals for the force’s role in the deaths of hundreds of young protesters. Students are managing traffic in Dhaka, the congested capital city — checking licenses and reminding people to use helmets. In some roundabouts, the punishments they are doling out to rule breakers are straight out of the classroom:  An hour of standing for a wrong turn, 30 minutes for not wearing a seatbelt.

One female student, who looked no older than 16, tried to ease traffic on a busy street with the zeal of an overachiever, shouting what were more pleas than orders to every  bhaiya, Bengali for brother.

A car carrying New York Times journalists was stopped by a boy who looked no older than 12. He asked to see a driver’s license.

In another corner of the city where some of the worst violence had taken place, Salman Khan, 17, and two other students manned a roundabout, occasionally pulling aside the fanciest of cars. What exactly were they looking for?

“Black money, black money,”  Khan said, explaining that many of  Hasina’s senior officials were on the run. 

Guiding the students who now run this country is a very different figure: the 84-year-old Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus. He is gambling his storied legacy as a helper of the poor to be the interim leader of a nation in disarray. But he has accepted the mantle of handpicked grandfatherly figure for what the students describe as “generatio­nal transformation.” “I’m doing this because this is what the youth of the country wanted, and I wanted to help them to do it,” Yunus said over the weekend in a briefing with reporters. “It’s not my dream, it’s their dream.”

Nahid Islam, a key student protest leader who said he had been blindfolded and tortured by security forces, described  imme­nse pressure that had now fallen on the movement, “even though we weren’t prepared for it.”