Bangladesh’s prime minister just fled the country in a helicopter. Why?

Bangladesh’s increasingly autocratic leader, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, resigned and fled the country Monday following weeks of unrest.

Hasina’s exit on an India-bound military helicopter came after crowds broke a curfew and stormed the prime minister’s residence in the capital Dhaka, following weeks of bloody protest. 

The movement that ultimately toppled her started with students frustrated at their lack of job prospects and snowballed to include ordinary Bangladeshis facing increasingly tough economic conditions. But the jubilant scenes in the capital Dhaka come at great cost; around 300 people have been killed since the protests started in June, and the country’s future remains uncertain as a military-backed caretaker government steps in.

After a decade and a half in power, Hasina’s legacy is complicated. On the one hand, her government built modern infrastructure and improved development opportunities, especially for the poor. But she also increasingly cracked down on the press, as well as the opposition, and as time went on, many forms of dissent.

Army General Waker-uz-Zaman announced Monday that the military had taken control of the government; parliament is being dissolved, and the government is formulating a plan for fresh elections.

“The country is going through a revolutionary period,” Zaman said in a national television address. “We request you to have faith in the army of the country. Please don’t go back to the path of violence and please return to nonviolent and peaceful ways.”

Though a people-power movement has won a victory in driving Hasina out, the young democracy is entering a period of major uncertainty; indeed, what happens next for Bangladesh is anyone’s guess.

How Bangladesh got to the breaking point

Hasina belongs to one of Bangladesh’s two political dynasties, which have traded power with each other since the country’s tumultuous and bloody founding in 1971. Her father, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, was a freedom fighter frequently called the father of Bangladesh. He was assassinated in 1975, forcing Hasina to live in exile in India.

But, boosted by her familial connections, Hasina was first elected prime minister in 1996, serving until 2001, when Hasina’s foil, former Prime Minister Khaleda Zia, was elected. Zia was released from house arrest Monday at the behest of President Mohammed Shahabuddin. 

Hasina and Zia, the head of the opposition Bangladeshi Nationalist Party and widow of former Prime Minister Ziaur Rahman, have been the only two elected leaders in Bangladesh since 1991. Until January, the BNP was in a massive coalition against the Awami league with 19 other political parties and boycotted the January 7 elections.  

This intense polarization — Awami League versus everyone else — is part of the reason for the protests. Another part is economic. For the country’s many educated young people, a stable path has meant a job with the government, but that has been increasingly impossible. Protesters blame a quota system that reserved up to 30 percent of government jobs for relatives of soldiers from the 1971 war for independence — but which protesters complained benefited Awami League members and allies. 

Hasina is credited for an economic boom shortly after she took office for the second time in 2008. “The government has had a relatively strong economic record over its 15 years in power,” Geoffrey McDonald, a visiting expert at the US Institute of Peace, told Vox. “There has been rising development, infrastructure developments, [increased] income rates, and a lot of human development indicators outrank many of its neighbors.”

But “a lot of Bangladesh’s growth has been in areas like textiles, that are not a big employment stream for university graduates,” Paul Staniland, a political science professor at the University of Chicago, told Vox. “So this quota system was seen as kind of artificially restricting the supply of jobs for educated folks.”

But economic problems in Bangladesh are not limited to the middle class;  like many other countries in South Asia and around the world, Bengalis are suffering from high inflation — around 9.9 percent as of this writing — making it harder for ordinary people to afford the basics.

Politically, Bangladeshis were fed up, too; elections in 2018 and this past January were widely seen as being fraudulent, and people no longer felt that they had a voice in choosing a government that could respond to their needs.

“This process of an autocratic nation really deepens and lasts five or six years where Sheikh Hasina really goes after a lot of her enemies, whether they’re part of the BNP, whether they’re liberal dissidents, whoever — really kind of solidifying and personalizing her rule,” Stanliand said. “And so that kind of runs through the most recent election, which, you know, is widely viewed as deeply irregular.”

Those facts, as well as the government’s incredibly violent crackdown against the protesters, ignited a national movement that succeeded in ousting Hasina. 

“We were expecting some sort of crisis, but I was not thinking that she might leave because she’s a very strong character,” Fabeha Monir, an independent journalist living in Dhaka, told Vox. But the police response, “escalated in a way and then so much that it was intolerable, intolerable for the nation itself.”

In mid-July, crackdowns on the protesters started in earnest, with the police imposing a curfew and shoot-on-sight order. The government also blocked internet and mobile access. 

Bangladesh is in a historical transition — but no one knows what comes next

Along with the founding of the state, the assassination of Hasina’s father, and the 1991 return to democracy, the protest movement and Hasina’s departure will be one of the defining events of Bangladesh’s history. 

Details of Hasina’s resignation and exile are still coming to light, but the protests could not have evolved the way they did — with thousands eventually breaching Hasina’s residence — without the military’s tacit agreement, or at least its refusal to crack down as Hasina wished.

“So many armed students died, and everybody started blaming our military,” Monir said. “So then they started supporting [the protesters for] a few days now.”

The military has historically been powerful in Bangladesh, and though Hasina seemed to have corralled it a bit under her tenure, it still appears to have retained some independence, Staniland said.

“My guess is, the military was not willing to kill hundreds or thousands of people to stop this next wave of protest that developed,” he said. “And that was the trigger for her to leave.”

Though there is genuine excitement about Hasina’s departure, there is also great concern for what happens next. In a best-case scenario for democracy, the caretaker government could ensure elections that lead to real, progressive reforms. That’s far from certain, however. The military could cling to power, or more right-wing, Islamist factions could seize the government.

The great concern for now is the spread of more violence — this time, not just against protesters, but against supporters of the Awami League, particularly those belonging to minority groups.

Bangladesh is a multi-ethnic, multi-religious state, though the BNP tends toward political Islam and is more conservative. The Awami League, which is secular, appeals to religious minorities in a majority Muslim society, as well as ethnic minorities like the Rohingya from Myanmar, which the Hasina administration made an effort to support when they began arriving as refugees in 2017.

“I think we’re likely to see a lot of retribution being taken out against local Awami League officials — police and security officials who defended the government,” MacDonald said. “Hindus are a historical vote bank of the Awami League. And there’s also just lingering tensions between religious communities in general.”