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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to the new books network. This is the Nordic Asia Podcast.
- [00:14]
B
Welcome to the Nordic Asia Podcast, a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region. My name is Kenneth Bornhilsen. I am a social anthropologist at the University of Oslo in Norway, where I also lead the center for South Asian Democracy. In the summer of 2024, the Sheikh Hashina regime in Bangladesh fell, following what came to be known as the July mass uprising or the July Revolution. But what political and social forces were actually at play in driving the uprising? What role did the nature of the Hashina regime and its effort to justify itself play? And in hindsight, what can the Bangladesh uprisings tell us more generally that about processes of autocratization, resistance and mass protests in the contemporary world? These questions are at the heart of a recent special issue of the Journal of Bangladesh Studies. It's guest edited by Aril Ingleton Rood and Mubashar Hassan, who were both at the University of Oslo while working on this special issue. And they join us today for a conversation on how we can make sense of this tumultuous period in the history of Bangladesh and its longer term implications. Welcome Arild and Mubashar.
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A
Thank you.
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B
Also with us is Ishrat Hoschein from the German Institute for Global and Area Studies, who is one of the contributors to the collection. Welcome Israel.
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C
Great to be here.
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B
And of course, in addition to talking about events way back in 2024, we'll also draw some longer lines up to the recently concluded national elections held in early 2026. But Aral, if we retrace steps a little bit back to the events in 2024, you describe in your collection, Sheikh Hashina's regime as a 21st century backsliding democracy rather than a sort of classical dictatorship. What is it about the Hashina regime that makes this term especially useful?
- [02:10]
A
Thank you. I think that it's interesting because Hasina's regime is very much a 21st century phenomenon. So it's very different in a sense, or was from the sort of 20th century dictatorships that we, we saw in the 60s and 70s into the 80s, like Pinochet, Ceausescu, these kind of regimes. Hasina started off as a popularly elected government in 2008. They won by landslide, was very popular, and then it slowly and erratically introduced measures that solidified its position and prevented the opposition to function properly as a democratic opposition. At the end, in 2024, to some extent the regime was dictatorial. There were a lot of, over the years, arbitrary arrests. De facto, there was censorship. The interesting, I noticed this in the. Maybe in the 2015, 16 when I visited, one of the things that struck me was that Bengali is. Bangladesh is very sort of. They open, they talk a lot about politics, but increasingly they spoke less about politics. Right. So they were less informed and less willing to talk, even in tea stalls. And I think this came out of a sort of a self censorship atmosphere that was created by, for instance, the Digital Security act, in which any online statement could land you in prison up to several years. Not a lot of people did spend a lot of years in prison, but the harassment was very effective. And even up to the end, or fairly near to the end, criticism was permitted, some criticism, but not. There was a lot of an increasing number of no, no areas like Hasina herself, you couldn't criticize. So, and business owned media and business was friendly to the government. So this was also a part of the whole package that it was very difficult to criticize the government. And I think. So I prefer this term rather than dictatorship because of it's a different animal than you had in the 20th century. But it did approach 20th century dictatorship towards the end. It did.
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B
But there's another interesting concept that you also work with in the introduction, and this is autocratization's hidden twin that you call it. Another word for that might be resistance or hidden resistance. I mean, of course, the resistance that finally did come out in July 2024 was not hidden at all. I mean, it became very visible and was met with a good deal of violence. But if we go back to the long period before that, at least when seen from the outside, the Sheikh Hashina regime looked like a very stable autocracy in many ways that seemed to be in full control, pretty entrenched in most respects, with little opposition that it couldn't really handle. Why is it that resistance so often seems to be fragmented or hidden or muted for long periods before it suddenly becomes extremely visible through this kind of mass uprising?
- [05:21]
A
Right. That's a good question. Why is that? I think there are major gaps in our understanding of uprising in general and especially how they work in the 21st century. We don't really understand this whole lot. And there are not very many comparative studies of successful uprisings. But I think one of the things that the Bangladesh case shows over the years is that the autocratization that Hasina presided over was slow, it was erratic, it didn't go in one solid direction throughout. There wasn't a clear plan. It happened over time and so did resistance. But I think that we need to talk about resistance in A broader understanding. So there is nothing, just open public resistance, fighting industries and demonstrations and all of that. But there's a lot of other things that goes on too. I mean, one of the things that did happen under Hasina's many years in power was that you had large public uprisings, protests, demonstrations, 2013, 2018, a lot of the four or five large ones, but they were not directed at her government directly. And they were. It was directed at aspects of the government like road safety and stuff like that. And I think that they were really energized by dissatisfaction with her government, but they were not openly against her government. So I think that these also need to be taken into consideration. And in addition, there are aspects like foot dragging, tax evasion, and a lot of. We have. In a different article Mubash and I published some years back on bricolage, there's a lot of stories about how people dodge censorship, for instance. And if we consider all of this as examples and expressions of dissatisfaction cum resistance, then the whole thing becomes more sensible and understandable.
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B
Mubashar, can I ask you to weigh in on this question as well? Because, I mean, just to. Not to repeat myself unduly, but from the outside, I mean, these uprisings, they really looked as if they suddenly just happened. No, I mean almost like an explosion of ang. But as you also write, these uprisings in July 24, they were long in the making, shaped by many years of protests and silencing. But also these everyday acts of resistance that are mentioned. Now, how did these quieter, more informal forms of opposition help sort of prepare the ground for what eventually did become a mass uprising?
- [07:53]
D
You're right. From the outside, the July uprising looks sudden. It felt like an explosion, as you said, almost as if people just snapped overnight. But when you stared back, it really wasn't that spontaneous at all. It was the visible climax of something that had been building quietly for the yards by the late. So I'll give you a bit of background. By the late 2018, open protest in Bangladesh had become extremely risky. Laws were tightened, digital surveillance were increased, media spread shrank. If anyone went to the street, they could be intimidated, arrested, or worse, even they could have been shot down. So in this context, the resistance did not disappear. It adapted. It moved into less visible spaces while cultivating this wider democratic resilience in the society. So, for example, when openly criticizing government become dangerous, artists began embedding political critic into rap and hip hop music lyrics started talking about corruption, enforced disappearances, inequality, and repression of Hasina government. In this way, cultural production Became political and you know, in Facebook memes, satire, quoted jokes about Hasina and her father. They circulated widely online. They weren't always direct in our research we found, but people understood the message at the same time, informal letters became really important. Conversation in small WhatsApp groups, encrypted chat, diaspora media platforms. These became alternative political arenas and grievances circulated there. People compared experiences they realized they are not alone. In a book ARIL and I co edited, which is called Mask of Authoritarianism, we documented how different parts of society were quietly pushing back. Journalists kept investigating despite pressure. Academics raised concern about less academic freedom. Health professionals spoke about governance failure. Some bureaucrats slowed down certain directives in many NGOs we found that reframe their language just to keep civic space alive. None of this looked like a unified opposition movement. So that's the quite interesting story about Bangladesh. These resilience are fragmented, dispersed, sometimes even disconnected from each other. But collectively, this acts act something alive, a democratic imagination, the belief that alternatives are still possible. So in our later work with ARIL that ARIL just referenced, we described this pattern as democratic bicolage. It's basically the idea that when formal democratic space shrinks, people improvise. Instead of one big organized resistance structure, you get a patchwork of adaptive actions that are strategic ambiguity, legal challenge, issue based mobilization, every day, non complex. Some of it is playful, some of it was indirect, some of it was very careful. But together. What is important for us to understand here, Kenneth, is that it preserves the spaces for voice. It kept grievances circulating, a sustained network of democratic awareness. So finally, when the July arrived, society wasn't politically asleep. Grievances had accumulated for years, as I explained. And what this repression of Sheikh Hasina did is that they unified these separate mindsets. So Sheikh Hasina's repression, in my argument, is kind of acted as a facilitator for unifying resistance.
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B
But this also raises the question of, I mean, what should we call it? Maybe regime robustness. I mean, you show also in the collection how the Hashina regime relied heavily for a long time on different ideological narratives, focusing on the development it had brought to Bangladesh, on the stability it provided, and on this whole legacy of 1971 and so on to justify its rule over time. At what point did these narratives begin to backfire? And why did this sort of gradual loss of legitimacy matter politically?
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D
That's a really important question, Keren. Because authoritarian regions rarely rely on coercion alone, right? They need stories to sustain their authoritarian regime. They need moral narrative that justify why they deserve to rule. So for your listeners, I would give you a brief background of what were the three narratives of Sheikha Sina. So her first narrative was development, which included economic growth, mega infrastructure projects, poverty reduction. Second was the stability, the idea that only her leadership could prevent chaos or extremism. And the third narrative was the legacy of 1971, the Liberation War and the central role of our father, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, who was known as nation's founding hero. And for a long time this narrative worked. Bangladesh did experience some visible economic growth. Roads, bridges and power plants are built. International actors like the UN World bank praised development indicators. And invoking 1971 had deep emotional resonance in a country that was born out of oil, Right? So the regime reframed itself as the guardian of both prosperity and unfinished dream of independence. Shonar Banala, the Golden Mangle, the dream of Sheikh Mujeep's Bangladesh. But you know, these narratives did not come into the, into the political reality. People saw that this moral legitimacy had wider gap with lived reality over the years. You know, I'll give you a big background. More than 2,500 extrajudicial killings are documented by the right groups. There are over 700 enforced disappearances, many three illegal secret detention sites. Families searched desperately for their sons and husbands. Some never returned. Malnationary intelligence and security agencies like the military Intelligence, dgfi, the Rapid Action Battalion accumulated enormous powers. Allegations of secret facilities like Aynagar House of Mirrors were circulated widely. I spoke about this not only academically but but personally. I was kidnapped, forcefully disappeared, tortured and held in Aynagar for 44 days in 2017. For my critics and writing against Hasinan. When you are inside of an illegal secret prison, hearing the rhetoric of democracy and development echoing outside, you see the disconnect very clearly. The state spoke stability and progress, but the citizens were living with fear. And at the same time, all the elections under her were rigged. None of them were widely considered free or fair. And then this ideological secularization of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, a lot of criticism. People went to jail just criticizing her and her father. So in short, when economic growth cannot indefinitely compensate for humiliation and fear, citizen outburst, development without dignity has limits. Stability that rest on repression generates silent resentment. Over time, the narrative of only we can protect the nation began to sound like only we can control the nation. And you saw the collapse of symbolically, you know, so the story of Sheikh Hasina collapsed. They lost political legitimacy. And when Sheikha Sina fled to India, almost immediately, all the statues of Sheikh Modi were demolished. So finally, in the end, we need to say, at least in my opinion, that these narratives were contradicted by lived experience. And once that moral legitimacy, repression, could no longer hold the system together. And when the July uprising erupted, what failed was not only a government, but the credibility of this story that had sustained it.
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B
Ishtar, on this topic of 1971 and the war of liberation, I mean, this is something that you also touch upon in your contribution, and this is quite significant, this argument you make, that the students who were so central in this July uprising didn't actually reject this crucial liberation war narrative outright, but that they rather sought to interpret it. Could you explain to us how these ideas about equity, human dignity and social justice came to, in a sense, reshape what liberation could mean during first the uprising, but then also in the period afterwards?
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C
Thanks, Kenneth. I think it flows nicely from what Mubashir bhai just said. And before I answer, I think it's important for us to note that liberation war, or mukti jutho, is a loaded term in Bangladeshi politics, and rightly so. And every political party has tried in their own ways to own or disown this term, and especially based on their party leadership's respective position during this historical event and during the July uprising. I believe that we saw a different version of this politics of owning muktijutho play out. And I think it happened broadly in two ways. First, there was this discursive front which Mubashir bhai also alluded to, where we saw sort of a conscious decoupling of the word liberation from its historical context of the war. And kind of it was given more universal and liberal democratic meaning as a way to reclaim it. So we saw a lot of slogans like Shadi Natasha Bar Junnu, meaning liberation is for everyone, or true liberation is a commitment to equality, which points to that there was not equality present in the way the regime treated dissent. And also there was this Awamilek's main narrative on mukti Jut Chetuna, or the spirit of liberation war. This was kind of reframed as like, the spirit is for everyone and it's our spirit as well. So these are like some of the points where we saw kind of a discursive reclamation of the term liberation. And secondly, I thought that it was done through the subversion of this hegemonic, otherizing Awami League metanarrative that kind of played out in the 15 years and on which the Awami League regime built its central political ideology, on which is the spirit of the liberation war. And in a way, this aversion also happened at a discursive front through memes and hashtags and graffitis and slogans. And these were all like, were trending just during the uprising and slightly afterwards as well. But the overall message I think that the protesters were trying to get across was that despite Awami League and the Hasina regime monopolizing the narrative around the liberation war, they were unable to fulfill the actual promise of independence for Bangladeshis. And especially in the sense that in the absence of equity, justice and human dignity for all citizens, liberation is incomplete. And that's how we see the kind of the recontextualization of this term happening as the protest went on. And so it kind of shifted from 1971 to 2024.
- [20:21]
B
If we were to zoom out a little bit and think about some of the broader implications of looking at these events in Bangladesh 2024, you invoke this royalty and idea of a just society and you use this to make the case that the uprisings in a sense expose the limits of authoritarian ideological projects. What does this tell us about how dominant state narratives can be challenged from within and from below?
- [20:52]
C
I think I make more of a general argument about how authoritarian regime works, which then I give example of the Bangladesh sheet case from. But my broader argument is that when authoritarian regimes try to achieve legitimation through creating this hegemonic metanarrative, an outcome of that unavoidable or maybe unintentional outcome is that they become ideologically isolated. And then this isolation makes it vulnerable against like counter ideological backlash. And it happens for two reasons. First is the over politicization of regime ideology which we saw in Bangladesh's case through the spirit of liberation war ideology. When you combine this overarching ideology with repression of the opposition ideas, this kind of insulated the regime from counter hegemonic discourses which happened in the case of Kawamily. And the second is that when autocrats try to deliberately seek legitimation, they also depoliticize some of the liberal terminology or universal terminology, such as democracy, freedom and expression or rights, this kind of terminology. And they kind of try to give a different meaning to these words. And what happens in the process that people kind of try to the coalesce around this terminology which we saw during the Bangladesh's protest. So these two kind of two way process of achieving legitimations through overarching narrative and depoliticizing these liberal values kind of work as a way to kind of undermine the actual legitimacy of the dominant narrative, which makes it very brutal in the force of when the protest kind of takes a momentum.
- [22:45]
B
Ariel, could I invite you to follow up on Isharat's if we take Bangladesh and try to place it in a broader Asian context, we've seen comparable uprisings also in Sri Lanka some years ago, more recently in Nepal that we've also covered in earlier episodes of this podcast. But of course globally as well, we do see various forms of uprisings against autocracies. What does the Bangladesh experience tell us about when popular mobilization can actually secede against contemporary autocracies?
- [23:22]
A
Interesting question. There's been a number of successful uprisings, of course, in Asia and elsewhere. Madagascar government leaders have fled or been toppled or resigned. There's also been a number of not successful uprisings and protests that share a lot of traits with these three, four, five successful ones. For instance, only last year, not long after the Nepal uprising, there was a campaign, online campaign in Indonesia protesting against certain they called Nepal babies. So the extreme extravagant luxury display by children of politicians, oh, they're Louis Vuitton bags and foreign travels and all of that, that also happened in the Philippines and there were a lot of protests in the Philippines whilst I was there. And of course earlier you've also had the, the protests in the sort of the multi alliance protests in Burma, Thailand and Taiwan. And of course even before that there's the Arab Spring and that toppled a lot of governments. So there is a, there's a whole series of uprisings, protests, et cetera. Some are successful and some are not successful, but they share certain traits. And one trait I think that they do share is of course that they happen a lot of the mobilization happens online. So that's a different quality to uprisings compared to 20th century uprisings because a lot of it happens online. Also it involves very young people, so very often the digital natives. One of the interesting things that I saw in Bangladesh, but you also would see in other places, including in Nepal, is that there's a lot of popular cultural references to Anima, Japanese cartoon and Japanese. So the East Asian popular culture is more, at least as important a cultural mobilization as the history of 1971, for instance, in Bangladesh or previous, previous Ocewara. For an older generation it was Che Guevara. Now it's whatever they call these animus areas. They're very interesting though. So that's one thing. Another thing that I think is happening is that to some extent the Bangladesh case is different because it's the Hasana regime was first of all it was more autocratic, dictatorial than a lot of the other ones.
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D
Right.
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A
So it was actually more violent than others. But one of the things that they share, all of them, is corruption. There's a lot of corruption, nepotism, mal governance and very poor prospects for young generation. This is interesting because the young generation also engages in education. There's a lot of people who take education. They're private universities, they're quite expensive, so they build up big debts. And this is something that really worries the young generation too. Where will they get a job when there's no prospects? And economic development in a lot of these countries is bleak. Often Nepal was very bleak. Bangladesh took a hit after the pandemic. It did quite well until around the pandemic, but then it took a hit. Sri Lanka, of course, is a very unusual case that, that, you know, really went nosediving just before Gotha was forced out of the country. But even in Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand, et cetera, economic prospects are mixed. They all share, interestingly, all of these countries, they're fairly equal level in transparency, internationals, index. They're all fairly corrupt. Not massively corrupt, but they're fairly corrupt. Right. So this is a worry that I think that governments should be looking at. Corruption and mal governance really creates a lot of dissatisfaction whether the government is democratically elected or not.
- [27:24]
B
I couldn't help noticing that both the introduction but also a number of the contributions end on a quite a cautious note about post uprising politics. And you warn about, or warn against entertaining inflated expectations of immediate transformation as we have this conversation. More than a year and a half have now been past since the uprising and we've now had the first nationwide democratic elections after the fall of the Sheikh Hashima regime. These elections produced probably as, as expected, a big win for the Bangladesh Nationalist Party in terms of seats, but also a strong performance by the Jamaati Islami, who I think won quite close to one third of all the votes cast. A result that looks almost like a new sort of bipolar party system. The three of you, how do you see the connection between these promises and dreams that the uprising both built on, but also gave more energy to and the actual election results that we now have? And maybe Ishtad, I could invite you to chip in first on this one.
- [28:36]
C
Yeah, I want to pick up on your. This word you said about the promise. You know, it is. There are a lot of comments, promises. And one of the big promise was a promise of reform, which played out in the way we saw a national referendum happening which promises that there will be structural and substantive changes to the constitution that will prevent another autocratic regime from come. But whether this promise will be fulfilled by the incoming government is the big fear and that we have to wait and see. And the second thing is the big change that we have from this result is the rise of an alternative political player, as you mentioned, in the form of Jamaat e Islam. Their rise is partly because Awamilee Sheikh Hasina's party was not allowed to participate in the election. So that could be explained as why they got such a big majority in the parliament. But no matter what, we have an opposition, which is a new opposition, which Bangladesh has never had before. It's a right wing conservative Islamist party. So these are, I think, the initial ways I tried to interpret the results after this, the big uprising.
- [29:50]
D
Thank you, Shah. I agree with largely with this shot, but I also think there was a politics of who the legitimate, legitimate representative of the protest. You know, the reform agenda that was framed under it was a kind of technocratic framing of mass uprising. So they will say yes, there was a referendum, People voted for yes. But that particular referendum does not cover the key problems that eventually facilitated the rise of authoritarian government of Sheikh Hasina, which includes reform of intelligence agencies like dgfi, nsi, National Security Intelligence, Rapid Action Battalion and so forth. So if you cannot hold them accountable for under a parliamentary system, there would always be a risk of that authoritarian government style coming back to Bangladesh in future. And also I need to say, even though I'm a survivor of Army League's autocracy, I need to say that, you know, many of the army leaders were not involved in mass killing or crime against humanity. And this party has hundreds and thousands of supporters. So suppressing their voices for legitimate political expression have given away the rise of radical right parties like Jamaat Islami. So that two challenges will continue to sustain in the coming days if the new government, which is democratically elected and they need to address this in some way.
- [31:43]
A
It's true, as Candace pointed out, that about 30%, so 30% of the voters voted for the Islamist party, which is an ideological party that fielded about 80% of its candidates, were inexperienced. They had not held public office before, so it's an ideological party, but it was inexperienced. BNP, on the other hand, that won, won with about 50% of the vote. And I think that's pretty interesting. A lot of the candidates were also old. You know, they had been around for a long while. They had experience, they had been building organization, they'd been engaged somehow in politics. Over all these years. And of course, the party leader Darigraman had been, you know, he was famous. He was the prince. He had been there for the last 20 years or more. He's the son of two former state leaders. So he represented continuity. And I think a lot of Bangladeshi voters voted now for continuity, but they also voted for good governance. There's no doubt no one wants a corrupt government. And this was one of the issues with outgoing with the last government. And Tarek Rahman has managed to portray himself as someone who is generally interested in creating good governance and good economic development and proper rule. So he's managed quite well in that respect. And he represents a different kind of political culture from the outgoing government. And I think that to some extent does respond to the desires that people had.
- [33:26]
B
Mubashar Aril and Ishrata thank you so much for joining the Nordic Asia Podcast to talk us through the July Uprisings, how it came about, and how its long shadows have shaped politics in Bangladesh up to this day. The research we've been discussing can be found in a special issue of the Journal of Bangladesh Studies, more precisely in volume 27, issue number two. The collection is simply titled the July 2024 uprising. It's edited by Ara Lington Rood and Mubashad Hassan, who you have been listening to in this episode. Their introduction to the collection is available open access to read for free from anywhere in the world. My name is Kenneth Boonelsen and thank you for joining the Nordic Asia Podcast showcasing Nordic collaboration in studying Asia.
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A
You have been listening to the Nordic Asia Podcast.