Staff Reporter:
Bangladesh saw an unimaginable start of fall of the autocratic Awami League (AL) regime on the very first day of July, 2024 as the day was gripped by student protests turning the ‘quota reform movement’ into an ‘anti-discrimination student movement’.
The people of the country even never imagined the quota reform movement which started getting mo-mentum on the first July eventually to be evolved into “July Uprising” participated by student-mass people, ending the almost 16 years autocratic rule of AL.
The displeased students merely heralded the protest to press their demand of rescinding the quota system in government jobs after a High Court (HC) order that declared illegal the government’s 2018 circular scraping quota in recruiting first and second class officers in government services.
Earlier, the deposed government was compelled to issue the circular repealing quota in 2018 amid exten-sive student protest that was subjected to violent attacks by AL’s student wing Bangladesh Chhatra League cadres.
However, the anger of students re-emerged after the court order that reinstated the 56 percent quota sys-tem including 30 percent for descendents of freedom fighters who joined the Liberation War in 1971 and 10 percent for women, 10 percent for residents of backward districts, 5 percent for people from minority groups, and 1 percent for people with disabilities.
The agitating students promptly took to the streets against the restoration of the quota system considering it a deprivation for meritorious students.
The student movement then spiralled into uprising as the government wanted to harshly tackle the pro-testers unleashing security forces and pro-AL cadres on them, killing 834 and injuring approximately 20,000 leaving the whole country in a pool of blood.
Bangladesh witnessed a barbaric crackdown on unarmed protesting student-people after the Liberation War which many people perceived that the July uprising was so terrible and intensive in the context of violence, ensuring the AL government’s fall after it came to power in 2008.
Sheikh Hasina’s all evil attempts even couldn’t save her throne as Bangladesh was finally freed from her autocratic rule in the face of massive people’s resistance and supreme sacrifice on August 5 as she fled to India bowing down to an unprecedented student-people uprising.
Sheikh Hasina resigned and fled the country amid the uprising, in an apparent backtracking from her arrogance to be showed during her entire rule saying with boastfulness that “Sheikh Hasina has not fled, she does not flee” as the identical word was also uttered by her in a meeting with businessmen on July 22, 2024.
But just 12 days later, her resignation and flee came in the face of the massive public wrath as hundreds of thousands of people marched towards Dhaka from different parts of the country defying a ending cur-few ignoring continued rain in the morning.
Millions of people from all walks of life took to the streets across the country with wild celebrations after Sheikh Hasina’s downfall.
