Bangladesh: The fall of the Hasina Government

On 5 August 2024, Bangladesh’s Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, fled the country. She had been in the post since 2009 and had won the most recent parliamentary elections in January 2024, though these were boycotted by the opposition parties. An interim government led by economist and Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus is now running the country.

While Hasina and her Awami League party had overseen economic growth and development, there had been discontent at the alleged high levels of corruption and concerns that supporters of the party benefited the most from the increased prosperity.

Concerns had also been raised about Hasina’s government growing increasingly autocratic, with reported stifling of dissent leaving little space for opposition political parties to operate. In the run up to the January 2024 elections, there was a mass arrest of leaders and supporters of the main opposition party, the Bangladesh National Party.

The principal reason for the fall of the government was mass student-led protests that started in July 2024 against a quota system for public sector jobs. Bangladesh’s Supreme Court had reinstated the system scrapped in 2018, which gave 30% of jobs to the descendants of those who fought for Bangladesh in its 1971 War of Independence. The protestors demanded that most jobs be awarded on merit. Dozens of protestors were reportedly killed and hundreds injured as the government responded to the demonstrations.

This briefing looks at the roots of the political crisis in Bangladesh’s political history, the quota protests, and the challenges facing the new interim government.