Bangladesh: courageous student movement continues – which way forward?

The courageous movement of the Bangladeshi students continues despite murderous repression by the Sheikh Hasina regime. Hundreds have been killed and thousands arrested. The curfew continues (though in a milder form) and while communications are being restored, messaging services and social media platforms remain blocked. The government arrested six of the coordinators of the movement and forced them, under duress, to make a press statement saying all further protest actions had been called off. Even under these conditions, however, there were student protests across the country on Monday 29 July,  including in Dhaka, Chittagong, Sylhet, Barisal, etc. These were met with further repression and arrests. 

Read this statement in Bengali here.

As the students have said, the movement is no longer about the quota system, the scrapping of which was its original demand, but rather is now about bringing down the Sheikh Hasina regime, winning justice for those killed, and the release of all those arrested. The students have issued a 9-point charter of demands. Many are saying, “when the movement ends, then the revolution begins” and are drawing comparisons with the revolutionary liberation struggle in the 1960s and 70s. The student movement is right in identifying the whole regime as the problem and in raising the need to overthrow it. How can this be achieved?

• The student movement needs to be strengthened and to equip itself with democratic structures. The importance of democratically accountable leadership has been shown in the past week. The Hasina regime has tried to strike the movement at its head, arresting and coercing coordinators. To ensure that the arrest or coercion of coordinators cannot behead the movement, coordinators should be elected, and replaceable and subject to recall at any time by mass meetings of students in struggle at each university, faculty and school. 
• The students can play an important role in sparking a wider movement, but on their own cannot bring down the regime. The movement needs to spread to the working class. This should start by approaching university lecturers and staff to join the movement. Committees of Action should be organised in workplaces and working-class and poor neighbourhoods. These should be coordinated at a local, regional and national level.
• Self-defence needs to be organised to protect the student movement and its right to protest. An appeal should be issued to the ranks of the army not to attack their brothers and sisters, to break ranks if ordered to do so, and to defend the students. Attempts must be made to break the army along class lines by raising social demands that would resonate with those drawn from humble backgrounds, and to encourage the organisation of committees in solidarity with the students in the army to the extent that this is possible.
• For the movement to have an impact on the working class, it needs to adopt a wider programme of social and economic demands, in addition to its current democratic ones. Garment workers last year went on strike for a $200 monthly wage. Such demands should be combined with full trade union rights, housing and jobs for all. 
• Such a programme should show how it is not only the Hasina regime, but the capitalist system that her regime serves that is to blame. In order to rouse workers to struggle in greater numbers, bold measures to achieve these social demands should be included, including the expropriation of the banks and finance institutions, and the nationalisation under workers control of the largest capitalist firms, both national and multinational. 

The only reliable allies that Bangladeshi workers and students can trust are their class brothers and sisters / Image: Nafis24, Wikimedia Commons

Some of the demands of the students pose the question of the role of the UN (whose vehicles have been used in the repression), appealing for the intervention of the international community and calling for Hasina to be tried at the ICC. We say, the only reliable allies that Bangladeshi workers and students can trust are their class brothers and sisters – the international movement of the workers and revolutionary youth.

The ‘international community’ has shown its true character by either supporting or remaining passive in the face of the Israeli massacre in Gaza. The ICC has been discussing Netanyahu for months, while Palestinians continue to be murdered. An appeal must be made to the workers and revolutionary youth of the world to redouble their efforts in solidarity with the movement in Bangladesh. Such an appeal must be directed first and foremost to the workers and students of Pakistan and India, starting with those in West Bengal.

Another demand coming from the student movement is for the banning of all party political organisations on campuses. This is an understandable reaction to the gangster-like role of the Awami League student wing and expresses the students’ distrust of all opposition parties, including the right-wing, pro-capitalist BNP and the Islamists. Rejection of all bourgeois parties is correct. The Bangladeshi students and workers should trust only their own forces. However, the question is not one of banning all party politics, but rather of creating an organisation based on working-class revolutionary politics. Rejection of all capitalist politics must be accompanied by a serious discussion among the most advanced elements on the need to build a revolutionary communist party based on the ideas of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky and reclaiming the revolutionary traditions of the oppressed in Bangladesh.