Making Sense of Bangladesh’s Monsoon Uprising

Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s downfall seemed to come out of nowhere.

One minute it looked like she was in full command of the fast-growing country over which she wielded “hard power,” as her November 2023 Time Magazine cover put it. Nine months later, she was fleeing Bangladesh ignominiously in a helicopter bound for India, after a popular uprising she had attempted to repress in a frenzy of armed violence killed and maimed thousands.

Days and even hours before she fled, close observers and political analysts were puzzling over the endgame: Was Hasina really planning to shoot her way out of the crisis? It seemed so. And despite the massive movement demanding her resignation, her power rested on such a robust coalition of state and political forces that close observers and political analysts alike could not imagine her giving up power.

How did Hasina fall so far, so fast?

The first and most critical answer is that demands for democracy after 15 years of increasingly autocratic rule could no longer be suppressed. Rigged elections, jailed opposition members, a sinister campaign of enforced disappearances, and the criminalization of dissent had shored up the Awami League’s power. “Hard power” came at a high cost to those targeted, but also to the legitimacy of the regime. Fear and anger could only be contained through extensive violence, both overt and hidden from the public view. The Students-People’s Uprising that came together over the summer of 2024 was not the first such movement: earlier student protests had been violently put down, but none had attracted the level of popular cross-class support of the Monsoon Uprising.

What was different this time? How did the student movement escalate beyond the point of no return when the Awami League had been able to contain earlier bouts of contention?

An increasingly evident part of the explanation is the failure of the development model on which Hasina had prided herself, and on which the regime’s legitimacy had rested. This interpretation counters the noisy narrative and visible markers of economic success that had long clouded and deflected scrutiny of the murky means through which growth was pursued in Bangladesh.

By 2024 the shine had come off the Awami League development miracle. Government debt was higher than ever, banks were in trouble after giving out massive “loans” to politically-aligned business people, and the average citizen had been hit hard by a cost-of-living crisis. A thoroughly rigged election early in the year had secured the Awami League’s position in power for the near future. But it also meant that people who were suffering from a worsening economy saw no way of replacing those with the power to address the crisis – or even of pushing them to respond. A journalist who had reported on popular discontent about inflation in 2023 was jailed under the country’s draconian Digital Security Act, illustrating the political salience of the issue.

Economic performance has long provided the foundations of political legitimacy in Bangladesh; protecting citizens against the volatilities of the global economy and the heating planet has been the bedrock of sustainable and legitimate governance. Bangladesh remains, despite the official PR effort to promote its success story, a society in which the majority live with the real and present threat of descent into destitution from illness, disaster, or being on the wrong side of political power.

This was not the first time a Bangladeshi regime had been toppled through violent struggle after it failed to deliver on people’s basic needs. Sheikh Hasina’s father, Sheikh Mujib, along with most of her family, was brutally murdered in 1975, after he responded to an economic crisis and a famine that killed 1.5 million people with an all-out push toward autocracy. The echoes of history are deafening.

But what happened in bloody July 2024 is not a uniquely Bangladeshi story. It is merely a more brutal form of recent political upheavals witnessed worldwide, where cost-of-living crises have seen incumbents of all stripes lose legitimacy, and in many instances, power.

The real puzzle here involves Bangladesh’s development model. For decades, successive governments, elected or not, popular or otherwise, had consistently been fiscal conservatives, delivering steady growth, a stable macroeconomy, and a gradual expansion of public services for the poorest and most vulnerable, all with the blessing of the neoliberal guardians of the global economy, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. The economy of Bangladesh – if not the politics – still looked good from the outside.

Why and how did Sheikh Hasina’s development dream turn into a bloody nightmare?

A Surprising Success Story

To understand the roots of the Monsoon Uprising it helps to remember the country’s early history, when Bangladesh was the poster-child for Third World misery. One of the poorest places in the world at the time of its war-torn birth in 1971, it was also the most densely-populated country, with no natural resources but its people. The new country’s territory consisted of low-lying land in the Bay of Bengal, already in the 1970s beset by the worst effects of rising sea levels and a warming planet. This Malthusian spectacle had little geostrategic significance and few friends in the international community. It was only when Dhaka bowed down to international pressure to align with market-friendly policies in the 1970s that it attracted international aid in sufficient quantities to help it kickstart economic development. After a decade of coups and assassinations, it stabilized under a military regime, which was then in turn removed by a massive struggle for democracy in 1990.

From 1991 to 2006, the country was ruled by two main political parties, the Awami League and the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, alternating in power through fractious but roughly democratic elections. GDP growth has averaged around 5 percent since the 1990s. Floods, cyclones, and other disasters were increasingly effectively managed; the readymade garment industry and remittances from migrant labor to the Middle East boosted household and national economies; and a mixture of state and NGO services started to reach the poorest and most vulnerable, in particular rural women, with health and family planning services, education, micro-loans, and food and cash assistance for the most vulnerable.

What was surprising about Bangladesh’s development success was not so much its rate of economic growth and industrial transformation – which were, at best, modest – but that its model of development was relatively inclusive, moderately pro-poor, and attentive to the most needy. This surprisingly inclusive model was partly enabled by the scrutiny of public policy by a vibrant free press and civil society organizations. None of this could be anticipated from its corrupt and elite-dominated politics or its overall level of development. Explaining the “Bangladesh paradox” has grown its own scholarly cottage industry, including insightful work by scholars such as Niaz Asadullah, Wahiduddin Ahmed, K. A. S. Murshid, and most recently, Naila Kabeer.

After an interim caretaker regime sought to reset the country’s politics on a more democratic and less corrupt pathway in 2007-08, the Awami League won a landslide election victory in 2009. For the next 15 years, Sheikh Hasina presided over a country that was already being touted as a development success because of its stellar progress on the Millennium Development Goals. Burnishing her credentials as a leader of global development became central to her brand, and she was often seen personally distributing relief goods to those affected by the climate crisis or receiving international awards for her leadership.

The economic transformation was visible. Massive investment in infrastructure changed the face of the capital megacity Dhaka, most notably around the elegantly functional Hatirjheel lakefront development. A bridge over the mighty Padma River connected the underdeveloped southwest of the country with the north and east, built with government funding after allegations of corruption led the World Bank to cancel its loans for the project. This achievement caused great delight in the ruling party, which touted the bridge as a symbol of the country’s growing independence of aid and its status as an emerging economic powerhouse in the region. But as a recent White Paper on the economy noted, these “temples of development” were built with vastly over-inflated budgets, illicitly enriching those closest to the central sources of political power.

This “infrastructural populism,” as anthropologist Nusrat S. Chowdhury calls it, and some of the highest GDP growth estimates in the world, became key indicators of the government’s development performance. After decreasingly democratic elections, often boycotted by the opposition, in 2014, 2018 and 2024, the regime relied ever more on its development performance for the legitimacy it needed to rule. By 2015 national income had grown to match that of lower-middle income countries, and Bangladesh is expected to graduate from the ranks of the Least Developed Countries some time this decade. The subtext of the narrative of development success was that a growing economy was a substitute for democracy, and that only the Awami League could deliver.

It was clear that the leadership thought it was pursuing some version of an “Asian model of development,” led by big infrastructure and the pursuit of high growth, without the supposed drag of democratic accountability. But Bangladesh was never a China or Vietnam; its noisy, uncontrollably corrupt, and internally factional Awami League never resembled the disciplined corps of the Asian communist parties that had driven rapid growth to the country’s east. The growing disconnect between the Awami League leadership, its tight band of crony capitalists and state and civil society cheerleaders, and the broader public meant that they lost touch with popular concerns; they measured their performance with the totem of GDP growth rates and presumably expected whatever trickled down would be enough for the masses.

The COVID-19 pandemic hit Bangladesh and in particular its crucial apparel industry hard, as fashion brands abandoned orders, some already completed, and factories were left with unpaid bills and unpaid workers. Migrant workers were sent home and remittances declined. Economic growth dipped in a year when Bangladesh was projected to have had one of the highest growth rates in the world. But whether because of demography, good luck, or good policy, Bangladesh escaped the worst of the pandemic and saw no disasters on the scale of neighboring India. As soon as possible, it rolled out an effective COVID-19 vaccine program. When the world reopened, Bangladesh looked set to return to its pathway of apparel export-driven growth. Once again, Sheikh Hasina was presented as the savior of the nation, a strong and effective leader for a country of 170 million perched precariously on a small and sinking land.

Failure to Perform

The rich did well and conspicuously enjoyed their wealth in the Awami League period. Luxury apartments, fancy cars, and world-class restaurants were routine features of the elite lifestyle. Trips to nearby Bangkok were so common it became known as “Gulshan 3,” in reference to the up-market area of north Dhaka. Elite philanthropy flourished, and Dhaka’s winter became a gilded season of lavish weddings, parties, and artistic and cultural festivals that celebrated Bangladesh’s new place in the world. The slightly unreal feel of the flowing wealth was captured in “The Inheritors,” a 2024 novel by Nadeem Zaman that reimagines “The Great Gatsby” for Hasina-era Dhaka, with all the glitz and anomie of the original.

Some beneficiaries of the regime concentrated more wealth than they know how to spend: the prime minister’s former office assistant (annual salary: $800) flew around in a helicopter, while a tax official (annual salary: $8,000) paid an ostentatious $12,000 for a sacrificial goat for Eid. But corruption scandals were nothing new. Other regimes had thieves and crooks among their numbers, too, and even those without close government connections were doing well enough. The rural poor and the agrarian classes, important parts of the power base of the Awami League, received government cash on digital apps and had access to community clinics and some other improvements in public services. Rural areas benefitted from local investments, a growing agrarian economy, and rising rural land values as property developers pushed the urban frontiers ever further into the countryside.

The urban middle classes arguably benefited the least: City rents and property prices shot up, but formal sector job growth was limited. The expansion of private universities meant many more graduates, but around a quarter of these bright young people were unemployed. Their tremendous creative and entrepreneurial energies could have been put toward building the fledgling online and digital economies, but by the 2020s the now-familiar problems of nepotism and partisan policymaking meant the sector never got the support and investment it needed to create jobs for the educated youth.

Already at the start of the 2020s, expert observers and analysis were warning of declining foreign reserves and macroeconomic imbalances, as well as a looming banking crisis as the rate of bad loans to Awami League-aligned business groups grew. Growth started to slow and the high cost of infrastructure projects dependent on kickbacks began to hit the government’s balance sheets. The Anti-Corruption Evidence (ACE) Research Program found that collusive contracting in energy projects had cost Bangladeshi citizens at least $1 billion in subsidies.

Since Hasina’s fall, evidence is emerging of the extent of bad bank loans, estimated at around $16.5 billion – in a country whose national GDP is perhaps $400 billion, and which spends only $3 billion on educating its 24 million primary and secondary school students each year.

Progress on poverty slowed as the benefits of growth increasingly skewed toward those with assets and clout. A large proportion of the population had always hovered close to the poverty line. One 2021 survey by the Power and Participation Research Center and BRAC Institute of Governance and Development found that the pandemic had temporarily pushed 25 million people below it, demonstrating the fragility of economic growth without a robust social protection system.

The cost of living was already rising when Russia’s invasion of Ukraine kicked off the global inflationary spiral from 2022 onward. As a net energy importer, Bangladesh experienced a rapid rise in inflation that hit people with low incomes particularly hard, with food price inflation averaging around 10 percent, while energy and other costs of living grew even faster.

The price of basic commodities is widely understood to have been inflated further by politically-protected cartels or “syndicates,” a suspicion borne out in part by the sudden drop in prices after the Awami League was removed from power and its most prominent supporters fled, were arrested, or went into hiding. The likely connections between abusive political power and people’s struggles to meet their basic needs were a particular source of discontent. Despite the heavy-handed repression of political dissent, Bangladesh saw hundreds of protests about the cost of living in 2022 and 2023.

As the governments of China and India seemed ever less keen on financing Bangladesh’s spending spree, the government sought and secured a $4 billion bailout package from the IMF. While this was deemed necessary according to neoliberal economic orthodoxy, it inevitably proved to be a poisoned chalice, requiring cuts to energy subsidies that saw consumer energy prices double.

The political economist Mushtaq Khan had diagnosed early on the core of the problem: The emergence of a political settlement in which political power hinged on crony capitalism. Key “advantages” were distributed among a core group of business leaders; this was enabled by tame members of the civil administration, violently enforced by aligned leaders of the security forces, and whitewashed by a cadre of cheerleaders from sections of civil society and the media. The excoriating and occasionally purple-prosed White Paper commissioned to report on the actual state of the economy post-Hasina noted a “Faustian bargain between the ruling political, business and bureaucratic elites” and a “dynamic coalition of transactional convenience between politics, business, bureaucracy, law enforcement organizations, media, development partners and the outsider insiders from civil society.”

There is a distinctive “moral economy” aspect to the successful Monsoon Uprising. It reflected a common belief that governments should protect citizens against the predations of global capitalism, in particular the market manipulations of identifiable local actors. A politically-captured state, driven by a polity dominated by crony capitalists, was too short-sighted, too focused on graft, and too insulated from popular concerns to see where the winds were blowing.

The Students-People’s Uprising

The dramatic uprising against Hasina’s increasingly authoritarian rule was led by students and joined by hundreds of thousands, very possibly millions, of people from across society. She ordered the security forces and her party’s thugs to attack and shoot these initially peaceful protesters, and this only inflamed the movement. More than a thousand protesters, as well as bystanders, were killed in the six weeks of the Monsoon Uprising; tens of thousands were seriously and permanently injured. Some of the victims’ bodies have never been found.

No civilian government of Bangladesh had ever treated its own people with such brutality, and the country was in shock at the violence of the state. The army had never before been commanded to shoot Bangladeshis en masse, and it was only when they declined to kill any more people that the violence ended and Hasina was ousted. Those who lived through both times said it was like the 1971 war of liberation, when the Pakistani army attacked and murdered civilians in a targeted, almost genocidal strategy intended to instill deep fear.

The uprising led by students from public and private universities was soon joined by other citizens from all walks of life, in particular workers in the garments and transport industries and informal sectors. It was initially triggered by a public sector job quota system seen to favor supporters of the regime, which had for several years been the target of an increasingly well-organized student movement. But the anger of the hundreds of thousands that took to the streets was fueled by the brutal violence of a regime that had failed to deliver on people’s basic needs, yet was siphoning off billions in corrupt “development” deals.

The stakes for Sheikh Hasina’s regime and its beneficiaries were high, particularly after over a thousand civilians had been killed and many thousands more injured. By August 5, and with a reported revolt underway by junior officers, the army chief declined to continue to shoot protesters. As Hasina and her ministers and cronies fled the country, the student leaders of the movement invited Mohammad Yunus, the Nobel laureate and founder of the microfinance institution the Grameen Bank, to form an interim government with the aim of introducing constitutional and state reforms and restoring the country to democratic rule.

One of the interim government’s first tasks was to tackle massive flooding, the worst in several decades, in a country where the apparatus of the state – the local government, the parliament, and the police – were in hiding, exile, or jail.

Bangladesh’s next government will probably be elected later in 2025, and it will face the uphill task of rebuilding broken and captured public institutions, recovering billions of dollars in stolen assets, and figuring out how to restore democracy without either violence or oppression. If political leaders have learned anything, their first step will be protecting citizens against economic crisis and the effects of climate change. To do that they will need to be accountable to Bangladeshis. That accountability must not be won at the cost of thousands of more young lives.