“LOOK at the lanes!” exclaimed an astonished bystander from a bridge above one of Dhaka’s main roads. For a week a miraculous transformation settled upon the motorised anarchy for which the Bangladeshi capital is notorious. The streets were still gridlocked with vehicles, from battered buses and little tuk-tuks to the four-wheel-drives of the elite. Yet beneath the bridge and elsewhere, the traffic crawled in neat, well-behaved lanes.
Darting between them, students in high-school uniforms, acting as self-appointed traffic police, checked drivers’ licences and even distributed food to those stuck in jams. Dhaka had never seen anything like it.
The school-age vigilantes, numbering in their thousands and soon joined by university undergraduates, imposed order on Dhaka’s traffic into early August. This was a powerful form of impromptu protest, sparked when a speeding private bus, racing against another to pick up passengers, ploughed into a crowd at a bus stop on July 29th, killing a girl and a boy. Bangladesh has extremely high numbers of road deaths. A vehicle in Bangladesh is 30 times more likely to be involved in a fatality than one in Norway, while the number of cars on Dhaka’s roads has more than doubled since the 1990s. Adolescents are disproportionately at risk. There is no urban speed limit, and no money in the national budget for the agency responsible for road safety. Half of all vehicles are reckoned to be unregistered, and many drivers to lack a licence. Among traffic police, bribe-demanding far exceeds enforcement.
By contrast, some students are calling for the death sentence for drivers who kill. Priban, a 17-year-old, says those killed at the bus stop “could have been any one of us.”
The government of Sheikh Hasina Wajed, the prime minister, was quick to divine the black hand of the opposition behind the protests. Although everything suggests they arose spontaneously, a political dimension is hardly surprising. A road-safety bill had gathered dust for years. And the arrogance of Sheikh Hasina’s government is overbearing. One of her ministers, Shahjahan Khan, when asked by reporters about the two bus-stop deaths, grinned and answered: “A road crash has claimed 33 lives in India’s Maharashtra [state]. But do they talk about it the way we do?” It is, Priban concludes, “like our lives don’t matter.” To their list of demands, students added Mr Khan’s resignation. As minister, he has kept his post as the head of the Bangladesh Road Transport Workers’ Federation-a clear conflict of interest.
“Ministers and police should be sent to school and we’ll run the country,” was one of the students’ slogans. Strikingly, the ruling Awami League (AL) responded to the protests as if they were a mortal threat to Sheikh Hasina’s increasingly authoritarian rule. First it closed schools and universities (and, intermittently, the internet). Then it denounced the protesters, before going after them on August 4th. Meg, a 21-year-old student at Dhaka University, said he was part of “an absolutely non-violent protest” when he and his friends got tear-gassed. Rubber bullets were also fired into student gatherings. Stick- and machete-wielding thugs from the AL’s youth wing, the Chhatra League, backed up police in attempts to frighten protesters off the streets. Unidentified goons attacked the cavalcade of the American ambassador as she returned from a dinner with liberal critics of the AL government.
Sheikh Hasina, street cleaner
With the head-cracking, Sheikh Hasina has got her way. By August 8th few students remained on the streets-Priban’s parents forbade her to protest once the state-backed violence mounted. Hundreds have been injured and arrests have been made, including of a prominent photographer and activist, Shahidul Alam. He was picked up from his home on August 5th, beaten up in police custody and charged with “spreading propaganda and false information against the government” following an interview with al-Jazeera, a Qatar-based television channel, in which he was supportive of the students and critical of the government. A high-court judge who this week ordered him to be transferred to hospital said grimly that Mr Alam was fortunate not to have been “disappeared”. Over the years, critics of Sheikh Hasina have simply vanished.
The crackdown on these unprecedented teen protests comes just five months before a general election that Sheikh Hasina seemed bound to win. She has, in effect, done away with the opposition since returning to power in 2009. Her arch-rival, Khaleda Zia, leader of the main opposition, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), is in prison on corruption charges that her backers say are politically motivated. The BNP boycotted the last general election, in 2014. For the next one, Mrs Zia wants the army deployed to protect voting, as well as Parliament dissolved and an impartial interim government formed to organise the poll, as used to happen. The AL refuses. Yet to boycott the election a second time would, according to electoral rules, lead to the BNP’s dissolution. Perhaps, in the students, the BNP sees dissatisfaction upon which it can capitalise.
The Awami League does not want Bangladesh’s children to upset its plans for a long rule. Yet two-thirds of the country’s population are under 35, and the feelings of students count. Not only do they fear for their safety but they sense they will be frozen out of job opportunities which fall only to the politically well-connected. Abrar Chowdhury of Dhaka University believes insensitive handling has turned an “innocuous low-key demand for reform” of public transport into an anti-government movement. “Our generation has failed,” he says. The students, by contrast, are “reclaiming the state for everyone”.
