The end of the Hasina era in Dhaka

On 5 August, Sheikh Hasina resigned as prime minister of Bangladesh and left the country by helicopter, bound for India, and the general who announced her departure, Waker-Uz-Zaman, spoke of the violence that had brought the country to this point in the flat tones of a man describing a settled fact. The protests that had begun in July as a campaign against the quotas in the civil service, which reserved jobs for the descendants of the 1971 war, had grown through weeks of deadly crackdowns into a movement that no longer asked for a smaller reform but for the fall of the government, and the death toll of the summer, counted in the hundreds by the human-rights groups, made the demand harder to refuse with every passing day. When the police and the army declined, in the end, to carry out the orders that would have held the streets, the government was gone within an afternoon.

The politics of the collapse were years in the making. Hasina’s rule had grown steadily more solitary: the opposition was crushed, the elections were managed, the press was silenced by degrees, and the economy, which had lifted millions out of poverty in her first decade, had run out of the borrowed credit that had sustained the boom. The quota protests were the spark, and the students who carried them were young enough to have known nothing of the Awami League’s heroic founding story, which meant they were also free to judge its present by what they saw in front of them. That generational rupture is worth taking seriously; movements that begin with a demand for a share of the jobs tend to end by asking who holds the power that distributes them.

The immediate arrangement is a caretaker government, and the name most often mentioned to lead it, Muhammad Yunus, the economist whose microcredit bank won the Nobel Peace Prize, is a choice that carries its own meaning: the man who built his reputation on lending to the poor is being asked to lend the country a few months of decency. It is a strange reward for a figure who has been treated by successive governments, Hasina’s most of all, as a nuisance, and his acceptance of the role would be, if it happens, a small irony of the kind politics occasionally delivers.

What the students extracted is real, and what they face is harder. The army has not dissolved itself, the bureaucracy has not reformed itself, the political parties that were crushed have not rebuilt themselves, and the economy that the protests interrupted is still the country’s oldest problem. The fall of a long ruler is usually the easy part; the building that follows is where the debts come due, and the debts of fifteen years are not cleared by one helicopter. The streets of Dhaka were jubilant on the evening of 5 August, and the celebrations were honest, but the country that woke up the next morning was still the same country, with the same institutions, the same inequality and the same geography. The students who won the summer have now inherited the winter, and that is the part of the revolution nobody can do for them.