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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   1159 thread views

Transnational Thursday for July 18, 2024

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Reuters: Explainer: Why are Bangladesh students protesting against job quotas?

The demonstrations started last month after the High Court reinstated a quota system for government jobs, overturning a 2018 decision by Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina's government to scrap it.

That move, which covered the 30% of jobs reserved for family members of freedom fighters in the 1971 war for independence from Pakistan, followed similar student protests.

But the Supreme Court suspended the high court order after the government's appeal, setting a date of Aug. 7 to hear the government's challenge.

However, the students stepped up their protest when Hasina refused to meet their demands, citing the court proceedings.

 

Introduced in 1972, Bangladesh's quota system has gone through several changes since. When it was abolished in 2018, 56% of government jobs were blocked under various quotas.

The bulk covered groups such as freedom fighters' families, with women and those from underdeveloped districts receiving a share of a tenth each, with 5% allotted to indigenous communities, and 1% for the disabled.

The protesting students want all categories abolished, except the last two.

 

Hasina is the daughter of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the founding father of Bangladesh, who led its freedom movement. Protesters and critics say the 30% quota for families of freedom fighters favours Awami League supporters, which led the independence fight.

Experts also attribute the unrest to stagnant job growth in the private sector, making public sector jobs, with their accompanying regular wage hikes and privileges, very attractive.

The quotas shrink the number of government jobs open for all, hurting aspirants who want them filled on the basis of merit.

They have sparked anger among students grappling with high youth unemployment, as nearly 32 million young people are out of work or education from a population of 170 million.

Hasina is the daughter of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the founding father of Bangladesh, who led its freedom movement

It is important to put this in context. All direct and extended members of the Rahman family were murdered in cold blood, children and all. Hasina is the only* living member of her family, that's only because she was in Europe at the time.

This is a muslim majority country that's lived through a major genocide (in 1971), multiple bloody coups and is still attempting to be a democracy. Just the fact that that a muslim country is trying to be democracy is already a tall task.

Under her tenure as prime minister, Bangladesh has experienced democratic backsliding. Human Rights Watch documented widespread enforced disappearances and extrajudicial killings under her government

Wikipedia being tone deaf as usual. Practically every non-Hasina Bangladeshi leader has a genocide or dictatorial military coup on their hands. Bangalesh can't experience democratic backlisliding beceause it started at the bottom.

These fledgling countries need time. If you don't want military coups every 3 years, you need to keep them well fed. Yes, that means 100x better perks than civilians. But, it is better than having your head chopped off. Yes, Bangladesh, India and Pakistan are genetically and historically quite similar. But, only India has shown a genuine affinity for democracy. The other 2 are still figuring it out. There are obvious reasons for why, but that's a whole another discussion.

5% allotted to indigenous communities

I am legitimately curious who "indigenous communities" here refers to: I usually associate that term with first world countries with guilt complexes around historical events. I may be ignorant of regional events, here, but I'm not quite sure who this means, and what they were present before.

The Bangla-language version of Wikipedia's article on the quota system uses a word that Google translates as "tribal" rather than "indigenous".

Wikipedia's article on Bangladesh's demographics says:

Bangladesh's tribal population was enumerated at 897,828 [1.0 percent of the total] in the 1981 census. These tribes are concentrated in the Chittagong Hill Tracts and around Mymensingh, Sylhet, and Rajshahi. They are of Sino-Tibetan descent and differ markedly in their social customs, religion, language and level of development. They speak Tibeto-Burman languages and most are Buddhist or Hindu. The four largest tribes are Chakmas, Marmas, Tipperas, Tanchangya, and Mros. Smaller groups include the Santals in Rajshahi and Dinajpur, and Khasis, Garos, and Khajons in Mymensingh and Sylhet regions.

There's a separate Wikipedia article on the topic.

Fascinating. Quotas in multi-ethnic society make some degree of sense, but it's like they wanted to create a quota system and then, upon discovering that their country was 99% Bengali, just decided to bodge one together anyway.

Reading the Wikipedia, it seems that the founders of the system wanted to:

  1. Reward their fellow soldiers who fought in the war
  2. Reward women who were raped by Pakistani forces during the war
  3. Give out 'traditional' quotas for the poor (those from 'underrepresented districts')

What seems to have happened is that as the first two groups aged out, rather than replacing these positions with merit appointees, they expanded the rape victim quota to all women and expanded the soldier/political faction quota to the children and later grandchildren of those who previously held it.

It's a really interesting example of how this kind of corruption can be self-reinforcing. Even when a system is obviously not doing what it claims/claimed to do, it may still be kept in place due to the self-interest of those who benefit from it.

Quotas for veterans of major conflicts in this kind of third-world post colonial nation aren’t just a matter of favoring supporters, they’re a necessary coup-avoidance strategy to avoid getting overthrown by men who have guns and know how to use them.

For example, some people are suprised that Mugabe was fine with much of Zimbabwe’s farmland being owned by whites for the first 20 years of independence; he only changed position significantly in the late 90s after agitation by various veteran allies, many of whom were still well armed, and who hadn’t received the dividends they’d been promised after a series of long post-independence separatist struggles they had won. White farmland wasn’t redistributed to these veterans out of some kind of Malema-esque nativist-socialist platform, but because Mugabe feared being overthrown if he didn’t do it.

In Bangladesh Hasina started abolishing the system in 2018, but there were powerful constituencies in both the Awami League and the BNP (and in the ~20 or so extended families who rule Bangladesh and dominate every aspect of its political, economic and legal elite) who feared the consequences of no longer being able to reward the families of countless mid-level peons, and so the courts reversed the reversal, and now the higher courts have reversed that. We shall see what happens.

More generally, the Bangladeshi elite are highly westernized and secularized in what is largely a conservative and deeply religious Muslim country that has (like every Muslim country) seen the growing and significant influence of fundamentalist Islam since the late 1970s that emerged from the Gulf and spread with oil money, and which has extreme levels of wealth inequality. The BNP is in opposition but still largely dominated by these same elites. They all fear being overthrown by Islamists, and have all stashed billions of dollars in Singapore, the US and Canada. Every aspect of politics in Bangladesh must be viewed through this lens.

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