Dhaka burns: death toll rises, telecommunications blocked

Students, who have been protesting for days demanding the abolition of quotas in public hiring, set fire to the state TV headquarters and other government offices in response to a harsh police crackdown. Yesterday alone 32 people were killed. The protest is acting as a catalyst against Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, who was re-elected in January but in a vote boycotted by the opposition who accuse her of authoritarianism.

Milan (AsiaNews/Agencies) - Dhaka woke up today with the internet and much of its telecommunications disrupted, having yesterday experienced the most dramatic hours of the protests that have been going on for days over student demonstrations on the issue of quotas for government jobs. The AFP news agency reports 32 deaths in the last 24 hours alone, bringing to 39 the total death toll in the unrest that began on 7 July. Clashes are reported in at least 26 districts, almost half of the country's districts.

Students responded to the harsh police repression by setting fire to several government offices in a chain of violence. Among the buildings set on fire in Dhaka was the headquarters of the state broadcaster Bangladesh Television, from whose frequencies Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina had made an appeal to the nation. The security forces themselves complain of assaults on their vehicles and say they will use every means to restore order. There is a lot of concern about the interruption of telecommunications, which makes it impossible to get a clear picture of the situation: even local news sites are inaccessible.

As we wrote a few days ago, the protest started from the issue of public recruitment - tens of thousands of jobs in a country of 170 million inhabitants - in which a 30% quota is still reserved for the descendants of the combatants in the war of liberation from Pakistan in 1971, as well as for the protection of minorities and the disabled. An issue that remains hot in a country where the premier is still the daughter of Mujibur Rahman, the founding father and first president of Bangladesh.

This protest by the students is intertwined with the discontent that has been simmering in the country for some time over the increasingly authoritarian character assumed by Hasina's government. There had already been strong tensions at the end of last year with the unheeded demand of the opposition for a ‘super partes’ government to manage the elections held on 7 January. A vote that saw for the fourth consecutive time the reconfirmation of Sheikh Hasina's Awami League, but with a massive boycott of the polls by movements linked to the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, the main antagonist force, whose leader Khaleda Zia has been under arrest since 2018 on corruption charges. International observers and some Western governments have also accused the Dhaka government of using security laws to gag any form of dissent.

The issue of quotas, therefore, has become the catalyst for the opposition to Sheikh Hasina in recent hours. And the premier's accusation that the students are ‘ghosts of the Razakars’, the Pakistani army collaborators in the 1971 war, has further inflamed tempers. But the internal balance in Bangladesh - especially the question of the protection of Hindu, Buddhist and Christian minorities in a country with an overwhelming Muslim majority - remains an extremely delicate issue. And as we reminded AsiaNews a few days ago on theeighth anniversary of the Dhaka massacre, Islamic radicalism remains a latent threat that could find an important ally in the country's chaos and violence.