Protests over the Bangladesh quota: Hundreds of college students in Dhaka and other cities have been holding rallies for weeks.
At least 32 people have been killed, and more than 2,500 have been hurt in Bangladesh as the violence around student protests for changing the way government jobs are allocated has gotten worse.
On Thursday, the protests worsened when students set fire to the country’s public channel. This happened just one day after Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina went on the network to try to calm down the growing violence.
For weeks, hundreds of college students in Dhaka and other cities have been having protest rallies against the way that public sector jobs are reserved, including jobs for relatives of war heroes who fought to free the country from Pakistan in 1971.
What caused the protests in Bangladesh?
The Bangladesh High Court brought back a quota system for government jobs last month, rejecting Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s government’s decision to get rid of it in 2018. This is when the protests started. However, after the government appealed, the Supreme Court put the high court’s order on hold and set August 7 as the date to hear the government’s case.
The protests worsened when Sheikh Hasina said she couldn’t meet the students’ requests because of court cases.
Thousands of people protesting against the quotas and members of Hasina’s Awami League party’s student wing got into fights this week, which made things worse. The cops also tried to get rid of the protesters with rubber bullets, tear gas, and noise grenades, but they didn’t work.
Because of the violence, the metro rail in the city and all train services to and from Dhaka have been shut down since Thursday afternoon. The government has also shut down mobile internet networks in some countries. Netblocks, a company that checks for outages, said that Bangladesh had a “nearly total internet shutdown.”
Also, see: Indians living in Bangladesh are being told not to move because of protests against quotas. The Bangladesh Police website was down earlier on Thursday, and the Bangladesh Chhatra League website, run by the ruling Awami League and for students, was hacked.
As the protests get worse, the Bangladeshi government has also ordered that all schools and colleges close permanently.
What are the students asking for?
The students who are protesting want to end a system that gives more than half of government jobs to specific groups, such as the children of veterans of the country’s 1971 war of independence against Pakistan.
How does the quota system work?
Bangladesh’s quota system has changed a lot since it was first implemented in 1972. The system covers groups like the families of freedom fighters, and women and people from poor areas each get a tenth. Reuters said 5% is set aside for Indigenous groups and 1% for disabled people.
When the system was abolished in 2018, it was said that 56% of government jobs were stopped by different quotas.
The students protesting are worried that the quota will reduce the number of government jobs open to everyone, which will hurt people who want those jobs to be filled based on ability.
What has the government of Bangladesh, led by Sheikh Hasina, said?
After more violence broke out across the country on Thursday, Bangladesh’s law minister, Anisul Huq, said he was ready to talk with the students who were protesting.
“Whenever they agree, we’ll sit down. It could happen this afternoon (Thursday) even…” The government has agreed to talk with those who want to change the quotas,” he said, as reported by PTI.
Hasina, meanwhile, spoke out against the deaths and asked people to be patient until the Supreme Court’s decision.
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