DHAKA, Bangladesh — The two black VIP vehicles, their hoods adorned with Bangladesh’s national flag according to state protocol, idled late one recent evening in a ground-floor parking lot at the University of Dhaka.
The cars were waiting for two students, both 26. Just a week before, they were hounded leaders of a youth-driven popular uprising against the country’s seemingly unbreakable prime minister. Now, after her astonishing ouster, the two are Cabinet ministers in the country’s interim government.
Inside the parking lot, young women and men milled around these unlikeliest of government officials, asking questions and posing for selfies. On a pillar at the entrance, spray-painted graffiti declared the moment: “Revolution is not a dinner party.”
Outside, the streets of this country of 170 million people are run by students.
After overcoming a deadly crackdown and toppling Bangladesh’s iron-fisted leader, Sheikh Hasina, the student protesters are now seeking to set a new course for a nation born in a bloody rupture five decades ago and marked by political violence ever since.
The magnitude of their task is not lost on anyone. Not on the young leaders and mobilizers themselves, who have been surprised by what they have achieved and are scrambling to protect the spaces that have fallen into their hands.
Hasina’s power had grown so all-consuming that her departure triggered a near-total collapse of the state. A wave of violence, including revenge killings and arson, persisted after her departure, with the country’s long-persecuted Hindu minority, in particular, gripped with fear. Almost all of the country’s police officers went into hiding, afraid of reprisals for the force’s role in the deaths of hundreds of young protesters.
Students are managing traffic in Dhaka, the congested capital city — checking licenses and reminding people to use helmets. In some roundabouts, the punishments they are doling out to rule breakers are straight out of the classroom: an hour of standing for a wrong turn, 30 minutes for not wearing a seat belt.
One female student, who looked no older than 16, tried to ease traffic on a busy street with the zeal of an overachiever, shouting what were more pleas than orders to every “bhaiya,” Bengali for brother.
“Bhaiya — helmet!” she implored one man who raced by on his motorbike. “Bhaiya — footpath, footpath!” she yelled at a group of pedestrians.
A car carrying New York Times journalists was stopped by a boy who looked no older than 12. He asked to see a driver’s license.
In another corner of the city where some of the worst violence had taken place, Salman Khan, 17, and two other students manned a roundabout, occasionally pulling aside the fanciest of cars. What exactly were they looking for?
“Black money, black money,” Khan said, explaining that many of Hasina’s senior officials were on the run.
Outside her sprawling official residence, which protesters had breached and looted as she fled to India last week, a teenage student sat on a chair and spoke nonstop on a phone.
This was her duty station. When an army soldier called on her for something, she held out her free hand, in a motion meant to silence him — a single gesture that encapsulated all that has suddenly changed in Bangladesh.
Guiding the students who now run this country is a very different figure: 84-year-old Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus. He is gambling his storied legacy as a helper of the poor to be the interim leader of a nation in disarray. But he has accepted the mantle of a handpicked grandfatherly figure for what the students describe as “generational transformation.”
“I’m doing this because this is what the youth of the country wanted, and I wanted to help them to do it,” Yunus said over the weekend in a briefing with reporters. “It’s not my dream; it’s their dream.”
Nahid Islam, a key student protest leader who said he had been blindfolded and tortured by security forces, described the immense pressure that had now fallen on the movement, “even though we weren’t prepared for it.”
“The day Hasina resigned, we realized everyone wanted to hear from us — what’s next for Bangladesh? How will Bangladesh be governed? How will the government be formed?” he said in an interview in the University of Dhaka parking lot.
Islam and a second leader, Asif Mahmud, are two of the 17 ministers in the Cabinet. Mahmud oversees the Ministry of Youth and Sports. Islam’s portfolio in particular has a whiff of justice — he is in charge of the information technology ministry after Hasina had shut down the internet to try to break the movement.
“It’s a coincidence,” Islam said, smiling.
Behind the scenes, other student leaders are trying to figure out how to enact their idealistic vision for the future, even in this moment of chaotic uncertainty.
Mahfuj Alam, 26, one of the leaders tasked with canvassing input for a road map, said the country needed a new political settlement founded on three principles: dignity, compassion, and responsibility.
“We want coordinated change, complex change, which will facilitate upcoming governments to be democratic, to be accountable,” Alam said.
The student leaders said the country must break from its cycle of violence and from the way it has been run for most of its history. Power has swung between two dynastic political parties that alternate between perpetrator and victim of the country’s brutal politics. The students are equally wary of a third force, the Jamaat-e-Islami party, the Islamist movement that Hasina had banned as radical.
The students want to move away from the binaries — the two dynastic parties, but also the “militant Islamism” and “militant secularism” that the country has been caught between in recent years.
“This generation is aspiring for real changes,” Alam said, “not mere talking or blabbering about some families, about some histories, about some glories.”
But before the Bangladesh of tomorrow can be conjured, security must be restored today.
The country finds itself in a peculiar reality: The military, with its history of abuses, has been deployed to guard the police. Dozens of police officers were killed in retaliation for Hasina’s crackdown on protesters, and many officers fear returning to their jobs.
On the desk of one army officer positioned outside a police station was a pile of unclaimed badges belonging to police officers who had fled. He sat between the carcasses of burned vehicles; the station behind him was a charred ruin.
A man in his 60s walked up with dried blood and wounds on his face. He wanted to complain about workers from the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, the main opposition to Hasina, saying they had attacked him on his way to work at the courts. The officer, Masud Rana, said that “this police station is not operational” and could not do much. He eventually appeased the man by writing his name on a ledger.
“Our main work is to ensure the security of the police,” the officer said.
Later, a woman approached with a request that the army definitely could not help with. A police officer, she said, had taken about $400 in bribes to release her son in a drug case. Could someone pay her back the money?
The interim government is rushing to find creative ways to lure police officers back to work and reduce the toxicity associated with them. There have been leadership changes and talk of new uniforms. In a first step toward a return to a uniformed presence, young cadets and scouts have been placed at roundabouts.
In one stood Tahia, an 18-year-old cadet who was directing traffic with half a dozen other young women. A man waited quietly nearby on the footpath, occasionally pulling out a bottle of water to give to Tahia. It was her father.
Asked what he did for a living, the man grinned nervously and dodged the question. Minutes later, he whispered in a reporter’s ear: “Both her parents are police constables.”
The interim government faces an enormous task not only in restoring law and order but also in reopening the economy. And its members understand that they could be short on time. The caretaker government may last only as long as it shows it can deliver something different.
Pretty soon, the interim leaders will find themselves in the push and pull of the established political parties and their business backers, who want an election to be held quickly.
An immediate test may come Thursday, when the Awami League, the party of Hasina, has called for a march. That could put the party — with scant law enforcement presence — face to face on the streets with the movement that brought it down after 15 years in power.
But the caretaker leaders are hopeful that a trump card will buy them time. In toppling Hasina, they demonstrated that they had a wide-ranging mobilizing power that the organized parties lacked. Those parties, they say, have been discredited by the kind of politics that ignored the young nation’s aspirations.
“If we go to our homes right now, there will be no change,” Alam, one of the student leaders, said. “We don’t want to let them relax.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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