Welcome to Foreign Policy’s South Asia Brief.
The highlights this week: Massive protests in Bangladesh undermine Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s legitimacy, India’s government announces its new budget in the wake of the national election, and Pakistan arrests an al Qaeda leader.
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Bangladesh has, in recent days, suffered its worst civil unrest in decades. A peaceful demonstration against the reinstatement of civil service job quotas for relatives of independence war veterans turned violent last week after the student wing of the ruling Awami League (AL) party, police, and border guards targeted student protesters with force.
Some demonstrators responded violently, attacking government buildings, public infrastructure, and police facilities and even staging a jailbreak, freeing hundreds of prisoners outside the capital, Dhaka. The Bangladeshi government deployed the army to restore order, imposed curfews, and shut down the internet nationwide. Nearly 180 people have died.
The demonstrations have abated since Sunday, when Bangladesh’s Supreme Court drastically decreased the number of quotas in question. But protesters have vowed to return to the streets if their demands, which include the release of arrested protest leaders and the resignation of government and university leaders that they have linked to the violence, are not met.
Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina now faces her biggest challenge over her 15 consecutive years in power. Even if she rides the crisis out, she has suffered unprecedented political damage that could come back to haunt her in the weeks and months ahead.
Hasina has faced little sustained resistance during her time in power, in large part because her government has sidelined the opposition. But this month, as thousands of students rose up in Dhaka and beyond, the initial protests morphed from a demonstration against job quotas to a wider anti-government movement fueled by long-standing grievances about state repression and corruption.
As a result, Hasina’s aura of invulnerability has been shattered. The protests were some of the largest and angriest ever directed at her—there were unprecedented chants of “down with the dictator”—and they have enjoyed extensive public support. Many Bangladeshis are also enraged about the dozens of people killed in her government’s heavy-handed response, her deployment of the army, and the nearly one-week internet shutdown.
This widespread anger has weakened Hasina’s legitimacy, which was already fragile when she returned to power in a January election boycotted by the opposition and amid growing economic stress. Hasina has sought to base her legitimacy on her oversight of remarkable economic growth, successful counterterrorism policies, management of the complex Rohingya refugee crisis, and geopolitical balancing act. This has now become a much harder sell.
Hasina isn’t about to step down. She has taken a characteristically defiant stance, painting the protests as a movement hijacked by mobs tied to the political opposition. Given this framing, Hasina resigning would amount to giving in. She has leveraged her own tragic history—the military assassinated her father, Bangladesh’s independence hero, along with her mother and her three brothers when she was 28 years old—to become a strong and unfaltering leader.
However, with the Bangladeshi public galvanized, it won’t take much to trigger fresh protests down the road. The next time around, Hasina could find it increasingly difficult to insulate herself from calls for her resignation. Such calls may not come from her inner circle, and she would surely ignore any from the opposition.
But Bangladesh’s military, which has staged a few coups and coup attempts in the country’s past but currently backs Hasina, could advise her to resign if sustained unrest raises concerns about stability. Similarly, India—Bangladesh’s closest and most influential friend—could take a similar position if it fears destabilizing actions by the opposition that would imperil Indian interests. (New Delhi, like Dhaka, sees the opposition as a dangerous Islamist force.)
Hasina, one of Asia’s longest-serving leaders, is the ultimate survivor; she is often described as an “iron lady.” She may persevere and serve out her fourth straight term, which ends in 2029, but the beleaguered prime minister has never had so many cracks in her armor.
India announces new budget. Indian Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman presented her government’s 2024 budget to Parliament on Tuesday, a day after New Delhi released its latest economic survey. The survey predicts that India’s real GDP will grow at around 6.5 to 7 percent in fiscal year 2025 (which, in India, runs from April 1 through March 31, 2025)—reinforcing the view that the economy has bounced back well from the COVID-19 pandemic.
This budget is one of the most important since Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi took power a decade ago, coming soon after an election in which his party performed worse than expected in part due to economic stress. Sitharaman announced plans to upgrade social welfare and introduce a $24 billion jobs program, along with initiatives intended to bolster rural development.
Additionally, the budget includes tax relief measures for the middle class, which India hopes will help reduce sluggish private consumption rates tied to inflation.
Pakistan arrests al Qaeda leader. Pakistani officials in the province of Punjab said last Friday that they had arrested an al Qaeda leader, Amin ul-Haq, who was a close aide to Osama bin Laden. They indicated that they were searching for him for several years and that arresting him foiled attacks that he was planning in Punjab, which is Pakistan’s most populous province and home to the military’s headquarters.
Ul-Haq, an Afghan national, once headed the elite security team charged with protecting bin Laden. His ties to bin Laden reportedly went back to the 1980s; he was previously arrested in Pakistan in 2008 but released in 2011 because of poor health and because his ties to al Qaeda “could not be proved.” Ul-Haq reportedly returned to Afghanistan at the end of August 2021 amid the U.S. withdrawal; it’s unclear when he returned to Pakistan.
In recent years, the Pakistani Taliban and Islamic State have emerged as the region’s most deadly terrorist threats. Still, al Qaeda remains a concern because of its close links to other militant groups in the region, including the Afghan Taliban. Ul-Haq’s arrest is also a reminder of al Qaeda’s historical presence in Pakistan: Several top leaders were arrested there and turned over to U.S. officials soon after the 9/11 attacks.
Protesters besiege Pakistani Consulate in Frankfurt. Last Saturday, dozens of protesters scaled the walls of the Pakistani Consulate in Frankfurt, Germany. Video images showed them waving Afghan national flags, and someone was seen removing the Pakistani flag from the facility. The Pakistani Embassy in Berlin and the Foreign Affairs Ministry back in Islamabad angrily condemned the incident and called on the German government to conduct an investigation.
The Pakistani government did not blame anyone specifically, and the protesters’ motivation is unclear. However, it may be tied to a recent assassination in Pakistan: On July 11, Gilaman Wazir, a leader of the Pashtun Tahafuz Movement (PTM), was shot and killed in Karachi. The PTM advocates on behalf of ethnic Pashtuns, drawing support from members of the ethnic group living in Afghanistan.
The incident in Frankfurt could worsen tensions in an Afghanistan-Pakistan relationship, which is already strained by cross-border terrorism and Pakistan’s decision last year to expel hundreds of thousands of Afghan refugees.
This month, 13 fishermen from the Indian state of Tamil Nadu were arrested by the Sri Lankan Navy for fishing in Sri Lankan waters. According to Indian reports, this marked the sixth such incident in less than a month.
Such arrests have long been a tension point in the otherwise smooth relationship between India and Sri Lanka. Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M.K. Stalin, a rival of Modi, has pressed External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar to address the issue with his Sri Lankan counterparts. Stalin has his own political motivations for doing so: In recent days, large protests have broken out in the state, with fishermen demanding more be done to address the problem.
The Indian External Affairs Ministry says it is focused on the issue, although New Delhi must be cautious in its diplomacy: Colombo is a major battleground for India-China competition. Still, India has a serious crisis on its hands. According to Sri Lankan Navy figures, 252 Indian fishermen have been detained and 35 of their boats have been seized so far in 2024.
Some of those detained face major charges. Last month, Sri Lankan authorities said that 10 Indians arrested for fishing illegally in Sri Lankan waters would also be charged with involvement in the death of a Sri Lankan sailor who was killed during an operation to seize their trawler.
Source link : https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/07/24/bangladesh-protests-undermine-sheikh-hasina/
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Publish date : 2024-07-24 17:00:25
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