Bangladesh in limbo: A rustic of 170 mn, the place college students run the streets | World Information

Outdoors, the streets of this nation of 170 million persons are run by college students.

After overcoming a lethal crackdown and toppling Bangladesh’s iron-fisted chief, Sheikh Hasina, the scholar protesters are actually in search of to set a brand new course for a nation born in bloody rupture 5 many years in the past.

Hasina’s energy had grown so all-consuming that her departure triggered a near-total collapse of the state. A wave of violence, together with revenge killings and arson, continued after her departure, with the nation’s long-persecuted Hindu minority, particularly, gripped with concern. Nearly all the nation’s cops went into hiding, afraid of reprisals for the drive’s function within the deaths of lots of of younger protesters. College students are managing site visitors in Dhaka, the congested capital metropolis — checking licenses and reminding individuals to make use of helmets. In some roundabouts, the punishments they’re doling out to rule breakers are straight out of the classroom:  An hour of standing for a fallacious flip, half-hour for not carrying a seatbelt.

One feminine pupil, who appeared no older than 16, tried to ease site visitors on a busy avenue with the zeal of an overachiever, shouting what had been extra pleas than orders to each  bhaiya, Bengali for brother.

A automotive carrying New York Instances journalists was stopped by a boy who appeared no older than 12. He requested to see a driver’s license.

In one other nook of town the place a few of the worst violence had taken place, Salman Khan, 17, and two different college students manned a roundabout, often pulling apart the fanciest of vehicles. What precisely had been they searching for?

“Black cash, black cash,”  Khan mentioned, explaining that lots of  Hasina’s senior officers had been on the run. 

Guiding the scholars who now run this nation is a really totally different determine: the 84-year-old Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus. He’s playing his storied legacy as a helper of the poor to be the interim chief of a nation in disarray. However he has accepted the mantle of handpicked grandfatherly determine for what the scholars describe as “generatio­nal transformation.” “I’m doing this as a result of that is what the youth of the nation wished, and I wished to assist them to do IT,” Yunus mentioned over the weekend in a briefing with reporters. “IT’s not my dream, IT’s their dream.”

Nahid Islam, a key pupil protest chief who mentioned he had been blindfolded and tortured by safety forces, described  imme­nse strain that had now fallen on the motion, “although we weren’t ready for IT.”

First Printed: Aug 14 2024 | 12:06 AM IST