"she had to accommodate another virulently hardline group called the Hefazat e-Islam. In fact, some of the draconian restrictions on social media that the Bangladeshi young so objected too, and the constant state monitoring, came from intense pressure from Islamist groups who claimed that Hindus were writing denigrating social media posts against Islam."
"Bangladeshi politics had always been violent and authoritarian, and Hasina did to her rivals what they had done to her and her family,"
"growing economic prosperity could have still ensured peace and calm but for the fact that the
Covid-19 pandemic, followed by the global downturn, and then the hit on energy prices due to the Ukraine war, tore open Bangladesh’s fissures. Unemployment soared, as did inflation, crossing 9%. By some estimates, garment exports prices fell 16% between 2023 and 2024."
"the forces she took on, for instance, the Jamaat-e-Islami, have deep and growing roots in Bangladesh. Foreign assistance, including from extremist groups in the UK, have poured in to create groups like Hefazat, which was created by hardline clerics only a few years ago to expressly oppose Hasina’s push for a secular nature to Bangladesh. As the murder of the secular publisher Faisal Arefin Deepan in 2015 showed, no matter who was in power, the most blood-soaked streets were controlled by the Islamists"
NEW DELHI: The underlying causes of Sheikh Hasina’s rise and fall show that the future is likely to be precarious. The lyrics of one of the most popular
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