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F
or 15 years, it seemed that Sheikh Hasina – Bangladesh’s so-called Iron Lady – had an unshakeable grip on power.
Once seen as a pro-democracy icon who was credited with overseeing the country’s economic progress, Hasina was later accused of turning autocratic and clamping down on any opposition to her rule. Yet her regime managed to outlast several violent riots and protests calling for her resignation.
Last January, she had even sailed to an easy fourth-term victory, at a time when her rights record sunk to new lows. For a time, too, it looked like she would survive months-long student protests that roiled nationwide against an edict setting a quota on government jobs.
But when the dead bodies of young Bangladeshis mounted, it finally became too much, said Bangladeshi human rights activist Ferdows Lisa.
“Initially, the protests were only (composed of) public university students,” she said in a recent virtual forum hosted by Asia Democracy Network (ADN), which gathered rights advocates mainly from South Asia. “Then private university students also gathered and became very active. It connected other people, guardian teachers, political parties, rights defenders, workers, day laborers, people from every corner. So the more the government was applying violence, it got more mobilized, more invited, and more connected.”
The mounting public pressure forced Bangladesh’s longest serving prime minister to flee to India last Aug. 5. But perhaps even more surprising was that university students – not organized civil society groups or political parties – exerted the most pressure that led to Hasina’s sudden exit, and even had a hand in forming the interim government.
Bangladesh is not the only South Asian nation witnessing a youthful show of political force. Across the region, which has one of the world’s youngest populations, the youth have been at the forefront of political movements.
In Pakistan last February, the young people delivered a stinging rebuke to the establishment party and the military elite by voting for the party of their jailed ex-leader, Imran Khan, during the general elections. Similarly, in India, young doctors led protests in eastern Kolkata to condemn the rape and murder of a female doctor and to call for safer working conditions.
Their examples should prompt civil society groups in the region to learn from these emerging movements and therefore regain their lost civic spaces in the region, said activist Meena Menon at the ADN forum, dubbed “People’s Sovereignty and Democratic Resilience in South Asia” forum held on Sept. 13. Groups should stop seeing themselves “as a mere teacher” of advocacy but to act as well as students learning from movements that also bring change, she said.
“If the youth are on the streets, what should we learn from them?” asked Menon, who is also president of the India-based Working People’s Coalition. “If we are not in a constant process of learning from new things, how much are we going to understand (such movements) and the sentiments behind it?”
Losing ground
If civil society fails to learn from these emerging movements, Menon said, it risks becoming disconnected from the very people it seeks to represent and support. She added, “If we don’t learn from them, then we will not be able to be a part of them.”
Yet Menon and other rights advocates agreed that it isn’t as if civil society across South Asia as a whole has been flagging in its goals to promote democracy and human rights.
In fact, “the vibrancy of its civil society has never run out of steam,” said Kaustuv Kanti Bandyopadhyay, vice chair of the Asia Democracy Network. “However, in recent years, civil society in the region has been fragmented and knocked inside, primarily due to geopolitical reasons.”
Like Bangladesh, many South Asian countries have seen a rise in authoritarianism, with their governments increasingly restricting freedoms of expression, association, and assembly. These restrictions have effectively diminished civil society groups in the region.
In India, for example, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led government of Narendra Modi often uses its draconian anti-terror Unlawful Activities Prevention Act and its foreign funding laws to cripple civil society groups and nongovernment organizations.
As of 2024, India’s Foreign Contribution Regulation Act – which Modi said was intended to beef up accountability for the receipt and use of foreign funding of NGOs – has been used to cancel or suspend the licenses of over 35,488 NGOs in the country.
In Afghanistan, the Taliban have banned women from working in NGOs, leading to the temporary closure of some nonprofit organizations. Sri Lanka, meanwhile, is currently mulling a law to regulate civil society groups that, if passed, will explicitly require NGOs to comply with state agenda and render unlawful criticisms of government policy.
Understandably, Menon said, such restrictions have forced many civil society groups to “transform themselves into mere charity organizations or services delivery organs” in order to avoid being “strangulated by state regulatory frameworks.”
“But was it necessary that the civil society leave those spaces?” she asked. “Was it not possible for them to resist the states, to remain in their spaces, and keep on their social movements?”
Challenges and opportunities
In the meantime, opposition parties across the region have been trying to maintain relevance – and failing, said Deekshya Illangasinghe, executive director of South Asians for Human Rights (SAHR).
“Many key parties that have historically relied on the popularity of family dynasties are losing ground, failing to cultivate dynamic leaders, and they fail to generate innovative ideas or respond to citizens’ needs,” she noted. “These political parties need internal reforms … to revive citizen-centered political competition and to also demonstrate that democracy delivers.”
Many of these parties have also been caught in the dragnet against dissent, as seen in Bangladesh, where the opposition Bangladeshi Nationalist Party faced mass arrests and police raids leading to its virtual wipeout even before the January 2024 parliamentary elections.
Sources: Review of Democracy, Joint SDG Fund, Al Jazeera, The Guardian, Lowy Institute, Ketagalan Media, Human Rights Watch
Without robust political opposition and civil society in disarray, public and youth-led movements in South Asia have become essential in holding ruling parties accountable and forcing governments to make concessions.
As BBC journalist Sarah Atiq observed at the ADN forum, opposition parties – which are supposed to serve as alternate representatives of the public – are likewise struggling to connect with the youth.
Today’s youth are taking matters into their own hands “because they don’t think the political parties represent their interest or present their agendas,” she said, adding that the ways of the parties “(from) the ’90s have become obsolete; they are not working any more.
“You can’t just have public rallies and speak behind the glass,” she argued. “They have to rebuild public trust so that the public regains interest in the democratic process.”
Atiq echoed the view of SAHR’s Illangasinghe that given these challenges, civil society organizations should actively work to bridge the divide between youth and political parties. By fostering greater youth involvement in politics, they said, CSOs could help strengthen democratic processes and ensure that political leadership remains accountable and representative of the entire population.
Atiq added that movements and organizations across the region have to think of “innovative ways to forge alliances so we can offer a consolidated opposition to the ruling elite.”
Atiq cited what happened in conflict-riven Balochistan, where the Pakistani government shut down the Internet and landlines last July to quash protests calling for the release of a civilian abducted by the state’s counterterrorism department. Human rights activists and farmers then turned to Google Docs to share information.
“We see that through technology they have been building those alliances and they’ve been learning from each other indirectly,” said Atiq. “It’s just that [the] movements and the organizations across the region have to step up and learn from these movements.”
This is especially crucial as South Asia – home to nearly half the world’s voters this year – leads the world in what has become known as a “super elections” year. Among South Asian nations, only Afghanistan and Nepal have not held elections, which could not have come at a more precarious time for a region suffering from democratic backsliding.
Glimmer of hope
But there have been encouraging signs amid these stark realities. The last general polls in India, for example, saw a strong showing by the opposition coalition, revealing cracks in the BJP’s stronghold. The opposition Congress Party even won decisively in the recently concluded Jammu and Kashmir elections, the region’s first since the national government stripped it of autonomy and statehood in 2019.
Menon remarked, “Everybody knows how the situation is in India: The right to organize, to protest, to have any kind of opposition from civil society, any kind of civil society work has been curtailed. Money is being shut off. There is a lot of surveillance. Everybody knows these things.
“In that situation, the opposition, which was being kind of dismissed as a non-performer, still came up and created a space,” she said.
She and other South Asian rights advocates at the ADN forum agreed that what’s happening in the region also highlights the importance of global solidarity in supporting local struggles for democracy. The interconnectedness of political movements around the world has never been more apparent, and South Asia’s civil society recognizes the need to build international alliances to amplify their efforts.
This also includes fostering cross-border solidarity to address common challenges, said Menon. She raised the idea of reinvigorating the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC).
Established in 1985, SAARC is a regional intergovernmental organization of eight countries in South Asia, namely, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. Once a promising platform for regional cooperation, SAARC has been hamstrung by the longstanding tensions between India and Pakistan.
Recently, Bangladesh’s interim leader and Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus also called for the revival of the alliance. India shot down the idea, however.
Asserted Menon: “Whether SAARC happens or not, whether we come together in the name of SAARC or whether we come together as South Asians who believe in democratic rights, to come together is very important.” ◉
