Delegated leadership: The strategy behind the students-led uprising’s success

When Nahid Islam and five other quota reform coordinators announced the end of their movement through a video message from the Detective Branch (DB) office, then led by its notorious chief Harun-or-Rashid, the outcome did not go as planned or expected by the government.

Instead of halting the movement, the other coordinators who were free outright rejected the call. They said Nahid and others had made those announcements under duress by the DB officials. They decided to continue the protest programmes.

Thus, apart from strong determination, it was the vast multi-tiered leadership network that helped accomplish the unimagined — overthrow of the Sheikh Hasina regime.

The mass uprising was spontaneous, triggered by the July massacre and authoritarian rule of Sheikh Hasina for more than 15 years. The spontaneity was evident as people took to the streets in known hotspots, notwithstanding the internet blackout aimed at disjoining the protesters. 

Yet, some leaders, called coordinators, of the quota reform movement played key roles in announcing the next programmes, which often emanated from the demands of protesters at the ground level.

The organisational structure of the student body — Students Against Discrimination — was a marvel; it was designed to withstand the expected crackdown by law enforcers and the state security apparatus responsible for enforced disappearances that characterised Hasina's more than 15-year rule.

The known faces and how they worked 

Soon after the High Court declared 'illegal' the government's decision to scrap the quota system in the civil service on 5 June, students of Dhaka University and other public universities started organising peaceful protest rallies on the campuses. With a brief hiatus due to Eid-ul-Adha vacations in mid-June, the protests continued for a month without much impact, but they kept growing.

Protests against the quota system intensified since the first day of July when the students started blocking the Shahbagh intersection. This coincided with the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court upholding the High Court verdict on 4 July that said: "30% quota for children of freedom fighters was binding upon the judiciary and the state machinery." 

Students from Jahangirnagar University, Chattogram University, Jagannath University, Barishal University and Kushtia's Islamic University also organised rallies around their campuses.

Protest leaders Nahid Islam, Asif Mahmud, Sarjis Alam, Hasanat Abdullah and Nusrat Tabassum from Dhaka University came to the limelight at this point. On 8 July, a 65-member coordination body comprising students from across the country was announced. 

Among them were 23 coordinators and 42 co-coordinators. Less than a month later on 3 August, the coordination team would be made even bigger, consisting of 158 members. The updated list had 49 coordinators and 109 co-coordinators.

Under the leadership of these students, a series of programmes including the 'Bangla Blockade' were carried out successfully from 7 July, which brought the capital to a standstill and cut it off from the rest of the country. Additionally, several key highways were also blocked across the nation. They also called for continuous class and exam boycotts in the universities.

About the tactic of announcing a large number of coordinators flanked by an even bigger tier of co-coordinators, Nahid Islam told media that the movement did not have a singular leader.

"The coordinators can come forward and speak and give guidelines any time. We don't have a specific spokesperson," Nahid said.

Arif Sohel, a central coordinator at Jahangirnagar University said, "We don't want individual-centric leadership. We want the movement to have a democratic character, since the demands are democratic, and people are showing support for it."

The coordinators made decisions about the next programmes and organised the gatherings through online meetings among themselves and posts on social media groups.

"In the online meetings, we decide where we will demonstrate and who will be in charge. This is how we're coordinating," Sohel added.

No wonder the Hasina government later shut down the internet to disrupt communication among the coordinators.

In the early phases of the movement, the protesters had been allowed to carry on their programmes but as the movement grew stronger, the government grew hostile. From 10 July, Bangladesh Chhatra League (BCL) activists started attacking protesters in various spots. 

Events took a serious turn after Sheikh Hasina's controversial 'Razakar' remark that infuriated students, who, reacting to the comment, held midnight demonstrations on university campuses.

Shortly thereafter, protesters were beaten at Chattogram University by BCL members, and Awami League General Secretary and then Road Transport and Bridges Minister Obaidul Quader said that BCL would now give a fitting answer to the protesters.

For the next few days, BCL and other ruling party organs, along with law enforcers, carried out systematic attacks on the protesters across the country leaving several dead — starting with Rangpur's Begum Rokeya University student Abu Sayeed — and universities were closed with dormitories vacated. 

On 18 and 19 July, the killings upscaled to a massacre level but the government's desperate attempts to contain the situation went in vain. 

At midnight of 19 July, coordinators Nahid Islam, Asif Mahmud and Md Abu Baker Majumder were picked up from different places in the capital by unidentified agencies, in a bid to render the movement leaderless. 

The government also imposed an internet blackout from the day prior. Before Nahid was released one day later and the other two four days later, they were all tortured and pressed to issue statements ending the movement, which they did not oblige to. 

"When I refused to oblige, they pushed an injection and made me senseless. As soon as I regained consciousness, they pushed one more injection to make me senseless during the last four to five days," coordinator Asif Mahmud revealed in a Facebook post after he was released.

Later, from 26-28 July, police again detained six coordinators — Nahid Islam, Hasnat Abdullah, Asif Mahmud, Sarjis Alam, Nusrat Tabassum and Md Abu Baker Majumder — and illegally kept them in DB custody for several days without producing them in the court.

It was during their enforced disappearance and DB custody that the tactic of making a large coordination team proved successful. The quota reform movement, which by the time had turned into mass unrest, did not stop. Rather, it expanded exponentially, and agitators started to resist the aggressors despite the death toll crossing the several hundred mark.

This is when the second tier of coordinators and the unknown faces became the determinants of the uprising.

The unknown faces of the monsoon revolution 

Soon after the video message of the six detained coordinators calling for an end to the agitations surfaced, other coordinators, namely Abdul Kader, Abdul Hannan Masud and Mahin Sarkar, along with co-coordinators Rifat Rashid and Abdullah Salehin Ayan, rejected the withdrawal announcement in their statements.

"The detained coordinators were forced to read out the statement written by the intelligence agencies, and we reject it. We strongly condemn and protest the government's heinous act of extracting statements by force," Abdul Kader said.

"We unequivocally declare that our movement will continue until our nine-point demands, including the resignation of the home minister, are met. We urge the nation not to be misled. The movement will persist until justice is served for those killed over the quota issue," he added.

During the detention of the central coordinators and throughout the sporadic internet blackouts until 5 August, the common men and women of the country held their ground and continued demonstrations. 

Earlier, when the public university residential halls were vacated and the movement faced a major setback, private university students, who hardly had any stake in the quota reform movement, took to the streets and sacrificed their lives under brutal attacks, thus reinvigorating the protests.

"It felt like our movement might be coming to a halt. However, private university students coming out to the streets the next day was unexpected. This was a turning point. The second turning point was when we were taken to the DB office. 

The third significant event was the indiscriminate shooting of unarmed, innocent people. But these events ultimately fueled public anger and strengthened the movement," coordinator Sarjis Alam told TBS earlier, in retrospect after the fall of the Hasina government.

It is interesting how the common man determined the course of the movement.

After the mindless shooting and killings of protesters on 18 and 19 July, young protesters, often merely college students, were heard saying that the movement was not confined to quota reform anymore.

Indeed, when the government issued a circular on 23 July announcing the new quota allocation in government jobs following a Supreme Court verdict, key organisers of the movement said the protests would continue and demanded that the government answer for the recent bloodshed and deaths.

As the death toll rose, protesters started saying that Sheikh Hasina had to go and a new goal of the movement had to be announced in that direction. But who would bell the cat? None in the country, other than the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), ever thought of demanding it in public over the past 15 years.

Eventually, on 3 August in the grand rally at Shaheed Minar, coordinator Nahid Islam, flanked by all his comrades, announced the penultimate call for the resignation of the prime minister, rejecting her invitations for dialogue. 

His call triggered mass gatherings across the country, but it still lacked one final call, clearly felt and spoken about in the killing zones in the capital on 4 August. The protesters said the next destination should be Ganabhaban — the official residence of the prime minister.

The call came later that day.

The rest is history.