John Jefferson
Bangladesh is a country of 170 million that Americans rarely think about and, to the degree that they do, mostly associate with the manufacturer’s tags in t-shirts and blouses. This past week was the exception, when the longtime prime minister, Sheikh Hasina, was chased out of the country by mobs that went on to loot the ministerial palace. As of this writing, the president and the chief of the army are working out what a provisional government is going to look like.
The underlying cause of the riots hardly made it into the Western news, which preferred to focus on Hasina’s not-altogether-democratic style of rule and the botched repression of student protestors, which resulted in several deaths and heightened the crisis. This account fits neatly atop Western hobbyhorses about “authoritarianism,” but cuts out the more complicated, possibly (by liberal lights) embarrassing root problem: The demonstrators were protesting against affirmative action.
Despite its off-and-on political instability, Bangladesh has grown steadily economically since gaining its independence from Pakistan in 1971. Under Hasina’s administration, the poverty rate has plummeted from 70 percent to under 45 percent. The growing middle class has done what middle classes everywhere have done—sent its children to school in hopes that they will take their places in the leading ranks of Bangladeshi society, which includes in large part the civil service.
The problem: Historically, only between 20 percent and 50 percent of civil service jobs are allocated based solely on merit. The lion’s share is reserved for the descendants of veterans and war crime victims in Bangladesh’s war of independence, with a smaller portion also set aside for various favored minority groups. The quota system has persisted through the exertions of the executive despite various rulings modifying it in the Bangladeshi judiciary. The protestors’ initial slate of demands focused on reforming the quota system to allow more applicants from non-protected groups into the state service. Only after the police killed some of their number—an action for which the cops are now nervously asking immunity in whatever the post-Hasina settlement looks like—did the demonstrations reorient toward a single demand, the end of the Hasina government.
To the degree that the Western press has treated this at all, it has been to point out that the quota system allowed Hasina to reward her political cronies (because of certain historical accidents of the Bangladeshi party system that we need not get into here). That is true, as far as it goes. But the protestors weren’t pushing for an abolition of the quota system, but a reform—that is to say, their problem wasn’t that some of Hasina’s cronies were being hired in, but that the protestors’ own class were being disproportionately kept out.
Completely absent, so far, has been any kind of self-reflection about all this, so here is a hot-wash examination. Almost all revolutions, in the final analysis, are bourgeois revolutions. A large class with significant capital that feels itself unduly excluded from the levers of power will make itself felt, peacefully or not. In our own history, the civil rights movement, so far from being the spontaneous uprising of the downtrodden that it is now fashionable to portray, was a highly organized operation spearheaded by lawyers, church leaders, and academics—the people with the wherewithal to pursue a legal and political playbook, and, perhaps more importantly, the people who were of a class to rankle at exclusion from elite institutions.
One of the core elements of the civil rights–era settlement was, ironically enough in 2024, race-based affirmative action, enacted by university administrators with liberal sensibilities and a fear of instability a la the Black Panthers’ 1970 occupation of Yale’s campus. This corrective measure has now grown unpopular; the use of race as a consideration in college admissions is opposed by a simple majority of Americans. A small but disproportionately capital-heavy segment of the population, Asian Americans, are disproportionately affected by the deemphasis on academic merit. Yet establishment interests in the state and the academy have a vested interest in perpetuating the affirmative-action regime as a way to invest their constituents with institutional and economic power. Recent court cases have attempted to address the perceived distortions of the affirmative-action regime, but the establishment has employed various dodges to make sure it continues all the same.
We won’t belabor the point. The particular genius of liberal systems is allowing social mobility without violence; when this mobility is compromised, distorted, or curbed, the systems acquire the brittleness associated historically with aristocracies and oligarchies. The next thing you know, you are getting chased out of your living room and making for the nearest plane to New Delhi while the well-heeled children of shopkeepers and insurance agents howl for your blood. Bangladesh furnishes an extreme case study of what an unpopular quota system can set off. Will we learn the lesson?
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