The Foreign Office said the two leaders in a telephonic conversation reviewed Pakistan-Bangladesh bilateral relations, including trade and economic cooperation. File
| Photo Credit: Getty Images/iStockphoto

Muhammad Yunus
| Photo Credit: C.V. Subrahmanyam

Dhaka:

A Bangladeshi student group has vowed to resume protests that sparked a lethal police crackdown and nationwide unrest unless several of their leaders are released from custody on Sunday.

Last week’s violence killed at least 205 people, according to an AFP count of police and hospital data, in one of the biggest upheavals of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s 15-year tenure.

Army patrols and a nationwide curfew remain in place more than a week after they were imposed, and a police dragnet has scooped up thousands of protesters including at least half a dozen student leaders.

Members of Students Against Discrimination, whose campaign against civil service job quotas precipitated the unrest, said they would end their weeklong protest moratorium.

The group’s chief Nahid Islam and others “should be freed and the cases against them must be withdrawn”, Abdul Hannan Masud told reporters in an online briefing late Saturday.

Mr Masud, who did not disclose his location because he was in hiding from authorities, also demanded “visible actions” be taken against government ministers and police officers responsible for the deaths of protesters.

“Otherwise, Students Against Discrimination will be forced to launch tough protests” from Monday, he said.

Mr Islam and two other senior members of the protest group were on Friday forcibly discharged from a hospital in the capital Dhaka and taken away by a group of plainclothes detectives.

Earlier in the week, Mr Islam told AFP he was being treated at the hospital for injuries police inflicted on him during an earlier round of detention and said he was in fear for his life.

Home minister Asaduzzaman Khan told reporters Friday that the trio were taken into custody for their own safety but did not confirm if they had been formally arrested.

Police told AFP on Sunday that detectives had taken two others into custody, while a Students Against Discrimination activist told AFP that a third had been taken on Sunday morning.

At least 9,000 people have been arrested nationwide since the unrest began according to Prothom Alo, Bangladesh’s largest daily newspaper.

While a curfew imposed last weekend remains in force, it has been progressively eased through the week, in a sign of the Hasina government’s confidence that order was gradually being restored.

Telecommunications minister Zunaid Ahmed Palak told reporters the country’s mobile internet network would be restored later on Sunday, 11 days after a nationwide blackout imposed at the height of the unrest.

Fixed line broadband connections had already been restored on Tuesday but the vast majority of Bangladesh’s 141 million internet users rely on their mobile devices to connect with the world, according to the national telecoms regulator.

Jobs crisis 

Protests began this month over the reintroduction of a quota scheme reserving more than half of all government jobs for certain groups. With around 18 million young Bangladeshis out of work, according to government figures, the move deeply upset graduates facing an acute employment crisis.

Critics say the quota is used to stack public jobs with loyalists to the ruling Awami League.

The Supreme Court cut the number of reserved jobs last week but fell short of protesters’ demands to scrap the quotas entirely.

Hasina has ruled Bangladesh since 2009 and won her fourth consecutive election in January after a vote without genuine opposition.

Her government is accused by rights groups of misusing state institutions to entrench its hold on power and stamp out dissent, including the extrajudicial killing of opposition activists.

Protests had remained largely peaceful until attacks by police and pro-government student groups on demonstrators last week.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Bangladesh’s main opposition party plans to hold a mass rally on Saturday in the capital to demand the resignation of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and the transfer of power to a non-partisan caretaker government to oversee general elections next year.

But the ruling Awami League party has warned that any attempt to trigger violence would be met with force, and said it would hold a “peace rally” near the opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party’s headquarters, where supporters of former Prime Minister Khaleda Zia, the party’s leader, also plan to gather.

The opposition says it is attempting a final push to remove Ms. Hasina as the Election Commission prepares to announce the country’s 12th national election, expected to be held in January.

Tensions are high in Bangladesh, a parliamentary democracy with a history of violence during political protests, especially before elections. The rivalry between Ms. Hasina and Zia has been ongoing for decades, and Ms. Hasina’s government has been under pressure for months as the opposition has held largely peaceful anti-government demonstrations. But experts say violence could break out anytime.

Mirza Fakhrul Islam Alamgir, secretary general of Zia’s party, said it would continue to push for the resignation of Ms. Hasina’s administration and the installation of a caretaker government.

“We don’t trust this government. They must go first to hold a free and fair election. Otherwise they would rig the election,” he said in a recent interview with The Associated Press.

Ms. Hasina hopes to return to power for a fourth consecutive term and says the election should be held under her government’s supervision as specified in the constitution.

Ahead of Saturday’s rally, Obaidul Quader, the Awami League party’s general secretary, said its members would be on the streets, and pledged to retaliate if there are any attacks by opposition supporters.

“The answer of violence is not silence. The answer of violence is violence,” Quader told reporters on Thursday. “If our peace rally is attacked, our activists will not sit idle.” Amid worries over whether the polls will be free and fair, a diplomatic row is also brewing between Ms. Hasina’s government and the United States.

The U.S. State Department said in September it is “taking steps to impose visa restrictions on Bangladeshi individuals responsible for, or complicit in, undermining the democratic election process in Bangladesh.” These include members of law enforcement, the ruling party and the opposition.

The Biden administration has made the push for free and fair elections in Bangladesh “a prime focus of its democracy promotion policy abroad,” said Michael Kugelman, director of the South Asia Institute at the Wilson Center.

The imposition of visa restrictions followed previous measures including restrictions on the country’s elite anti-crime force. Rights groups and the U.S. say the force is responsible for many enforced disappearances of government critics and opposition activists. The restrictions have resulted in a decrease in the number of deaths in so-called “cross-fire” incidents in recent months, media reports said.

Rights groups and the U.S. also criticised the government for enacting a controversial cyber security law, saying it is designed to silence critics and the opposition, an allegation authorities deny. Critics have also slammed the recent jailing and subsequent release on bail of two Bangladeshi rights activists.

Ms. Hasina recently told parliament that the U.S. wants to remove her from power at any cost. But the opposition and critics have welcomed the move by the U.S., which is the largest importer of Bangladesh’s garment products.

Reactions to the U.S. move in Bangladesh have broken down along partisan lines, Kugelman said. Ms. Hasina’s administration slammed it as “meddling” while many critics welcomed it, saying they hope it will push back against what they view as Ms. Hasina’s growing authoritarianism.

Recent elections in Bangladesh, especially the last one in 2018, were widely believed by the West to be flawed. The Awami League party doesn’t have a good track record of overseeing free and fair elections since Ms. Hasina returned to power in 2008.

Kugelman said the government and opposition “are on a collision course” and that “there’s a good chance we could see an election with no opposition participation.”