By Muhammad Zahidul Islam Miaji
Bangladesh’s July 2024 uprising exposed the limits of authoritarian control. Despite deploying repression, censorship, legal manipulation, and disinformation, the Hasina regime failed to contain a decentralized, student-led movement that ultimately forced its collapse.
Bangladesh, under the rule of Sheikh Hasina since 2009 to 2024, serves as a vivid example of authoritarianism. Authoritarian regimes often rely on a playbook of strategies to maintain their grip on power, even in the face of widespread public dissent. Her regime’s response to massive student protests in 2024 highlights the lengths to which authoritarian leaders will go to protect their power. Finally, months-long student protests forced Sheikh Hasina to resign and flee to India on August 5, 2024. This article examines how the Hasina regime deployed core elements of the authoritarian playbook: coercion, censorship, legal engineering, and disinformation, and analyzes why these strategies ultimately failed to prevent the emergence of a broad, students-people-led uprising in July 2024 despite an extensive crackdown by the state.
The July 2024 uprising illustrates a central paradox of digital authoritarianism: efforts to control information can inadvertently deepen societal resistance when repression becomes both visible and indiscriminate.
Since coming to power in 2009, Hasina has been accused of multiple election riggings (in 2014, 2018, and 2024), fostering strong clientelism, and encouraging corruption and deploying disinformation campaigns to tighten her control. While these generated widespread frustration, it was the so-called quota system (that reserves 56% of governmental jobs for special categories of applicants) that sparked the unrest. Despite having merit and all other qualifications, many youth could not get jobs due to preferential treatment of certain classes such as the veterans of the 1971 independence war. This led to the July 2024 student-led protests, which resulted in deadly violence and mass arrests.
The initial response to the student protests was a typical strategy from the authoritarian playbook: the deployment of law enforcement agencies to suppress dissent. Authoritarian rulers, when confronted with dissent, often resort to violence, and Hasina was no different. As her grip was firm enough to suppress the 2018 quota reform movement, road safety movement, and numerous other protests, she decided to take similarly tough measures against citizens during the July 2024 uprising. When student-led protests erupted in early July, calling for reforming the job quota system, transparency, democratic reforms, and an end to autocracy, Hasina responded by deploying law enforcement and military units. Protests that began peacefully were met with tear gas, rubber bullets, and batons, resulting in over a thousand deaths and the arrest of tens of thousands of protesters.
Protests that began peacefully were met with tear gas, rubber bullets, and batons, resulting in over a thousand deaths and the arrest of tens of thousands of protesters.
A second pillar of Hasina’s authoritarian strategy was the use of digital repression; most notably nationwide internet shutdowns aimed at paralyzing protest coordination. By disabling mobile networks and broadband services, the government sought to sever communication channels, restrict documentation of state violence, and isolate citizens from external scrutiny. This aligned closely with contemporary authoritarian practices in which internet blackouts function as tools of preemptive control rather than reactive security measures. The Cyber Security Act (CSA) of 2023, which preserved the coercive architecture of the Digital Security Act, further enabled the state to criminalize online dissent, resulting in the arrest of journalists, student leaders, and ordinary citizens for criticism or even perceived satire. Yet this strategy yielded diminishing returns. Instead of demobilizing the movement, censorship pushed organizers toward adaptive tactics—including VPN use, encrypted social media communication, and offline coordination—that ultimately broadened participation and increased public defiance. In this sense, the July 2024 uprising illustrates a common paradox in digital authoritarianism: efforts to control information can inadvertently deepen societal resistance when repression becomes both visible and indiscriminate.
Third, Hasina’s regime also employed legal maneuvers to stifle opposition forces. The government banned the Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami (BJI) and its student wing, Bangladesh Islami Chatroshibir. The BJI, a controversial political party due to its stance during the 1971 liberation war, has been a significant player in Bangladeshi politics. By banning the party, Hasina aimed to shift the narrative from a genuine student-led movement to one driven by political agendas, thus justifying further crackdowns. However, the July 2024 uprising was silently supported by all opposition political parties and loudly supported by all people of Bangladesh. The use of the term ‘silent’ is significant: under Hasina, major protest waves were routinely framed as opposition-orchestrated, providing legal and political justification for sweeping arrests. In Bangladesh’s context, opposition parties had already been weakened by years of surveillance, restrictive laws, and selective prosecution, making them structurally vulnerable. Because their organizational networks were fragmented and their leadership frequently criminalized, the state could detain opposition members quickly and with minimal resistance, an established pattern in the country’s electoral authoritarian environment. This tactic of delegitimizing dissent by framing it as foreign-backed or opposition-led is a common strategy used by authoritarian leaders to discredit movements. However, this time opposition parties cautiously took a silent stand, encouraging their supporters to take part in protests but refraining from publicly supporting the movement. This prevented Hasina from portraying the movement as opposition-led.
This time, opposition parties cautiously took a silent stand, preventing the regime from portraying the movement as opposition-led.
Fourth, disinformation played a critical role in Hasina’s strategy. The absence of free and fair elections since 2009 left many citizens skeptical of potential alternatives, despite widespread dissatisfaction with the current regime. Throughout the protests, state-controlled news and other entertainment media, as well as social media platforms, spread false narratives about the number of deaths, fake scandals of protest organizers, and the alleged involvement of the political opposition. Various narratives showed doubt and confusion among the populace, particularly among younger generations who had only known Hasina’s rule. (Also, India, as the closest ally of Hasina, spread disinformation during and after the uprising.) However, fact-checking organizations this time around played a key role in debunking misinformation, particularly on social media, where falsehoods fueled tensions. During the July uprising over 70 percent of misinformation and disinformation was debunked.
A final component of Hasina’s authoritarian strategy was the mobilization of party-linked student forces and local political networks, an approach deeply rooted in Bangladesh’s political history. Since the 1952 Language Movement and the mass uprisings of 1969, 1990, and 2007, student groups have played decisive roles in regime change, making control over campus politics a critical asset for any ruling party. Recognizing this, the Bangladesh Awami League (BAL) and its student wing, the Bangladesh Chhatra League (BCL), functioned as essential extensions of the regime’s coercive apparatus throughout Hasina’s tenure. During the July 2024 uprising, BAL and BCL cadres collaborated closely with police in coordinated assaults on university campuses, residential halls, and major protest sites in Dhaka and key district towns. Their ability to operate with impunity was reinforced by institutional protection from elements within the bureaucracy, local administrations, and segments of the security forces. Unlike formal state repression, which relied on the military and police, BAL and BCL tactics centered on targeted intimidation, campus dominance, and disruption of student organizing, tools designed specifically to weaken the youth-driven core of the movement. Yet this strategy ultimately failed: for the first time in over a decade, students successfully resisted party-cadre violence on multiple campuses, eroding a crucial pillar of Hasina’s control and accelerating the regime’s collapse.
Despite the full deployment of these authoritarian strategies, the Hasina regime ultimately collapsed. Prolonged uncertainty, coupled with widespread fear of detention or lethal state violence, had become a defining feature of daily life, but these conditions were no longer sufficient to contain the escalating mass mobilization. The organizers of the July 2024 uprising were not affiliated with any specific ideology. The uprising gained momentum precisely because it emerged from a broad, decentralized coalition that was not anchored in any partisan or ideological platform. The movement’s credibility rested on widespread public frustration with authoritarian governance and its capacity to unite students, workers, professionals, and ordinary citizens around shared demands for accountability and political reform. This stands in sharp contrast to movements that are narrowly partisan, which can more easily be portrayed as politically motivated, and are also vulnerable to state co-optation and targeted repression. The non-partisan, society-wide character of the July uprising significantly reduced these vulnerabilities and strengthened its resilience in the face of authoritarian crackdown and pressure. Overthrowing an authoritarian regime is a complex and protracted process, fraught with challenges such as fatigue, fear, frustration, division, and distraction. In this respect it was crucial that overwhelming majority of the population, including the Bangladeshi diaspora, supported the movement, even calling for a boycott of government remittance channels.
The uprising succeeded not because society acted as a unified force, but because a broad coalition converged around the immediate goal of ending authoritarian rule.
The fall of the Hasina regime demonstrates the limits of authoritarian governance when coercive, legal, and informational tools are no longer effective even when they operate in concert. Although the government deployed the full authoritarian playbook; repression, censorship, legal engineering, patronage, and partisan violence, these strategies failed once institutional cohesion eroded and key actors, including segments of the judiciary, bureaucracy, and the military, refused to underwrite or take part in the escalating repression. The July 2024 uprising succeeded not because “the people” acted as a fully unified force, but because a broad coalition of students, professionals, workers, and civic groups converged around the immediate goal of ending authoritarian rule; their later fragmentation underscores the contingent nature of this alignment. The emergence of the interim government under Dr. Muhammad Yunus marks a recalibration rather than a resolution of Bangladesh’s political challenges. The July National Charter 2025and the planned 2026 elections will test whether the structural weaknesses revealed during Hasina’s tenure—politicized institutions, constrained civic space, and entrenched patronage—can be meaningfully addressed. In this sense, the uprising underscores a central lesson of authoritarian politics: regimes falter not only when confronted by mass dissent, but when the institutional foundations essential to authoritarian survival cease to function.
Muhammad Zahidul Islam Miaji is a faculty member in the Department of Political Science and Sociology at North South University, Bangladesh. His research interests include political behavior, youth mobilization, and comparative politics, with an emerging focus on Indo-Pacific strategy, small-state security dynamics, and alliance politics.
This article is published under the sole responsibility of the author, with editorial oversight. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the editorial team or the CEU Democracy Institute.
