Opinion | Bangladesh After Hasina Is A Warning To India Under PM Modi: Look Who Inherits The Streets

The two street movements now testing Dhaka's legacy and Delhi's present deserve a harder look than the applause they have received abroad

Two leaders built two of the most consequential growth stories in modern Asia. Sheikh Hasina governed Bangladesh for fifteen years and turned it into a garment-export powerhouse with one of the fastest poverty-reduction records anywhere in the world, with countless developments. Narendra Modi has spent over a decade turning India into the fastest-growing major economy on earth, a global manufacturing base, and a digital-public-infrastructure model the rest of the developing world now studies. Both records deserve to be judged on their own terms, and neither leader deserves to be blamed for a mob’s decision to burn down what took decades to build.

That is precisely why the two street movements now testing Dhaka’s legacy and Delhi’s present deserve a harder look than the applause they have received abroad.

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A distorted sentence, twice

Both uprisings trace back to a single sentence, stripped of its context and set loose online.

In July 2024, at a routine press conference, Sheikh Hasina was not volunteering an attack. She was answering a direct question about the student quota protests, and she answered it with a rhetorical question of her own: if quota benefits meant for the descendants of freedom fighters did not go to them, who should receive them instead, the grandchildren of Razakars, the epithet for wartime collaborators from 1971? It was one line inside a much longer exchange, an answer that only made sense next to the question that had prompted it. Within hours, it no longer existed next to that question. It had been lifted out, captioned, and pushed across social media as though she had turned to the protesters and called them traitors outright. She had not.

Hasina said as much almost as soon as the clip began spreading. “I did not call the students razakars. My comment was distorted," she said. But a head of government correcting the record cannot outrun a fifteen-word clip already circulating without her. By the time her explanation reached anyone, the sentence had already been separated from the question it answered and handed to a movement that needed a villain more than it needed the transcript. A policy dispute over civil service quotas became a movement to remove a government on the strength of a line she never........

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