How a student-run uprising led to the ouster of Bangladesh’s longest-serving prime minister

NEW DELHI (AP) — In a video that lit up social media feeds in Bangladesh, jubilant protesters climbed atop a statue of Sheikh Mujib Rahman, the country’s first leader after independence, and beat it with iron rods and axes as people below hooted and cheered.

Crowds across the nation have attacked symbols of Rahman, as they sought to literally dismantle his legacy and that of his daughter, Sheikh Hasina, the country’s prime minister until Monday when she resigned and fled in the face of the unrest.

The anger that pushed Hasina from power — and that is behind the drive to erase her and her family — is rooted in deep economic distress felt by the majority of people in Bangladesh, as well as the perception that while they suffered, the elites aligned with Hasina prospered, analysts said.

“It created a deep-seated resentment against the government,” said Ali Riaz, an expert on Bangladeshi politics who teaches political science at Illinois State University.

That eventually triggered a full-scale rejection of Hasina and her increasingly autocratic turn.

Monday’s extraordinary scenes — when crowds ransacked her official residence, her party offices and a museum to her father while she fled to India in a helicopter — capped weeks of protests that began with discontent over a quota system for allocating government jobs that critics said favored those with connections to Hasina’s party.

Hundreds of people were killed as security forces cracked down on the demonstrations — violence that only fueled them, even after the quota system was dramatically scaled back.

It showed that her government “wildly underestimated just how much anger there was among the public, and the sources of the anger which went beyond the issue of job quotas,”