The victory of Bangladesh’s student movement should not surprise anyone

It seemed the students toppled Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s government in five short weeks, but this revolution was 15 years in the making.

Twenty-five-year-old Abu Sayed, the son of a farmer and one of nine children, was a successful scholarship student at one of Bangladesh’s finest universities. He dreamed of one day securing a government job that would guarantee economic stability, and perhaps propel his family into upward mobility.  But when the government introduced a new quota system that awarded the descendants of “freedom fighters” – the people who liberated Bangladesh from Pakistan in 1971 – a shocking 30 percent of these highly coveted government jobs, his dreams were dashed.

Sayed knew that there are 18 million unemployed young people in Bangladesh at the moment, and he did not want to be part of this damning statistic once he graduated. So he became a lead coordinator in a countrywide movement to reform the quota system, which came to be known as “Students Against Discrimination”.

At one protest, he stood some 15 metres (50 feet) away from the Bangladesh police and stretched his arms out in defiance.

They shot him dead.

The video of this blatant extrajudicial killing was shared like wildfire online, igniting a fire that brought hundreds and thousands of students across the country into the streets. Educators, lawyers, parents and rickshaw pullers joined them in solidarity, in anger and mourning over the death of Sayed and more than 200 other protesters who died at the hands of government-aligned student activists and armed forces.

Their efforts, and the real risks they took, were not in vain.

The High Court revised the quota system, assigning just seven percent of the jobs to the descendants of freedom