Who were the Razakars and why are they central to Bangladesh protests?

They were a force of collaborators used by Pakistan to try to crush the movement for an independent Bangladesh. The recent protests show that their blood-stained legacy remains alive — 53 years after the freedom war.

The Supreme Court of Bangladesh on Sunday slashed a controversial quota in government jobs that was at the heart of mass nationwide protests that swamped the South Asian nation in recent weeks.

Student protesters were agitating against a quota system under which 56 percent of government jobs were reserved for select categories of citizens. Within that, their principal gripe was over a 30 percent quota for descendants of freedom fighters from the country’s 1971 liberation war against Pakistan.

The court shrunk that 30 percent quota to 5 percent, and the remaining quotas to another 2 percent, opening up the remaining 93 percent jobs for all other Bangladeshis.

But the protesters have refused to end their movement until the government notifies these changes. They are also demanding justice for the more than 100 people who have been killed in clashes between protesters on the one hand, and a combination of security forces and purported members of the governing Awami League’s student body on the other hand. A countrywide curfew remains in place, with the military manning the streets.

Yet, as the protests have grown, they have morphed from a reflection of a job crisis to a broader battle over identity in a country that is 53 years old but where a vast majority of the population was not born when Bangladesh secured freedom.

At the heart of this is a term that the country’s prime minister, Sheikh Hasina, used amid the protests, and which set off an angry response from protesters: “Razakars”.

The word means