Economic and political grievances were equally present and inseparable. The quota system was an economic trigger, but behind it lay 15 years of governance that treated public resources as private property and citizens as subjects to be controlled. Banks were going bankrupt through corruption. Political leaders openly joked about the looting happening on their watch. At one point, Sheikh Hasina casually mentioned in a live broadcast that her former personal assistant had amassed a fortune of US$34 million. Meanwhile, young people with university degrees had no jobs and the housing crisis deepened.

Economic dispossession and political exclusion fed each other. The less economic power people had, the more powerless they felt, and vice versa. As a young person, I felt the need to control my own life in a context where that freedom was systematically denied.

What finally brought people out was the collision of these accumulated frustrations with an act of direct state violence. People began speaking openly about issues they hadn’t been able to discuss for 15 years. Once the killings started, the protest became a movement against the regime. People from less privileged backgrounds, including day labourers and workers, joined students, making clear that the anger was not confined to universities.

The protests began spontaneously. When students at the University of Dhaka started gathering, other universities mobilised their own groups via Discord and Facebook and joined in. There was no formal structure, no registration, no institution behind it. Each university had a handful of people willing to take the initiative and gather others.

As the protest grew, coordination improved. Students Against Discrimination leaders would post on Facebook indicating a location and time, and hundreds of thousands of people would converge. Even under curfew, people walked to those points. Even as student-led structures emerged to back the protest, there was no formal affiliation or registration. Some people took the initiative to gather. Others came together around it.

Social media was indispensable to the point the government had to shut it down. The internet blackout was a declaration that the regime understood its power depended on controlling what people could see and say. For the next five days, the Bangladeshi diaspora stepped in, spreading footage and appeals to international outlets including Al Jazeera and the BBC. Activists used VPNs to bypass restrictions. Others coordinated through direct phone calls. So when the internet returned, images of what had happened during the blackout – young people and children shot and workers attacked – further fuelled the movement. Social media also dismantled the government’s propaganda that the protests were orchestrated by opposition parties. People identified fake content, and the faces of those killed spoke for themselves.

The movement’s most powerful slogan emerged from an act of government contempt. When Hasina called students traitors in a live broadcast, using the Bangla word ‘rajakar’, which refers to those who opposed the 1971 liberation struggle, the effect was the opposite of what she intended. Students reclaimed the word, and ‘traitors’ became a rallying cry of defiance and fury. If demanding your rights made you a traitor, then we were traitors.

Another slogan pointed to the fundamental contradiction of a government that turns its weapons on the people whose taxes fund it. The death of Abu Sayed, a student from a poor background who was the sole provider for his family, killed on camera during a protest, put a human face on the movement’s stakes. Protesters chanted his name in subsequent protests.

Art, music and poetry were woven into the protests throughout. Slogans were written with literary care, people sang and performed in the streets and imagery drawn from Bangladesh’s liberation war, rather than from global Gen Z visual culture, gave the movement its particular character.

The risk of death was real. Security forces shot live rounds at crowds, fired from helicopters and killed protesters and bystanders, including children on balconies and workers going about their daily lives. Over roughly three weeks, between 1,400 and 1,500 people were killed.

Beyond lethal violence, police stopped vehicles and searched phones for evidence of protest involvement and arrested those found to have participated. They raided the homes of students living near university campuses. They sometimes came disguised as food delivery riders and kidnapped them at night. Public servants who dared criticise the government publicly were fired and some detained on false charges.

Women faced additional layers of risk. Reports emerged of women being abducted. Online harassment was pervasive and particularly vicious for women. Many people, including myself, were pressured by family members who tried to prevent them leaving the house. Those with government contracts or professional ties to the state faced the prospect of lasting career damage.

But risks didn’t stop people. If anything, each new killing brought more people out. The sense that turning back would be a betrayal of those already on the streets was stronger than the fear.

Yes, definitely. The protest was initiated and led by us students. The use of social media to speak to the world was distinctly Gen Z. We were the ones with the most energy to pick up the fight. Later, millennials and other generations joined us.

Gen Z is only now realising what it means to hold power, and that realisation played a big role. We managed to overthrow a longstanding regime backed by a powerful neighbouring country, India.

However, there wasn’t a direct connection between our movement and Gen Z protests in other countries. We were global pioneers, and have since heard from young people in countries like Nepal that our protests inspired theirs. This became a big global movement, and now I feel part of it.

The most unambiguous outcome was the end of a government that had consolidated power over 15 years and built a system designed to sustain itself. Hasina fled to India and an interim government was formed under Dr Muhammad Yunus. Protests continued, scattered, agenda-specific, directed at the new government rather than against it, and people felt, for the first time, that their demands were being heard.

The Yunus administration had real achievements. Corruption decreased, some human rights-friendly policies were introduced and freedom of expression was substantially restored. But it also had significant failings, particularly around women’s safety and the rule of law, as a rise in extremist violence created an environment where many felt less protected, not more.

But the deeper change is that people are no longer silent. The instinct to accept injustice quietly has weakened, political awareness is higher and the collective knowledge that people can make governments fall has not faded.

The Bangladesh Nationalist Party won a two-thirds majority in the February 2026 election, held alongside a referendum on the July Charter, a political reform declaration, which passed with 60 per cent support. It was described as among the most peaceful and credible votes in decades.

The government is being watched closely by a public that has learnt it has the capacity to act, and also knows that no party has yet governed without exploiting that position.

But deep divisions remain, particularly between anti-rights Islamist extremists aligned with the Jamaat-e-Islami movement and liberals and neutrals who, despite having little historic trust in any party, appear willing to give this government a chance