Bangladesh Shuts Down TV Channels and Telecommunications Amid Violent Protests
Bangladesh experiences nationwide disruptions as violent student protests over government job quotas escalate, leading to multiple deaths and the government’s call for military assistance.
Dhaka, Bollywood Fever: Television news channels in Bangladesh went off the air, and telecommunications were widely disrupted on Friday amid violent student protests against quotas for government jobs, resulting in nearly two dozen fatalities this week.
The government has not yet issued an official statement regarding the disruptions.
French news agency AFP reported that the death toll from Thursday’s violence had risen to 32. Reuters had previously reported 13 deaths, in addition to six fatalities earlier in the week, but could not immediately verify the higher number.
According to India’s Economic Times, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s government “was forced” to deploy the army late on Thursday to help “maintain order,” a claim that Reuters could not independently verify.
Authorities initially cut some mobile services on Thursday to control the unrest, but the disruptions spread nationwide on Friday morning, according to Reuters witnesses in Dhaka and New Delhi.
Overseas telephone calls were mostly disconnected, and internet-based calls were not going through. Several Bangladesh-based newspaper websites were not updating, and their social media handles were inactive. Only some voice calls were operational, with no mobile data or broadband available. Even SMS or mobile-to-mobile text messages were not working, a Reuters photographer in Dhaka reported.
News television channels and the state broadcaster BTV were off the air, while entertainment channels continued normal transmission. Some news channels displayed messages citing technical reasons for the broadcast interruption, assuring that programming would resume soon.
Dhaka’s streets were deserted on Friday, a weekly holiday in the country, with minimal traffic, few rickshaw pullers, and thin crowds near a vegetable and fish market. A protest rally was scheduled at the main mosque around 0800 GMT.
The nationwide protests, the largest since Hasina’s re-election earlier this year, are driven by high youth unemployment, with nearly a fifth of the country’s 170 million population out of work or education. Protesters demand the state halt the allocation of 30% of government jobs to families of those who fought in the 1971 war of independence from Pakistan.
Although Hasina’s government abolished the quota system in 2018, a high court reinstated it last month. The government appealed against this verdict, and the Supreme Court has suspended the high court’s order, pending the hearing of the government’s appeal on August 7.
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