This summer Prapti Taposhi joined thousands of her fellow students in Bangladesh and took to the streets. She was furious about the unfairness of a quota system that reserved 30% of jobs for the children of freedom fighters from the 1971 war of independence with Pakistan.
Government jobs are well paid and secure and, students argued, it was a scheme that made no sense so long after the war. But then came a police crackdown, and protests that began peacefully led to 400 people being killed. Furious demonstrators now had a new demand: that the prime minister, Sheikh Hasina, step down.
The journalist David Bergman explains to Hannah Moore that no one considered that would actually happen. Sheikh Hasina was the longest-serving female prime minister in the world. She was a historic figure, first taking over her political party, the Awami League, after her father – Bangladesh’s founding father – was assassinated.
Yet suddenly, last week, she did just that, escaping Bangladesh in a helicopter. How was a once popular leader, lauded as the politician who brought democracy back to the country after military rule, ousted by students? And why?
Photograph: Suvra Kanti Das/ZUMA Press Wire/REX/Shutterstock