Shafiqur Rahman
In the immediate hours after Sheikh Hasina fled Bangladesh on August 5, a speculative theory began to circulate in the Indian social and public media that this was yet another US-orchestrated “Colour Revolutions” in action. That conspiracy theory only gained strength with each passing day in Indian national discourse and gained a great purchase among Bangladeshi supporters of the fallen regime.
This was ludicrous, of course. Those of us who followed the July mass uprising day by day and hour by hour understand it very clearly that the only way this theory makes sense if Sheikh Hasina was complicit in the conspiracy for her downfall from the very beginning because it is her regime’s fatal decisions one after another that irreversibly led the course of events to the very improbable Wagnerian end.
An actual colour revolution took place in Bangladesh in July 2024, but it is not the CIA-orchestrated revolution that we often hear in the popular discourse. It was a revolution in the sense that the true political opinion of the overwhelming majority of the citizens of Bangladesh, finally got publicly expressed in glorious colour. To explain this colour revolution, I will resort to the well-known political science theory of “preference falsification” and “preference cascade” by famous political economist and historian Timur Kuran.
An explainer
Preference falsification is the act of withholding or misrepresenting a privately held belief or preference in public due to fear of social pressure or political oppression. There is a private opinion that is held by every citizen according to their own nature and experience. Then there is public opinion which is the distribution of all the opinions of citizens expressed publicly. When preference falsification occurs in any issue, there is a great divergence between the distribution of private and public opinions. It has been quite clear that in Bangladesh there has been a preference falsification happening regarding the approval of the Sheikh Hasina regime in the last decade or so. A huge number of citizens were afraid to express publicly their real private opinion of the regime, for fear of consequences.
Preferences are formed from knowledge, and we gain knowledge from both private experience and public knowledge. This is why when a lot of people in a society engage in preference falsification, public knowledge on issues becomes distorted. People incorrectly think that most people actually support an issue and thus they themselves start supporting the issue publicly, although the public support is mostly false. They are not just aware of alternate realistic possibilities. Because so many people were engaged in preference falsification regarding the Awami L:eague regime due to fear or material incentives, this created public knowledge that Sheikh Hasina and the regime were popular enough, which was far from the true distribution of private preferences.
In a democratic society, preference falsification does not become rampant because elections with secret ballots is a process that enables private preferences on important issues, and party choices, to be exercised without fear. Democracy acts as a brake on publicly-expressed opinion from getting too far deviated from privately-held opinion. Because the greater the deviation in an issue, the more important that issue becomes for the voting citizen. This is why the AL regime actively sought to undermine democratic elections ever since it came into power in 2008. The regime did not want people’s private beliefs about the oppressive predation of the nation to be revealed in public through ballots.
When a person has to falsify a belief in public, the act induces a psychological cost by generating resentment and humiliation from being forced to bear false witness. The greater the divergence in the public belief and personal belief, the bigger the psychological cost. There is also a reputational consequence of professing a belief in public and thereby signaling to which political group of citizens one belongs, the pro-authority group or the opposition group. The reputational consequence also depends upon the relative size of the groups of citizens. In an authoritarian country like Bangladesh under Hasina’s regime, the publicly pro-authority group is large and powerful while the opposition is small and powerless. So, the reputational benefits of publicly belonging to the pro-authority side as opposed to the opposition are significantly huge.
For an individual who believes the regime to be morally heinous, there is a tradeoff between the psychological cost of falsifying your true beliefs and obtaining material consequences of publicly belonging to the pro-regime side. This trade-off is different for every individual citizen and they all have a personal threshold at which the psychological cost overwhelms the reputational gain. This is known as the political threshold.
In stable political periods, there is only a small migration across citizen groups, pro-regime and pro-opposition. However, external events may lower the political threshold by increasing the psychological cost or decreasing the reputational advantage. For example, the regime indulging in the indiscriminate massacre of students and kids in the streets clearly increased the psychological costs of publicly supporting the regime. An economic crisis due to bad governance can also decrease the reputational advantage of belonging to the pro-regime side.
When the political threshold lowers significantly, there is a lot of migration from the publicly pro-regime side to the opposition. This changes the relative size of the two groups. Now, if the people can clearly see a significant decrease in the pro-regime side and increase in opposition, this further reduces the reputational gains from being pro-regime, leading to further lowering the political threshold and more migration. This creates a positive feedback loop that rapidly collapses the pro-regime side as more and more people come out with their true political beliefs. This phenomenon is called a preference cascade. Political preference cascades when running unimpeded, leading to a political revolution very shortly.
In my opinion, a spectacular preference cascade happened in Bangladesh in the second half of July 2024 that led to the fall of the Shiekh Hasina regime. When the students in Dhaka University shouted in unison in the early phase of the quota movement “Who are you? Who am I? Razakar, razakar” — it demonstrated to the whole country that publicly proclaiming the most profane taboo under the AL regime is no longer beyond the pale and the AL indoctrination of 15 years had failed. There is a young generation who doesn’t care about the theology preached by AL and the reputation of belonging to that camp is not so great after all.
Amid the repression and killing of students in the early phase of the movement, the martyrdom of Abu Sayed in Rangpur stands out as an incandescent point in our national history. The courage of Sayed was so heroic and so epic that almost every citizen began to understand that the regime that ordered those bullets to be fired, cannot but be evil. At that time social media-based and solidarity activism began to spread like wildfire among Bangladeshis living in all corners of the globe.
Social media played a very critical role in this mass uprising of Bangladeshis. In the last 5-6 years, social media sites like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and internet-based journalism have almost completely supplanted traditional print and electronic media as the main source of news and views for Bangladeshis. As general people started to view and share the videos and images of the brutal repression of the student movement, the anti-regime activists smelled blood in the water and started producing all kinds of hard-hitting content furiously. The viewership and sharing of these contents clearly showed how the political threshold is falling, and previously apolitical people are now joining in the universal condemnation.
In my view the regime crossed the Rubicon when its police forces attacked with wanton lethality the agitating students at private universities, colleges, and even schools on July 18 and 19. Scores of children and young people died. Among the dead in the massacre there were many middle-class youths. For the first time in the history of Bangladesh since 1971, middle-class youth were targets of a killing frenzy by a ruling regime. The famously apathetic urban middle and upper-middle class saw their sons and daughters and their family getting killed. The hurricane of indignation that spread worldwide forced the regime to shut down the internet and almost all communications. The curfew and shutdown seemingly halted the spiraling crisis for a time, but it was only a temporary lull.
Bangladesh was kept in digital darkness for nearly a week, but images, videos, and news of the massacre and crackdown trickled outside. Diaspora activists were frantically organizing global protests and sharing the images of the carnage carried out by the armed forces and goons of the regime. When the internet was restored, people inside Bangladesh once again saw their social media flooded with those horrific images.
A new nationwide wave of disgust rose towards the regime. At this very moment, desperate regime officials came up with a brilliant plan: They asked all Bangladeshis to observe a day of mourning for the dead, on July 29 by adopting the colour black ontheir Facebook profiles. Student leaders countered this pathetic attempt to garner sympathy by appealing everyone to turn their profiles into red, the colour of revolution and change.
On July 29, one after another Bangladeshis turned their Facebook profiles into red until one only saw a sea of red among his friends and followers. This was the day when there was a clear and incontrovertible signal that an overwhelming number of Bangladeshis are against the regime. The political threshold crashed, and the preference cascade became climactic.
A national uprising was here.
The rest is history. Witnessing the overwhelming rejection of the regime, junior and mid-ranking officers and soldiers refused to protect the regime by using force on the people. The military top-brass, fearing breakdown in the armed forces, asked Hasina to resign and flee.
This is not a complete theory or description of the events of the July uprising. There were other elements as critical as the preference cascade of citizens. The astonishingly resilient movement by students at universities and the country-wide participation of members of opposition political parties played no less important role. However, the end of July 2024 should be remembered as the time Bangladesh became the colour red and revealed that everyone is united against the Sheikh Hasina regime.
Shafiqur Rahman is a political scientist.
First Published in Dhaka Tribune on September 2
https://www.dhakatribune.com/356987
