By Mohammad Ponir Hossain, Ruma Paul and Sam Jahan
DHAKA (Reuters) – Television news channels in Bangladesh were off the air on Friday and telecommunications were largely disrupted due to violent student protests against government job quotas that have left nearly two dozen people dead this week.
No communication has been received from the government yet.
French news agency AFP reported that the death toll in Thursday’s riots had risen to 32. Reuters reported that 13 people had been killed, in addition to the six killed earlier in the week, but could not immediately verify the higher number.
India’s Economic Times newspaper reported that Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s government was “forced” to call in the military on Thursday night to help “maintain law and order.” Reuters could not independently verify the information.
Authorities had already shut down some mobile services on Thursday to quell the unrest, but by Friday morning disruption had spread across the country, Reuters witnesses in Dhaka and New Delhi said.
Telephone calls from abroad were often not connected and calls over the Internet could not be completed.
The websites of several newspapers in Bangladesh were not updated on Friday morning and their social media accounts were also inactive.
Only some voice calls were working in the country and there was no mobile data or broadband on Friday morning, a Reuters photographer in Dhaka said. Even mobile-to-mobile text messages were not getting through, he added.
News channels and state broadcaster BTV were off the air, while entertainment channels continued their normal broadcasts, a Reuters witness said.
According to the witness, several news channels showed a message saying that they could not broadcast for technical reasons and that programming would resume soon.
Streets in the capital Dhaka were deserted on Friday, a weekly public holiday in the country. There was little traffic and very few rickshaw pullers on the streets and thin crowds at a vegetable and fish market, he said, adding that a protest rally had been called at the main mosque around 0800 GMT.
The nationwide agitation, the largest since Hasina was re-elected earlier this year, has been fueled by high youth unemployment, with nearly a fifth of the country’s 170 million people either unemployed or out of school.
Protesters are demanding that the state stop reserving 30% of government jobs for the families of people who fought in the 1971 war of independence from Pakistan.
Hasina’s government had abolished the quota system in 2018, but a high court reinstated it last month. The government appealed the verdict, and the Supreme Court stayed the high court order pending the hearing of the government’s appeal on August 7.
(Additional reporting by YP Rajesh, Sudipto Ganguly, Shilpa Jamkhandikar and Subrata Nag Choudhury in India; Writing by YP Rajesh; Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan)
