COMMENT | On July 16, I was attending a friend's wedding in Naogaon, located around 200 km from Bangladesh’s capital city Dhaka, where I live now, when a Facebook notification shocked me.

Bangladesh was in the middle of massive protests led by university students and young people like me. Some of the protesters were my own friends.

I had, in fact, joined the protests twice in early July when it was peaceful. We formed human chains and chanted slogans such as, “Quota or merit? Merit, merit!”

The demand, as the slogan connotes, was to scrap reservations in government jobs, which, though reserved for descendants of freedom fighters (and women and the disabled), were being exploited to favour loyalists of then prime minister Sheikh Hasina and her Awami League party.

Like all young Bangladeshis, I wanted a...