Plucky little Bangladesh (in area, not population) has done what no country has been able to do. It has proved the redoubtable Karl Marx wrong.
In his 1852 essay The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, Marx wrote: ‘History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.’ Neither tragedy nor farce has graced two landmark events in Bangladesh’s colourful history.
The first event happened in August 1947 when East Pakistan emerged as part of independent Pakistan upon India’s constitutional partition by Westminster. The second event occurred in December 1971 when East Pakistan became the new nation of Bangladesh following Pakistan’s break-up through war. Both events had revolutionary implications for, and impact on, South Asian history in general and for the peoples of East Pakistan -cum-Bangladesh in particular. These events were neither tragic nor farcical but impressively geopolitical.
How then did history repeat itself in Bangladesh? The repetition lay in the initial brutal monopolization of the narrative and the subsequent unilateral exploitation of the legacies of the independence in 1947 by the Muslim League (ML) and of the liberation war in 1971 by the Awami League (AL). These parties assumed total power in 1947 and 1971, respectively.
The long-list of the Muslim League’s self-serving and greedy indiscretions are brilliantly described by the legendary Bangladeshi journalist-politician Abul Mansur Ahmed in his magisterial book Aamar Dekha Rajnitir Panchash Bachar (Fifty Years of Politics As I Saw It), 2016 edition.
Disregarding the party’s changed status after 1947 and callously mixing religion with politics, the Muslim League leaders created a toxic environment by treating the opposition as anti-Pakistan and anti-Islamic. (Ahmed, 243-245). The result was the cataclysmic war of 1971 that transformed provincial East Pakistan into the independent nation-state of Bangladesh.
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Supremely disdaining facts and logic, the post-1971 Awami League leaders flattered the Muslim League by imitating its foolhardy and foolish footsteps. They shrilly made the arrogant, dodgy and mischievous claim that it was solely their efforts that made the liberation war of 1971 successful, and that they were the rightful inheritors of the war’s pristine spirit, a stick that was extensively used to bludgeon critics and opponents.
To drive home these points, the Awami League deliberately constructed and remorselessly exploited a toxic gap between some genuine but largely manufactured “freedom fighters” (uspar—those who took shelter in India) and “collaborators” (espar—those who remained behind in East Pakistan).
The “usparis” were professional Awami leaguers, carpetbaggers and band waggoners. They received substantial state benefits. The “esparis” were dubbed collaborators (Razakars) and hounded from public life (Enayetullah Khan, Sixty Million Collaborators, The Weekly Holiday, 6 February 1972).
Bangabandhu Sk. Mujibur Rahman vengefully pursued this strategy which climaxed in the BAKSAL fiasco. But his vengefulness was mild compered compared to the ruthlessness of his daughter ex-Prime Minister Sk. Hasina.
During her long rule from 2009 to 2024, brute fascism in all its forms—persecution, corruption, censorship et al—became progressively rampant and a feared feature of daily life. Both father and daughter, plus the country, have paid heavily for their irrational heavy-handedness bordering on insanity. Bangabandhu and Sk. Hasina’s tragic fates evoke the ancient Greek proverb: Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad.
Fascism by Sk. Hasina was bad enough. But her greatest, and unforgiving, mischief was her deliberate and willful falsification of history to immeasurably and solely glorify her father’s achievements at the expense of all others. This falsification has woefully, even fatally, undermined Bangladesh’s moral fiber, fabric and psyche.
No nation can stand tall and proud if its founding narration is flawed or skewed with untruths. This dangerous vacuum must be rectified by objective, not monopolistic one-man or one party, history. This will take time but must be attempted by the historians of Bangladesh in the national fundamental and foundational interest.
Why did Hasina go overboard in governance and in distorting history? A tentative answer is that she had an overarching revanchist personality that never forgot a favour nor overlooked a slight. Thus, she’s grateful, rightly, to India for giving her shelter after August 1975. But then the manner and the magnitude of the concessions Sk. Hasina gave Delhi unilaterally without corresponding quid pro quo is unconscionable.
Her escalating ruthless fascist governance, epitomized in the aynaghar detainees without trial and making her critics and opponents vanish, is mind-boggling, unprecedented in South Asian politics, and reminiscent of Stalinism’s darkest days.
Sk. Hasina’s reign reflected Louis XV’s expression of “Après nous, le déluge ” (After me, the flood). Her departure has left behind chaos. But recalling the even darker days of December 1971 and August 1975, this instability is alarming but not fatal. The interim government has rightly focused on restoring law and order and getting the economy moving, mutually reinforcing subjects that feed on each other.
Concurrently, the authorities’ next order of business, sooner rather than later, will be to get to the bottom of such heinous tragedies as the 2009 BDR massacre and aynaghar. Inevitably, this will require housecleaning in the military, since it has supported Sk. Hasina for many years and done her bidding including aynaghar. Civil-military relations are in a state of suspended animation but need to be rationalized if democracy with meaningfully sustainable civilian rule is to prevail. A crucial test of the military’s foresight will be the way goes about housecleaning and reacts to the likely cut in the bloated military budget to restore treasury finances.
Is Sk. Hasina then a self-hating Bengali consciously and knowingly seeking primitive, atavistic revenge on an “ungrateful” nation for the 14 August 1975 murder of her father and family members? Posterity and psychiatry can best provide the answer as more dark facts emerge about Sk. Hasina’s warped thinking and authoritarian governance. It’s worth recalling Voltaire’s saying that “He (She) who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” Sk. Hasina espoused manifest absurdities and got her civilian and military acolytes to commit unspeakable atrocities.
Critics castigated the performance of the restored French Bourbon monarchy after Napoleon’s defeat in 1815 as having learnt nothing and forgot nothing. The Muslim League and Awami League went one better. These two parties learnt nothing and forgot everything after getting power.
To revert to Marx. Some aspects of Bangladesh’s post 1971 history validate his assertion of history as tragedy and farce but with a flourish. After Islamabad’s brutal crackdown of 25 March 1971, many Awami Leaguers fled to India to save their lives and with others launched the resistance against Islamabad. This was history as tragedy.
The July 2024 popular uprising in Bangladesh persuaded some of the more affluent Awami Leaguers and their cohorts to flee, not to India, but to Singapore, Malaysia and other lucrative destinations, where they live comfortably on their illegally repatriated capital from Bangladesh.
This flight revealed more than anything else how the character of the Awami League elites and hangers-on had changed. In 1971, they were impoverished provincial politicians. By 2024, they had become cosmopolitan crony capitalists. These disgruntled and discredited refugee exiles lack the cause to mount any worthwhile resistance to return to Dhaka. This part of history is farce.
Amongst the notable Awami Leaguers who have perforce sought shelter in India are Sk. Hasina and her sister Rehana. Since the UK has refused Sk. Hasina asylum, where she finds refuge is a work-in-progress in Delhi. Ideally, this should be as far away from Bangladesh as possible.
Civilized, secure and distant New Zealand would be a good place provided Wellington agrees. It should, to promote calm in South Asia. Delhi will find Hasina’s continued stay in India embarrassing and controversial, and a thorn in the ongoing reset in Indo-Bangla relations. Countries like individuals reap what they sow.
The above commentary provides a fitting backdrop to review the trajectory of Indo-Bangladesh relations, by far Bangladesh’s core external issue. Dhaka and Delhi are Siamese twins, inseparably and ineluctably bound at the hip through immutable geography and the shifting tides of history.
In 1971, Delhi helped Bangladesh diplomatically and militarily to defeat the Pakistanis. Bangladesh should be appropriately but not eternally grateful to India since shared interests, not benevolence, dictated this help.
This military victory legitimately gave Delhi bragging rights but not the rights of proprietorship. The mandarins in Delhi recognize this reality—nothing is permanent in interstate relations—but have behaved cavalierly in practice, as if Bangladesh was a satrapy of India, an approach that reached unprecedented and pervasive levels of crudity under Modi.
The predictable result has been an unrelenting denudation of Dhaka’s sovereignty to the point of overbearing suffocation and the emergence in Dhaka of the unflattering image of the ugly Indian. Hasina’s unduly deferential collaboration with Delhi over many years was a direct factor contributing to this ugliness. Indian policy makers probably reveled in this false euphoria, knowing that they had the head of government (Hasina) in their pocket.
At this point, it’s pertinent to digress a bit by taking a long view. Ever since independence in 1947, it’s no exaggeration to assert that Dhaka has been victimized by two indigenous colonial regimes.
From 1947-1971, Islamabad ruled Dhaka through the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) manned by brawny Punjabis. From 1971- 2024, it was Delhi through the opaquely titled Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) staffed by brainy Brahmins.
The modus operandi of ISI and RAW overlapped. They cajoled, bribed, and threatened willing and unwilling Bangladeshis to suborn, subdue and subvert Bengali aspirations. They were successful, up to a point. The pertinent point and unforgiving fact are that quislings do not last forever.
Numerous books published by Indians have extolled the emergence of independent Bangladesh as RAW’s “finest hour” (Raman, The Kaoboys of RAW, 2019. The word Kaoboy is a pun on Ram Nath Kao, RAW’s then boss). So, it was. But Hasina’s hasty departure for Delhi on 5 August 2024 has given RAW a black eye.
Despite its resources and coercive ability, the ISI was clueless about Bengali public opinion, as manifested in its abject failure to foresee the results of Pakistan’s 1969 election. RAW seems to suffer from the same malady. The mass popular student-led uprising in Dhaka of July 2024 caught it flat-footed.
ISI and RAW share another thing in common. They displayed a degree of ineptness when it came to managing Dhaka through collaborators.
Cuckolded husbands are usually the last to know of their wives’ infidelities. The same can be said of ISI and RAW’s capacities to discern material changes and trends in popular opinion. They are too consumed by their own pretensions to invincibility and infallibility to undertake painful introspection and course correction of long-standing policy momentum.
The lesson Dhaka should draw from this RAW imbroglio is to take steps to stiffen its spine to deal with RAW’s forthcoming onslaught to rehabilitate its Bangladesh network to redeem, if nothing else, its tarnished reputation for invincible prescience. The unequal Dhaka-Delhi relationship is likely to undergo a material reset, with a less obsequious leadership in Bangladesh and a more chastened one in India.
Sense and sensibility, not pride and prejudice, should characterize this relationship that should be constructed as between friends, not fiends. An amicable relationship with Dhaka will be a pleasant antidote to the long-prevailing situation where India has needlessly antagonized her neighbours consecutively and successively. Less reliance on bilateralism and more on robust regionalism could contribute to lowering tensions in South Asia and rehabilitating Delhi’s unflattering image. A good start would be a revival of moribund SAARC.
It’s possible South Block and RAW may pleasantly surprise by reforming their mindsets, turning over a new page, and conducting their operations in Bangladesh with civility, not Big Brother overtones. Don’t hold your breath, though, of this happening anytime soon, or at all. Old imperial habits die hard.