Monday, August 5, 2024, was a history-tossing day for Bangladesh, which made global headlines! The Awami League (AL)-leader Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina (Hasina), the country’s longest running chief executive, terrified of the rumbling protesters gushing towards her official residence, hastily resigned. She fled the country. But her stormy exit came in the wake of staggering death tolls, countless injuries, untold human suffering, ferocious public rage, burning, looting and catastrophic losses across the range. The country’s collapsed administration, since she bolted out of the country, is yet to fully recover as of this writing. Initially, it was a student-led protest for reforming the discriminating job-quota, but as she bungled it, the campaign became a nation-wide populist revolt that finally toppled her. The recent upheavals came at the breaking point under Hasina’s sledgehammer governance that protracted too long.
Seismic regime dissolution is usually the twin of a divided nation—the original sin of the country’s inflexible rift goes back to the early years of Bangladesh. The stocks of unbending hatreds commenced with those who professed themselves as the impeccable bunch of patriots and spitefully cast the rest aside as the smeared “others” in the new state emerging from a violent civil war. The two opposing sides did not find a middle ground to live in a mutually tolerant polity. Consequently, national unity yearned in Bangladesh right from its birth.
Thrown out of the newly independent country’s political process, the so-called “anti-liberation forces” lost personal safety, security, jobs, and properties. Indiscriminate blame games of who did what in 1971 and during the bloody insurrections of 1975 still drive Bangladesh apart. The AL exploited the old split as its political capital even after the nation crossed its 50th year of independence. Bangladeshis are yet to realize that pluralistic democracy does not flourish in a stalemate between a divided society and deceptive political institutions. We saw the worst manifestation of this gap between the people and the country’s governing elites over the recent years.
Partisan polarization, to Amy Chua, the celebrated author of outstanding volumes on a range of social and political issues, is like a virus that has not yet found a cure! Bangladesh is one of the worst examples of such politically riven countries where neither robust institutions nor national consensus thrive. The country’s clarion call, now, is for an early election and restoration of democracy, which are amongst the most challenging questions for the recently inaugurated interim or a caretaker government headed by Dr. M. Yunus.
A fuller narrative of the grim rancor that still plagues Bangladesh is beyond the scope of this limited opinion piece. Hasina steadily built an “unelected, “unaccountable and a stifling one-person and one-party rule after she won the 2008 election. Her grandiose rhetoric fell short of building a multi-layered nation with an array of democratic institutions and an esteem for the due process of law mediated by non-partisan actors. An undemocratic cult certainly revolved around Hasina, who hauled hereditary claims from the perceived glories of Sheikh Mujib, her father whom she deified as the “sole” founder of Bangladesh. It was Hasina’s way to weaponize history to legitimize her harsh regime. But then again, Bangladesh gave birth to a leader-dominated national imagination since Sheikh Mujib assumed the country’s absolute leadership soon after his return from Pakistan jail early in 1972. Hasina’s juggernaut of an autocracy transported the footprints of her father’s one-party decree shortly before his tragic end. However, she did not officially announce that she re-embodied the earlier BKSAL domination. Hasina’s hegemony had supporting pillars—her loyal partisan factions with its student wing and the hired goons, pro-AL civil bureaucrats, crony capitalists, corrupted layers of police and the upper levels of the judiciary loyal to her decrees. She nourished those columns of power by warped measures which have been becoming known every day since her fall. India’s not-so-hidden validation of the regime only emboldened Hasina both domestically and internationally. While Mujib’s undisputed authority came from his charismatic popularity until he launched the short-lived BKSAL in 1975, his daughter’s network of authoritarianism was much larger and even more tailored to her invincibility.
Between 1975 and 1991, the emotional makeup of the country’s politics changed first under General Ziaur Rahman (Zia) and later during General H. M. Ershad’s (Ershad) rule. Both the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) and the Jatiya Party (JP), born out of the previous military regimes, were non-ideological although they allowed space to Muslim identity and political Islam. Following the 1975 coup, Mujib was no longer the usually applauded leader in the national pantheon. His BKSAL gamble caused the greatest harm to national unity and to himself. When the BNP laid a claim that after the Pakistani massacre on the 25th of March 1971, it was (then a Major) Zia who first called for Bangladesh independence. The acrimony over who first declared independence in 1971 mushroomed into a cacophony over the “fatherhood” of Bangladeshi independence from Pakistan. Sadly, the specter of that dissension still prowls across the political, social, and cultural spans — it is at the bottom of the surfeit of miseries, including the contemporary tragedies, of the nation.
The AL imagined that its 1996 electoral victory, after the 21-year hiatus, only vindicated its “rightful claims to the exclusive political leadership of the country it freed from Pakistan in 1971”. Prime Minister Hasina promptly repealed the so-called Indemnity Ordinance that earlier precluded the trial of the accused assassins of Mujib and most members of the family in 1975. However, her critics insisted that Hasina used the trial of the indicted “Mujib killers” to rejuvenate the AL ascendency as it transpired before Sheikh Mujib suffered a fierce rebellion.
Taj Hashmi’s Fifty Years of Bangladesh 1971- 2021, Crises of Culture, Development, Governance, and Identity, (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2022) is one of the detailed narratives of Hasina’s domination and her divisive strides, including the pervasive human rights violations that Hasina committed from 2009 to 2021. Her foremost rival was the BNP headed by Zia’s widow Begum Khaleda Zia (Khaleda) who won the first election in 1991 after General Ershad’s fall. For the duration of her tenure, Hasina launched horrendous strikes, violence and an exceptional bureaucratic disruption until the BNP amended the constitution to craft a caretaker system to umpire the election which led her to the 1996 election victory. In 2001, Khaleda led her BNP to victory again. Then, Hasina pitched another round of agitations that steered to a military intervention which, in certain ways, enabled the AL victory in the 2008 election.
Fifteen years of Hasina’s hegemony were a cocktail of selective memories, nostalgia, and a politically induced amnesia about the nation’s larger history. The AL-identity worked like money in the bank for the party activists—it was also an endorsement for jobs, social vanity, business deals and easy credit that went to the party factions. Her cherry-picked history hardly encountered questions by the accredited historians and the liberal intellectuals of the country. Annihilation of the country’s democratic process by ruthless marginalization of the opposition parties, swelling corruption at the highest places, unrestrained violence against the dissenters, kidnappings and forced disappearances branded the Hasina government. Appalling political divides faltered dialogues on critical national security matters. Not an enviable job– the interim administration must put the past behind and move ahead! The fledgling student protests, which ousted Hasina, are indeed driving the country through a national catharsis.
Hasina’s long regime is a betrayal of Bangladesh’s national unity and the country’s comprehensive political development. But Bangladesh is still an energetic and a resilient landscape that just daringly ditched an autocratic rule—a strategic resource for the nation’s future. The ruling elite’s current priority is to depolarize the country by restoring peace and security, rule of law and launching an arrangement of participatory institutions necessary for liberal democracies. Riding the momentum of history at this hour, can we voice that Bangladesh now needs the uniters, not the dividers at the helm?