When I published “The Awami League in the Political Development of Pakistan,” in Asian Survey, University of California Press, July 1970, the Awami League (AL) was riding the crest of its unprecedented popularity. Sheikh Mujibur Rahman/Shiekh Mujib (later acclaimed as the Bangabandhu and father of the nation by his allies), had nearly scaled the peak of East Pakistani politics by the time I completed my research in 1970, which later continued in my post-doctoral work at Columbia University, New York. At the party’s 75th year, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina (Hasina)-led AL administration is, as a contrast, now confronting a surfeit of domestic and international fury for her alleged delegitimization of political dissent since she won the caretaker government-supervised election in 2008. In the wake of the three profoundly contentious elections in 2014, 2018 and (January) 2024 that she triumphantly won, the Hasina-regime met surging accusations for rampant rigging, undermining democracy, widespread human rights violations, virtual one-party rule, jailing opposition leaders and their accomplices on trumped up charges and reported disappearances of the regime critics. Additionally, the perceived sledge-hammer governance noticeably eroded the state and civil society institutions across the spectrum. Under the Cyber Security Act, 2023 popularly known as the Digital Security Act, the bulk of the media is stuck in the quagmire of regulatory contrivances and their self-imposed editing.
Initially tailored as the Awami Muslim League (AML), the Awami League was born on June 23, 1949, in Dhaka, but in 1955, four years, after its establishment, the party deleted “Muslim” from its designation to accord a more non-sectarian semblance. Assembled by the senior leaders like Maulana Abdul Hamid Khan Bhashani (Bhashani) and H.S. Suhrawardy and a host of young political icons like Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, Shamsul Huq, Tajuddin Ahmed and a host of political activists and student leaders, the AL propelled the Bengali opposition since the early 1950s in East Pakistan. The AL was the key player in the United Front (UF) coalition enlarged by A.K. Fazlul Huq (popularly greeted as Sher-e-Bangla) and his old guards in defeating the Muslim League’s (ML) single-party hegemony in the 1954 election. And yet, the U.F., with diverse partners, was not a unified organization.
With the exceptions of occasional internal feuds, the AL maintained its posture of strength until its leftist supporters broke away to set up the National Awami Party (N.A.P) in 1957, an explicitly All-Pakistani socialist party whose remnants still survive in Bangladesh. [Reference: my article, “The National Awami Party in Pakistan: Leftist Politics in Crisis,” Pacific Affairs, University of British Columbia, Autumn, 1970]. When the UF-guided opposition coalition fashioned the first cabinet in 1954, the AL fell out with the KSP on a range of acrimonious issues. The AL’s stretch with the U.F. partners from 1954 to 1958 was a narrative of betrayal, a product of the dismaying culture of on-again and off-again “floor-crossing” by their apparent allies. Former East Pakistani provincial Chief Minister Ataur Rahman Khan filled the pages of Ujaratir Doi Basar, his precious memoir, lamenting over the fleeting loyalties and personal rivalries of his cohorts in the 1950s. The AL’s continued distrust of their contemporary affiliates has a bit of historical bequest.
When I began exploring the East Pakistani parties in 1968, the rump of the timeworn Muslim League (ML), styled as the Convention M.L., backed the Ayub regime, and its other splinter, led by Nurul Amin, opposed it. Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was in jail during the earlier part of my study; notwithstanding his trial for high treason in the so-called Agartala Conspiracy Case then, Sheikh Mujib was still the AL’s indisputable leader and Tajuddin Ahmed, was the second in command deftly managing the party at a time of its existential struggle. I am immensely grateful to Tajuddin Ahmed (now late) who gave me research materials to back up the AL’s struggle against the ML’s monopoly of power, and his party’s contribution to the language movement of the 1950s. The AL’s six-point claims at that moment mounted an overwhelming challenge to the Ayub regime that stifled opposition politics in Pakistan. I recall that Tajuddin Ahmed took me to Sheikh Mujibur Rahman for an interview sometime in August 1970.
Compared to its halfhearted taste of power-sharing with the U.F. from 1954 to 1958, the post-1971 AL, with Sheikh Mujib’s outstanding ascendency, was a different frame — the leader was more powerful than the party organization that he led earlier. Mujib’s towering popularity, no doubt, dwarfed the AL’s institutional structure. The phenomenon is every so often branded as the “patron-client” liaison between the mentors and their cohorts of a party or its factions. The Mujibization of the AL commenced when a shadowy Mujib Bahini, received military training from the Indian intelligence in 1971. Mujib’s enthralling hallmark spread itself more prominently as Mujibism, an ideological badge spread out by the Mujib loyalists in the party. Except the JASAD’s armed challenge, there was hardly any fervent opposition party in Bangladesh’s opening years. From Colonial Bengal to contemporary Bangladesh, charismatic leaders and their dynastic claimants jettisoned their party outfits once they won their elections and established themselves in power.
Sheikh Mujibur Rahman suddenly decreed the BKSAL-style single party régime in Bangladesh, but with his exclusive grip of the new-fangled outfit, the old AL only transitioned under the new (BKSAL) cover! The specter of the now-defunct BKSAL still haunts Bangladesh, and the AL in office at this time can hardly exorcize itself from the stain of its authoritarian proclivities. Did Sheikh Mujibur Rahman launch the BKSAL, as he could no longer rely on or trust his quintessential AL? Did he feel that he was above the party that he had nourished earlier, and which, in its turn, facilitated his ascent to the unparalleled accolade that he had earned? Those are still the unanswered questions of Bangladeshi political history. Lest we forget, anti-BKSAL noise, dim though, endured inside the AL!
The long-standing ML remnants and the right-wing Islamic parties suffered a range of confinements and various sanctions for their presumed backing for united Pakistan in 1971, the seismic year of Bangladesh. By those steps, the AL effectively decapitated an array of its potential challengers. Likewise, the AL subdued its radical antagonists and soon the moderate socialists became its silent or open validators. Nevertheless, the Bangladeshi parties realized a paradoxical mission since the dawn of the country’s independence—legitimately acquiring sustainable power through a fair and participatory election as well as gracefully staying out of authority for the next spin after losing an evenhanded contest. Bangladeshi and other South Asian countries’ politicians often favored their charismatic leaders’ sway and, sometimes, their dynastic inheritors’ name recognition sustained the apparent unity of their respective parties. Then again, such charismatic leaders or their hereditary inheritors also indeed truncated the flourishing institutions essential for liberal democracy. The single dominant party, with successional propensities, undermined the peaceful party-contests and impaired nonviolent power transitions on multiple occasions in post-1971 Bangladesh.
At the cusp of the BKSAL becoming a totalitarian control, the emerging leadership of that regime suffered a brutal overthrow that killed Shiekh Mujibur Rahman along with his family members. The long interruption of the military-led civilian regimes that followed the catastrophic event slowly endorsed the rise of multiple parties in Bangladesh, and eventually the country returned to the parliamentary form of government in 1991. The newest parties included the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), founded by President General Ziaur Rahman (Zia) and subsequently, the ousted President General H. M. Ershad launched his Jatiya Party (JP). All through that hiatus, the AL’s hard core hunkered down until Sheikh Hasina (Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s daughter) became the leader of the revived party. After Ziaur Rahman (Zia) expired in an attempted coup by a renegade group of army officers, the BNP’s leadership decisively fell upon Begum Khaleda Zia (Khaleda), Zia’s widow. The 1991 election brought the BNP-led coalition to power with Khaleda Zia as the Prime Minister, and the AL occupied the opposition benches for a span of time. Sadly, the years from 1994 to 1996 witnessed the opposition-spawned 22-month long strikes, violence and unruly political strife that transported Bangladesh on the verge of a civil war. Still, it was a successful strip of bipartisan parliamentary governance in Bangladesh even though the major parties coalesced with their minor but like-minded partners.
Once she was self-confident in her power, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina surprisingly purged the constitutionally stipulated non-partisan governance to supervise every legislative election. Step by step, the AL reversed Bangladesh to the disgraced conduit of the single (BKSAL) party rule in 1975, without, of course, ceremoniously declaring it to be so. This is the milieu of the country’s precarious deadlock now. Disappointingly, few signs of peacefully exiting the crisis are in sight at this hour!
Did those punctured polling wins undercut the AL’s centrality as a democratic institution? Is the AL divided against itself on such issues? Did the AL members enormously vote in those boycotted polls? Absence of partisan wallowing for the deluding “victory” in the January 2024 poll and the Prime Minister’s toned-down post-election grandiosity may likewise imply a chasm between the Prime Minister and her party-base, at large and her not-so-happy allies too. The blatantly divisive polls lose their political worth, no matter which and how many of the political actors win or lose in such balloting—even the “winners” of such outrageous voting stir the party’s angry backers habitually deprived of the engineered election’s windfalls. Whimpers over who got what in the national and more recent local elections are still reverberating at the grassroots. Stretched discord, no matter if it happens within the party or between the ruling and the opposition entities, engenders a perilously swelling vacuum. And when it sets in, an implosion—loud or quiet—political or economic—is not hard to imagine!