by Prof. Rashiduzzaman 6 June 2022
Hegemonic proclivities are amongst the best historical parallels between Pakistan’s old Muslim League (ML) and the contemporary Awami League (AL) in Bangladesh. In December 1950, Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan rumbled at a public meeting in Mymensingh that he would not tolerate any party in the country other than the ML, Pakistan’s founding institution. The post-1971 AL matched, in certain ways, the ML’s prior ascendancy from 1947 to 1954 in East Pakistan. Well-known, as it is, the 1972-75 AL/the Bangladesh Krishak, Sramik Awami League (BKSAL) regime in Bangladesh zoomed the AL’s post-independence absolute authority. The AL reentered power in 1996. And later, its old pre-1975 hegemonic bent spiked expressly after the AL election victory in 2008. Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s (Hasina) partisan exaltation of the AL and the late Sheikh Mujibur Rahman (Mujib/Bangabandhu), her charismatic father resonated with what Liaquat Ali Khan once thundered to boost the ML six decades ago. To counter the AL’s trajectory, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) Secretary General M. Fakhrul Islam Alamgir minced no words when, in 2020, he faulted the AL for virtually establishing a single-party regime in the country.
The bonfire of the ML’s vanity sparked first when a group of the former ML leaders banded together to establish the AL in 1949, the first structured opposition launched in East Pakistan. Between the previous Pakistani ML and the sitting AL in Bangladesh, the historical comparisons, wittingly or unwittingly, still endure— the present-day AL was once the Awami Muslim League implying that the newfangled party was the people’s (Awami, an Urdu word meaning people!) Muslim League—a kind of counter League!
The United Front (UF), an alliance of the AL, the KSP, and a few other smaller competing parties, groups, and their leaders, with huge student support, astonishingly trounced the ruling EPML in 1954. As the saying goes, the victors write the first chapters of history, but the ML suffered a disastrous defeat before it could close its narrative.
Frustrated with the UF’s alliance partners from 1954 to 1958, the AL’s younger echelon ploughed a lonely furrow in the future. They drove their six-point demand and later singularly maneuvered the 1971 independence struggle with huge Indian backing. After the AL/BKSAL’s mighty regime violently ended in 1975, the AL ran into a political wilderness for 21 years. Bullying predilections —- silencing the political rivals with brutal methods, and grossly flouting civil rights— formerly attributed to the ML equally recurred in Bangladesh in multiple stages of the AL rules. The resurgence of one-party reign and the inclinations that go with such unilateral power are among the key elements of this paper.
Both the ML and the AL invoked history to legitimize their ascendancy. The AL’s privileges in Bangladesh partly stemmed from its remarkable victory in the 1970 election; on the other hand, the ML’s erstwhile entitlements in East Pakistan originated from the party’s success in the 1946 Bengal Legislative elections. But the ML’s greatest feat was its ability to achieve Pakistan, a separate Muslim state in India while the AL’s extravagant claim to authority came from its victory and independence from Pakistan in 1971. So, a few institutional parallels exist between the ML and the AL. But Mujib’s abrupt shift to the BKSAL as the only legal party in Bangladesh with its reported civil liberty restrictions was unprecedented. Rhetoric and intimidation apart, the ML did not take such a catastrophic turn in Pakistan even while it was at a high point of power. The party’s internal weakness and unpopularity surfaced when the UF, a sluggish opposition coalition, defeated the East Pakistan ML in 1954. On the contrary, the AL in East Pakistan and Bangladesh had staunch cadres of cohorts who later helped their party to surge back so dauntingly.
The top ML leaders (both East and West Pakistan), still wedded to the party’s old glory, made applauding pleas for their party which, however, did not inspire many in East Pakistan in the 1950s. A scion of the Urdu-speaking Nawab family in Dhaka, Khawaja Nazimuddin did not have a mainstream pedestal in East Pakistan politics. Nurul Amin, a veteran politician and an excellent gentleman in personal life, did not manipulate the 1954 election to stay in power.
The unpopularity baggage descended upon the ML since the police firing that killed a few civilians and students on the 21st of February 1952—the poignant incident became a noose around the ML’s political neck. Even at the height of the ML’s preliminary rule, the non-Bengali senior bureaucrats impeded the East Pakistan ML administration, according to various anecdotes. On the other hand, the post-1971 Bangladeshi bureaucracy—more politicized from the time of the independence struggle– augmented the AL supremacy under Mujib and later under his daughter Sheikh Hasina’s leadership. Because the ML discouraged new entrants to the party, the EPML deprived itself of innovative ideas that usually come with more “circulation of blood” in a wider party. Overall, the ML in Pakistan was weaker than what the AL later unveiled for itself in Bangladesh except for the party’s 21-year-long pause out of power from 1975 to 1996. Regionally, the ML enjoyed only brief sustainability in Pakistan compared to the post-1947 Indian National Congress Party’s (Congress) long staying power in India, which helped the big neighbor to establish its parliamentary institutions.
The 1958 martial law cast a pall of gloom on all the Pakistani political parties. Neither institutionalized parties nor competitive elections took their roots in East Pakistan and other parts of Pakistan during Ayub Khan’s rule. The ML’s fall in 1954 brought unstable cabinets until 1958, which did not add much towards stable democratic institutions in East Pakistan, and yet the four years of swapping regimes were the lively intervals for the politicians.
Did the AL in Bangladesh repeat the earlier EPML’s single-party dominance in East Pakistan? After the brutal crackdown of the Pakistan army in March 1971, elements of the AL leadership crossed borders and set up an exiled government in India with Tajuddin Ahmed as the prime minister. They sought New Delhi’s help and international sympathy in defeating the Pakistani soldiers and freeing East Pakistan. All institutions that derived their authority from Pakistan became invalid when the Pakistan army surrendered to the Indian military in December 1971. The AL’s maneuver thenceforth aimed at eliminating its potential challengers! In some way, the AL’s absolute hold since 1972 echoed the preceding post-1947 era when the ML was East Pakistan’s only ascendant party. The suspected radicals and the leftist leaders experienced a clampdown under the ML in East Pakistan, but in independent Bangladesh, the remnants of the ML, the Islamists, and their ideological allies encountered a political decapitation.
The AL’s single-party rule in the preliminary years of Bangladesh nevertheless, extracted a heavy price in the most violent coup of 1975, which threw the ruling AL/BKSAL into a stupor for many years. The post-1975 military-sponsored rules were a little comparable to the Ayub regime. When the parliamentary government returned to Bangladesh in 1991, working bipartisanship ran between the center-right BNP and center-left AL from 1991 to 2006. However, the years between 1991 and 2006 also divided Bangladesh by intense protests and non-stop demonstrations between the BNP, and the AL. When one party won the election, the other party vehemently rejected the outcomes—it was in a way indicative of the ML government’s cancellation of Shamsul Huq’s Tangail bye-election victory in 1949 on some flimsy pretexts.
Since the 2008 election, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina upended the non-partisan election supervision and the voting disputes nosedived into unyielding confrontations. Following two exceptionally controversial elections in 2014 and 2018, tarnished by boycotts, deaths, violence and heavy swindling, the AL again reached the height of its solo authority. Notwithstanding the counterparts between the parties in earlier East Pakistan and independent Bangladesh, they were less than identical—the following paragraphs cover a few of the divergences between the ML and the AL heritages.
The ML leaders, spirited by Pakistan’s creation in 1947 under M.A. Jinnah, unabashedly demanded absolute power along with unrelenting public loyalty. They also denied sufficient space to their opponents. Those who challenged the ML promptly garnered disgraceful branding as “anti-Pakistanis,” “unpatriotic,” and “Indian agents,” to cite a few such instances. The ML’s dominion lasted only for seven years, but the AL‘s single-party authority visited Bangladesh multiple times including its latest spin at this writing. India’s 1947 division brought numerous unintended consequences—– destabilization of government and civil society, enormous refugee problems, and sporadic communal violence that came in the wake of that seismic event. Yet, East Pakistan did not face massive lawlessness compared to what happened to the fleeing refugees from both sides of the Indian/West Pakistani borders. The ML’s initial dreads that East Pakistan was vulnerable to sabotage, economic collapse, and political instability made its government wary of the opposition. The AL had similar fears immediately after Bangladesh’s independence.
With the ML in shambles and no other strong opponents on the horizon after 1971, the AL had the added good fortune of Mujib’s unquestioned popularity. Bangladesh’s first AL government, riding the crest of its popularity, questioned all rivals from the right or left of the gamut. The unbridled campaign against the presumed dissenters, however, aimed at neutralizing the AL’s potential adversaries. The AL’s historical role in 1971 was the party’s “money in the bank” that promoted its upper hand at the critical juncture. Thousands more went to jail in youthful Bangladesh than what the ML did to its opponents in post-1947 East Pakistan. Most of such retributions occurred in Bangladesh then without the due process of law.
Both the old ML and the AL, at various times in history, humiliated their opponents with negative labelling. If you spoke or acted against the ML perceived it as treacherous acts while subsequently, the AL silenced its existent or presumed opponents with punitive actions by the police or the party cadres. After Bangladesh’s secession in 1971, the leftover Pakistani ML never reached its previous trail of power. But, on the other end, the AL slowly and steadily revived itself since 1981 though, for a while, it was a split entity. And then, it became the hard-nosed competitor to the BNP. Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina (Hasina), the AL leader, had won four elections since the AL first regained power in 1996. Her two elections in 2014 and 2018 were, nevertheless, too controversial for liberal democracy’s acceptable norms. Conversely, the ML never fully recovered since it severely lost East Pakistan’s 1954 election.
Featuring in her post-1996 cabinet, Hasina worked with like-minded groups and the leftist leaders who normally opposed the BNP for its center-right orientations and coalition with the Islamic parties. The BNP won, again, the 2001 general election. But later Hasina energetically prevailed in the next 2008 election, supervised by a military-supported caretaker government, not welcome by the BNP. After three electoral victories ( 2008, 2014, and 2018 in a row), though fiercely deplorable to her adversaries, Hasina reached the absolute height of power for herself and her party. Except for M.A. Jinnah’s towering leadership of the 1940s that briefly sustained in independent Pakistan until he passed away in 1948 and Mujib’s unqualified authority from 1972 to 1975, few other examples matched Hasina’s current grip in Bangladesh. Liaquat Ali Khan, Jinnah’s heir apparent, did not live for long after him; an assassin’s bullet took away his life in 1951. Jinnah’s sister Fatima Jinnah had a few minor stints in politics including her unsuccessful challenge to Ayub Khan in the 1965 presidential election. Rana Liaquat Ali Khan, widow of Liaquat Ali Khan had a few diplomatic and political turns after her husband died. But neither Jinnah nor Liaquat Ali Khan leave any strong hereditary sway on Pakistan’s Muslim League leadership as family links later transpired staunchly in independent Bangladesh. Both the AL and the BNP, on the contrary, transported their respective dynastic heritages, and the trend is likely to continue in the immediate future in Bangladesh.
Institutions usually tryst with convenient ideologies and historical slants for legitimizing their respective postures. The ML heightened the two-nation theory, Muslim identity, and Islam in the 1940s, and, disparately, the AL, later in 1971, starred Bengali nationalism and secular liberalism. When the AL first revisited power in 1996, it did not alter the prior military-backed constitutional amendment that acknowledged Islam as the state religion. It was an extraordinary addition to the Bangladeshi fundamental laws that otherwise, prided in non-religious Bengali nationalism. Much earlier in East Pakistan, the AL first swung to secularism by jettisoning the word— Muslim– from its original nomenclature in 1955. More on this point, the first AL cabinet in independent Bangladesh suspended the Islamic rituals from the important state functions. However, the party failed to assuage all by those blunt ideological shifts. In Bangladesh, the Muslim identity feelings staged an obvious comeback during the military-led regimes and through the center-right BNP’s spans in power. Bangladesh nationalism, an ideological infusion of both Muslim identity and Bengali nationalism emerged as the BNP’s alternative identity imagination to the AL’s familiar secular bearing. The ML was unpopular with non-Muslim minorities for endorsing the controversial two-nation theory. But then again, the AL’s linguistic nationalism too affronted the non-Bengali minorities and ubiquitous Islam and overwhelming Muslim identity in Bangladesh. The AL and its allies unhappily recognized that its lingo-national idioms did not necessarily produce a secular civil society at large.
Finally, there is an institutional lesson from the past and present parallels between earlier East Pakistan and contemporary Bangladesh: the parties, capitalizing on historical, populist, and dynastic claims, gravitate more towards single-party hegemony.
- Rashiduzzaman is a retired academic who writes from Glassboro, New Jersey, USA. This article pulls from his expected book: Parties and Politics in East Pakistan 1947-71: Political Inheritances of Bangladesh.