Amonth into Sheikh Hasina’s ignominious fall from the throne, political groups of different hues and colours are trying to fill the vacuum that her dictatorial rule has left behind in Bangladesh. During her 15-year in power, Hasina systematically destroyed the country’s political institutions.
When Muhammad Yunus, the country’s lone Nobel laureate, replaced her following a mass upsurge, Bangladesh didn’t have a functioning police force to speak of— a large number of its officers, handpicked by Hasina and her cronies, have either fled the country or are still in hiding.
With no effective monitoring of the law and order situation, there are signs that extremism and Islamic militancy is trying to raise its head in a country once plagued with large scale terrorist attacks and targeted killings of atheists, militant-atheists and an LGBTQ activist.
In this context, it’s significant that last month the Yunus government released on bail Jashimuddin Rahmani, a cleric who was trained in Darul Uloom Deoband, an Islamic seminary in India’s Uttar Pradesh. He was charged with the murder of a blogger in 2013 and was accused of being the spiritual head of Al-Qaeda associated Ansarullah Bangla Team, also known as Ansar Al Islam, which has been proscribed by Bangladesh, India, US and the UK.
But the case against him was so weak that back in 2015 he was given only five years’ imprisonment for abetting the murder. To make matters worse, Hasina’s prosecution team has never been able to effectively prove Rahmani’s connection with Ansarullah Bangla team, a transnational terror outfit thought to have operatives and sympathisers in India’s West Bengal and Assam.
In addition to the case for which he has already served his term, Rahmani faced four more charges. Before his release, all but one case filed in 2008 has been withdrawn by the Yunus government.
Culture of denial
Rahmani is a glaring example of how criminally inefficient Hasina’s law enforcement agencies were. The cases against him were filed under the country’s infamous Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Act, which Hasina mostly used against her political opponents. Absurd it may sound, Shahidul Alam, Bangladesh’s most celebrated photographer, has faced the same charges under the same law. Alam’s crime was that he gave an interview to Al Jazeera criticising Hasina.
Before his prison sentence, Rahmani was a little-known cleric with some popularity among fringe elements of the society. But the media attention given to him following his release has now made him look like a victim of Hasina’s autocratic rule, and he’s cashing in on the new-found limelight. Given that anti-India sentiment is running high in Bangladesh, thanks to the India’s shoddy and myopic foreign policy, who else would Rahmani target to grow fan-following?
In one of his first speeches given after his release, Rahmani warned India that if the country interferes with the internal affairs of Bangladesh or plays foul with him, “We will ask China to close down the Chicken’s Neck and tell Northeast India to fight for its independence. We will tell Kashmir to get ready for Independence. I urge Pakistan and Afghanistan to help Kashmir become independent.” He goes on to say that he will urge West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee to liberate her state from India.
Rahmani’s case is just a small part of a bigger problem that Bangladesh’s mainstream politicians have always been infected with— the culture of denial.
Islamic militancy in Bangladesh dates back to Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) leader Khaleda Zia’s final term in office between 2001-2006. In 2004, Siddique ul-Islam alias Bangla Bhai (Bengal’s Brother) started a Salafi vigilante group in some remote parts of the country and led a reign of terror by lynching members of different Maoist insurgent groups. When the newspapers were flooded with reports of these barbaric acts, Jamaat-e-Islami was a junior partner in Zia’s government. Jamaat leader Motiur Rahman Nizami, then Industries Minister, called Bangla Bhai a figment of media’s imagination—”Bangla Bhai was created by some newspapers as the government has found no existence of him.”
The BNP also kept denying until it rudely woke up to reality a year later. Meanwhile, Bangla Bhai joined hands with a cleric Abdur Rahman and formed an Al-Qaeda affiliated group named Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB). In 2005, the group simultaneously blasted at least 459 time bombs in 63 of 64 districts across the country. It was followed by strings of terror attacks that witnessed Bangladesh’s first suicide bombing. The BNP government arrested the top JMB leaders who were later executed.
However, the culture of denial continued. It went on even when Hasina’s Awami League came to power. In 2015, the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in its magazine Dabiq claimed responsibility for killing Italian aid worker Cesare Tavella and Japanese national Kunio Hoshi in Bangladesh’s capital. The Hasina government denied any ISIS involvement in the attacks. It invented the hands of a group called neo-JMB for the incidents.
A year later, Bangladesh faced the biggest terror attack in the country’s history when five ISIS terrorists killed 29 people and posted photos of the attack in the group’s media. The government again blamed it on the ‘neo-JMB’, because accepting the presence of ISIS would harm Bangladesh’s image abroad. Hasina’s Home Minister Asaduzzaman Kamal even questioned “Why will the ISIS come here?”
Yunus government must act
This culture of denial, in the end, allows problems to snowball into a crisis that governments sometimes find difficult, if not impossible, to handle. Yunus’ government should not think it can escape such a catastrophe.
Hizb ut-Tahrir, a banned Islamist outfit, is one of the many militant groups that is trying to fill the political vacuum that Hasina’s despotic rule and her departure has created. It has pasted posters all over Dhaka, asking the Army to hand over power to the group so that it can establish a caliphate in the country. Hizb ut-Tahrir is active in several Bangladeshi private universities and among members of the urban middle class. A few days ago, it distributed pamphlets in downtown Dhaka. The police were nowhere to be seen.
Asif Adnan, an alleged organiser of Al-Qaeda in Bangladesh, was granted bail in 2014. His lawyer AF Hassan Ariff is now Local Government, Rural Development and Co-operatives Adviser in Yunus’ cabinet. Al-Qaeda-led groups are active on social media, especially among members of the incel community. Any de-radicalisation campaign is yet to be seen. Shrines are demolished by mobs and no visible action has been taken either to protect these places or to punish the perpetrators.
In fact, the current Bangladesh government seems slow to react to events, let alone having the nose to smell the trouble. Take Utsab Mondal, a Hindu boy, who, according to Mohammad Tajul Islam, the Deputy Police Commissioner of Khulna (South), posted some objectionable comments on Islam on his social media handle. “Some madrassa students brought him to me,” he told The Print, “I went through his phone and found the allegations to be true.”
When Tajul was busy handling the situation, some more madrassa students turned up and it was decided that he would be tried as per the existing law. But by that time Facebook posts breaking the news of Mondal’s presence in Tajul’s office went viral, “A few thousands gathered around my office and they wanted to punish him.”
The Army and the Navy talked to the mob, who, Tajul said, “were determined that Mondal had to be handed over to them even if it’s for five minutes and were suggesting different forms of punishment.”
The crowd grew bigger. Army’s two Armoured Personnel Carriers were guarding the place, but hundreds from the mob managed to break the cordon and went into Tajul’s office to beat Mondal up. “They injured some Army-men, beat him (Mondal) up and left,” he said.
Mondal was gravely injured, so much so that the news of his death quickly appeared in different Bangladeshi and Indian media outlets. He’s alive, and a press release by Bangladesh Armed Forces press wing says that the process is underway to file a case against Mondal for hurting religious sentiments. He is probably going to be tried under the same law that was applied against Jashimuddin Rahmani and Shahidul Alam. The press release doesn’t talk about the kind of action the government plans to take against the mob that almost killed Mandal.
There’s no denying that it’s difficult to prevent a situation like this. But a quick action by the law enforcement agencies would’ve prevented such an incident. Mondal should have been taken away to a safe place right away. People take law in their own hands when they perceive State institutions as ineffective or lose faith in the judicial system itself. Yunus’ government has the herculean task of restoring that faith, and so far, it has failed miserably.
The median age of the population of Bangladesh is a little over 25. And these people have never been allowed to participate in the democratic process. Most of the 33-year-old Bangladeshis have never voted in an election because since 2010, the country has never witnessed a free and fair election. This is a recipe for disaster.
The honeymoon period of 30 days is about to be over for Yunus and his government, yet most of its members sometimes act as though they are on a paid vacation. The government should take effective action against the mob who appear to be calling the shots. Justice must be done. So far, the Yunus government is seen as weak when it comes to handling some of the burning issues of the day. A major terrorist attack will shrink the political acceptability that he enjoys across Bangladesh’s highly charged and polarised political landscape. A dysfunctional State is more dangerous than dysfunctional democracy.
Ahmede Hussain is a Bangladeshi writer and journalist. He is the editor of The New Anthem: The Subcontinent in Its Own Words (Tranquebar Press; Delhi). He has just finished writing his first novel. He tweets @ahmedehussain. Views are personal.
source : theprint