Tagore a pariah? Bangladesh’s rapid descent proves Hasina was the only secular bulwark against Islamist radicalism

It has been over a month since Sheikh Hasina was ousted through a mass uprising. The former Bangladesh prime minister had become quite unpopular. She was routinely called a ‘dictator’ by an increasingly growing number of people, critics, and the Opposition, and the United States threw its considerable weight to bolster these voices.

Hasina, who had won a straight fourth term in January in prime ministerial elections boycotted by the chief Opposition party BNP, ruled with a strong hand. She even used lethal force to tamp down on insurgency. In the end she ran out of options and time once the army refused to back her.

There is little doubt that Hasina was an autocratic ruler. There have been credible allegations against her of illegal detention of political rivals, and the dreaded RAB (rapid action battalion) paramilitary force was accused of several human rights abuses, enforced disappearances and even extrajudicial killings.

The United States, that fervently believes in the virtues of liberal democracy and envisages itself as a key crusader for democracy and the keeper of the liberal international order, focused a lot of attention on the Hasina government. It gave rise to an interesting paradox.

Even Hasina’s staunchest critic would agree that the former prime minister turned around Bangladesh’s broken economy and ushered in unprecedented economic growth. She had a vision document of making Bangladesh a developed nation by 2041. Hasina brought political stability, policy predictability, acted as a conduit of trade between India and Southeast Asia and successfully balanced the country’s relationship between India and China to make Bangladesh into a middle-income economy. She turned Bangladesh into a global garment hub, and textile imports powered the economy while being led by millions of female workers until Covid played havoc.

In 2019, World Economic Forum called Hasina the “secret of Bangladesh’s economic success” and pointed out that it is the fastest-growing economy in the Asia-Pacific region, eclipsing China, Vietnam and India and way head in many socio-economic indicators.

Interestingly, the US, that believes peace and prosperity depend on the maintenance of liberal international order and actively evangelises democracy around the globe, felt that Opposition space is getting squeezed in Bangladesh and proceeded to take a series of steps.

Washington asked Hasina last year to resign and hand over the power to a caretaker government led by the Speaker that will hold “free and fair elections”.

When Hasina refused to budge, the US slapped sanctions on key Awami League figures, its envoy to Dhaka, Peter Haas, effectively adopted the role of a de facto leader of the Opposition, installing the US as an actor in Bangladesh’s domestic politics, and the State Department, during a briefing in October last year, threatened to “take actions if necessary to support democracy in Bangladesh.”

In fact, the Joe Biden administration refused to congratulate Hasina on her fourth straight term as prime minister in January, observing that “that these elections were not free or fair and we regret that not all parties participated.”

Now that Hasina has gone after the August revolution, the US was quick to announce that it was “ready to work with the interim government, as it charts a democratic future for the people of Bangladesh”, and is now dispatching Donald Lu, the assistant secretary for South Asia, to Dhaka on September 14 and 15. Lu will launch economic talks with the interim government to help the beleaguered country boost its economy.

Bangladesh, once a standout economic performer under Hasina, now seeks $8 billion worth of funding from global lending institutions. Having thrown its weight behind the Yunus regime, Washington is naturally keen to bail out Dhaka.

Since Hasina’s departure, Bangladesh has evidently become more democratic. The regime change has earned Washington’s approval. Western media and west-based Bangladeshi academics are all praises for August revolution that has ushered in a democratic revival.

And what has been the result of this revival? A steep turn to Islamist radicalism. Jamaat, the Islamist outfit, wants Bangladesh to change its national anthem. Written by Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore, Bengal’s greatest poet, literary genius and humanist whose legacy spans both sides of Bengal, the anthem has suddenly fallen foul of Islamists.

The interim government’s “religious affairs adviser” Khalid Hossain, an Islamic scholar, is of the opinion that Bangladesh’s national anthem, ‘ Amar Sonar Bangla,’ penned by Tagore, “has been imposed by India.”

Any immediate changes have reportedly been ruled out but the country that had gained its independence through Bhasha Andolan, rejecting West Pakistan’s diktat of Urdu imposition and latching on to Tagore as the supreme expression of an identity based on Bangla language and Bengali culture, and whose Mukti Juddho (liberation war) leant heavily on the metaphor and grammar of Bengali literary and cultural tradition as expressed through Tagore, now suddenly finds its tallest literary figure and cultural icon too Hindu and too Indian.

Tagore remains germane and intrinsic to Bangladesh’s national identity as a Bangla-desh (a land for Bengalis). To even attempt to erase his legacy and claim that he was too Indian and his language was too Sanskritised shows how far down the Islamist radicalism route Bangladesh has travelled since Hasina’s ouster, and conversely proves the point that Hasina was the only secular figure that stood between Bangladesh and its descent into Islamist radicalism.

The signs are everywhere.

Utshob Mondal, a young Hindu college student, was thrashed almost to the point of death by a thousand-strong irate mob of Islamists, including madarsa students, inside a police station in Khulna, and according to German outlet DW Bangla, in presence of cops, armed and naval forces. The mob relented only when Mondal’s body turned limp, thinking him to be dead, and later, a critically injured Mondal was wrapped in polythene and taken out of the police station in an army vehicle under tight security while an agitated crowd still tried to block the vehicle.

Since the overthrowing of Hasina, Hindu minorities have come under vicious attack from rabid Islamists while the Yunus regime looks the other way or remains in denial. Hindus, fearful for their lives, are thronging the Indian border in desperate attempts to escape violence and persecution.

Many atrocities in the early days of chaos have gone unreported amid lawlessness and complete lack of law enforcement, but conservative estimates put such attacks against Hindu minorities, their temples, business establishments and houses at over 200 incidents leading even  Amnesty International to call for protection of minorities while the Yunus government claims that most reports are “fake”.

Islamist radicals are demanding banning of music at shrines as ‘ Bidat’ (against Islam), Hindu teachers are being forced to resign en masse from schools and colleges (latest figures put the number at 49 while there’s even a call to change the Bangladesh flag since it was designed by Narain Das, a Hindu.

One of the first acts of the Yunus government was to lift the ban on Jamaat, the party that resisted independence from Pakistan and in cahoots with Pakistan army, took active part in mass rapes, killings and atrocities mostly against Hindus in 1971. The Razakars and Pakistan army in 1971 carried out ethnic cleansing of Bengali-speaking people, mostly Hindus, killing over 4 million and raping over 2 million women.

Hasina had banned Jamaat as a “militant and terrorist” organization, and her ouster led to an orgy of violence against members and workers of Awami League, that also included a number of Hindus. The Yunus government has also released from prison Jashimuddin Rahmani, the chief of the Ansarullah Bangla Team, an Al-Qaeda-affiliated terrorist outfit, that was the mastermind behind killing of a number of atheist and secular bloggers. The organization was banned by Hasina in 2016.

Hasina may have been an authoritarian figure, but her obligation towards preserving the secular fabric of Bangladesh, and her actions against rabid Islamists, while also being mindful of India’s security concerns (given the fact that many of these outfits such as ABT were active in India’s northeastern states), made her India’s natural ally.

It raises the question whether secularism in Bangladesh is elite enterprise, unsupported by the masses. If the riffraff are Islamists, or if moderate Muslims are overshadowed by the more rabid elements in society, a political system that is freer will inevitably reflect the will of the people. And that is exactly what we are witnessing in Bangladesh. With Hasina’s departure, the secular ethos that kept the fundamentalists and jihadists is gone and the result is a rapid descent towards a more Islamist polity. The Bhasha Andolan has come full circle.

source : firstpost