Gowhar Geelani*
The situation has turned upside down in Bangladesh. Until 5 August 2024, Sheikh Hasina Wajed was perhaps the country’s most powerful individual. Hasina was Dhaka. Dhaka was Hasina. She no longer occupies the highest seat of power and is feeling disempowered. That is how the wheel of fortune turns. Simply put, Hasina’s currency in ‘Sonar Bangla’ is no longer valid.
A short history lesson: Every authoritarian or dictator has a sell-by date. Tyranny in any form does not last forever. No matter how “the night of suffering lengthens”, as Faiz Ahmad Faiz put it, “magar shaam hi to hai (but it’s just a night, that’s all)”.
In this piece, I won’t delve deeper into Faiz’s other poem titled “Dhaka se Wapsi Par” which he wrote in 1974 on his return from Dhaka, but will mention this verse “Kab nazar main aayegi bedaagh sabze ki bahaar, khoon ke dhabbe dhulenge kitni barsaatou’n ke baad (When will we ever be able to observe the spotless spring/ how many spells of rain will it take to wash off the blood stains)”.
Back to 2024: Bangladesh’s International Crimes Tribunal has initiated an investigation into former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and nine others, accusing them of ‘genocide and crimes against humanity’ during the recent youth-led revolt and mass agitation that resulted in the death of about 400 persons, mostly young students.
To this effect, a formal complaint has been filed against Hasina, her party Awami League’s General Secretary Obaidul Quader, former Home Minister Asaduzzaman Kamal, and other leading politicians bearing allegiance to the previous setup. Moreover, Bangladesh ambassadors in key countries appointed by the Hasina-led regime have been recalled.
How did this happen?
Live streamed images of determined youthful protesters in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, trying to flatten statues of ‘Bangabandhu’ Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, once a towering personality of the country’s political memoirs, are defining in more ways than one. Such images not only encapsulate the magnitude of the latest crisis that Bangladesh is dealing with but also give us a sense of Dhaka’s altered political landscape and the direction it is likely to follow in due course.
Not So ‘August’
In some way, August has been a month of political upheavals in Bangladesh’s 53-year-old history.
Only four years after Bangladesh became a sovereign nation state, the country’s first president Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was assassinated in a military coup on 15 August 1975 at his home in Dhaka’s Dhanmondi along with 10 other family members. Rahman’s two daughters – Sheikh Hasina Wajed and her younger sibling Sheikh Rehana – survived as both were luckily on a visit to Germany at the time.
After a gap of forty-nine years since her father’s assassination, Hasina as former prime minister of Bangladesh was forced to leave Dhaka on 5 August 2024 amid scenes of disorder and uncertainty. Facing a major crisis in her political career, she succumbed under immense pressure from the angry protesters and boarded a military aircraft to run away and land in Delhi. Her decision to escape to Delhi is telling in myriad ways.
The gravity of the situation was such that Obaidul Hassan and Professor Maksud Kamal were also forced to offer their resignations as the country’s Chief Justice and Vice Chancellor of Dhaka University respectively. Young protesters appear on a mission to dismantle the old structures and symbols considered loyal to the Awami League, Sheikh Hasina or even New Delhi.
Protesters tearing down a statue of the perceived liberator Bangabandhu (friend of the Bengal) Sheikh Mujibur Rehman, setting fire to his Dhanmondi home, vandalising statue of Pakistan Army’s 1971 surrender, alleged attacks on properties and religious places of minority community in parts of Bangladesh’s rural geography, vandalising the Awami League party headquarters and Hasina’s spectacular exit are warning signs for Delhi.
Why is it so?
Many in Bangladesh suspect Delhi’s covert role in the persecution of Hasina’s political rivals, civil society coalitions and media. They viewed Hasina’s administration as ‘authoritarian’ and ‘pro-India’. That is perhaps why the anti-India sentiment is running deep in Bangladesh at the moment. Recently, an “India Out” campaign gathered steam in Bangladesh and it was similar to another such drive in the neighbouring Maldives.
Delhi is finding itself on the wrong side of Bangladesh’s history.
In the 13-day war with Pakistan in East Pakistan, Delhi used military, muscle, money, diplomacy, strategy and politics to get a favourable result. Before and after the war, Indira Gandhi was taking all critical decisions in which she was being assisted by a formidable think-tank of strategic consultants.
Who were Indira’s advisers and what were they called?
The ‘Kashmir Mafia’
In the lower house of India’s Parliament also called Lok Sabha, Indira delivered a fiery speech on 27 March 1971: “It is not merely a suppression of a movement but it is meeting an unarmed people with tanks. We are fully alive to the situation and we shall keep constantly in touch with what is happening and what we need to do. We must not take merely a theoretical view. At the same time, we have to follow proper international norms.”
Indira Gandhi took a personal interest in the dismemberment of East Pakistan. Her aunt, Vijay Lakshmi Pandit, once referred to her as “the only man in her cabinet”.
Three Kashmiri Brahmins or ‘Pandits’ (considered upper caste in Hindu social hierarchy) namely Parmeshwar Narayan Haksar, the principal secretary to Indira Gandhi; Rameshwar Nath Kao, the first chief of India’s external spy agency, the Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW); and Durga Prasad Dhar, India’s former ambassador to the erstwhile Soviet Union, wielded more power and influence than Indira’s cabinet colleagues. The trio was dubbed the “Kashmir Mafia” and it played a key role in the Bangladeshi secessionist movement. In other words, the self-styled ‘Dhar-Kaul-Kao Kashmiri Mafia’.
In 2012, Vijay Dhar, son of D P Dhar, was invited to Dhaka to receive the honour on behalf of his late father from then Bangladesh president Zillur Rehman. The Hasina-led Bangladesh government honoured D P Dhar posthumously for his “special role” in the country’s liberation struggle. The citation honouring D P Dhar read: “Sree Durga Prasad Dhar is conferred with the Liberation War Friendship Honour in recognition of his pioneering role in concluding the 1971 Indo-Soviet Friendship Treaty, mobilising international support in favour of Bangladesh and playing a special role in support of the Liberation War.”
How did Delhi plan the unthinkable?
The Mukti Bahini
It is no secret that the erstwhile East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) gained independence in 1971 with New Delhi’s political, diplomatic, military and financial assistance. The role played by India’s first woman prime minister Indira Gandhi in the creation of Bangladesh has been well chronicled. At the time, India’s Border Security Force (BSF) trained the Mukti Bahini or the ‘Liberation Army’ to fight the Pakistani soldiers stationed in former East Pakistan. The Bengali rebels (Mukti Bahini) were young; some of whom according to American journalist and then Delhi correspondent of the New York Times late Sydney Schanberg’s account were “as young as ten”.
In his exhaustive book, The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide, Gary J. Bass, a noted professor of politics, recorded how Indira Gandhi’s government “escalated its backing for the Bengali uprising”. “The Indian Army had directed orders to help the rebels, involving India’s top generals. India secretly helped the insurgents buy weapons and ammunition,” Bass wrote in a chapter titled The Mukti Bahini.
Pakistani Army inflicted a lot of damage on its reputation by indulging in mass killings, loot, arson and even rapes of hundreds of Bangladeshi women.
Delhi got seriously engaged in the liberation struggle soon after the appalling military crackdown in East Pakistan. An estimated 300,000 Bengalis lost their lives in horrific actions by the Pakistani soldiers. Such terrible actions led to the departure of about a million people from East Pakistan to India during the heightened conflict.
What is the latest controversy?
Contentious Quota
Sheikh Hasina’s decision to grant a 30 percent reservation for grandchildren of the country’s ‘freedom fighters’ in government jobs may have been the latest trigger, but rage against the Awami League’s authoritarian style of functioning had been brewing for quite some time now. Previously, when Hasina won a contentious second term, the BNP boycotted the electoral process.
In 2013, the Hasina-led government cancelled the registration of JeI following the court ruling. The Islami Chhatra Shibir, a powerful student wing of JeI, faced the music. The JeI has not been allowed to participate in national elections since 2013.
The rapid trials and questionable convictions, depicted as kangaroo-style courts by global human rights watchdogs, resulted in the executions of half a dozen JeI members. These executions further angered sections of the population in Bangladesh. In 2016, Bangladesh’s War Crimes Tribunal under Hasina’s pressure ordered the execution of key JeI leader Motiur Rehman Nizami for alleged crimes against humanity committed during the country’s liberation war in the early 1970s.
From the perspective of the Awami League-led regime, JeI members were ‘razakar’ (collaborators or volunteers) of the Pakistan Army when Mujibur Rahman led the movement based on distinct Bengali culture and language.
Hasina is accused of undermining the sanctity of the electoral process and denying a level playing field to her opponents to contest elections. She has alienated the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), her main political adversary, and Jama’at-e-Islami, Bangladesh (JeI), an influential socio-religious and political outfit, its student wing, and civil society groups and media.
Ominous Signs
Bangladesh is witnessing an extraordinary political churning which has far-reaching implications for the country and the entire South Asian region, particularly India.
Hasina’s prolonged stay in India gives her political rivals a readymade argument that the Bangladesh Awami League leader was an “India loyalist” as perceived. It won’t be easy for Delhi to build new bridges and cultivate a brand new relationship with the BNP, a party founded in the late 1970s by the late Bangladesh President Ziaur Rehman.
New Delhi can least afford a hostile or unstable neighbour on its eastern border. One of the many concerns for Delhi is to avoid the possibility of Northeastern rebels finding a sanctuary in Bangladesh or the influx of Bangladeshi immigrants into India while crossing the delicate border. Experts on South Asian affairs believe that the influx of more Bangladeshis into Assam and West Bengal will trigger conflict while anti-India elements present in Bangladesh would not mind exploiting the situation to their advantage.
China’s Clout
Political commentators liken Hasina’s flight to the dramatic departure of Gotabaya Rajapaksa in Sri Lanka about two years ago. In 2021, Afghanistan President Ashraf Ghani also escaped as the Taliban captured Kabul.
With the possibility of the BNP returning to power in Bangladesh, China and Pakistan will try to exploit the current situation and strengthen their relationship with the new Bangladeshi government. Beijing is sitting pretty as it is Bangladesh’s largest trading partner with Chinese investments in the country touching $ 3.2 billion by 2023. China is involved in massive infrastructure development, including motor highways, power stations and railway projects. China’s extended role in Bangladesh will have a bearing on Dhaka’s relationship with Delhi.
Even though Bangladesh understands the benefits of trade with New Delhi, it cannot sideline China. There is every possibility of resumption of trade ties between Dhaka and Delhi. Bangladesh will try to strike a fine balance to accommodate the economic interests of the two regional players – Beijing and Delhi.
Hope
The path ahead for the advisory council of the interim government headed by micro-finance pioneer and Nobel laureate Professor Dr Muhammad Yunus is to restore calm, re-establish law and order, and pave the way for free and fair general elections as soon as possible. Additionally, there is an urgent need to provide justice to all victims and survivors of the recent violence, revive the sluggish economy, curb inflation, and maintain cordial relationships with key neighbours.
*Gowhar Geelani is a Kashmiri writer and journalist. He is the author of “Kashmir: Rage and Reason“, and Chevening Fellow.
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