Bangladesh: Divided Against Itself

 IT WOULD NOT BE NEEDLESSLY DISPARAGING OF THE present interim government of Bangladesh that came to power follow­ing an orchestrated insurrection on August 5, 2024 to suggest that the outcome of former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s trial before a so-called international court in Dhaka was known even before the proceed­ings began. It would also be an acknowledgement of reality—and not an act of mockery—to state that it is extremely unlikely that the present dispensation in Dhaka has the political muscle or determination to implement the farcical death penalty awarded in absentia to the former prime minister. The verdict will, at best, be a convenient handle to prevent Hasina from returning to her country from exile before the Nobel Prize-winning octogenarian usurper packs his bags and, in the company of the other notables who serve as the regime’s advisers, leaves Dhaka airport for the country that will become their place of exile.

For a country that was born in spectacular savagery 54 years ago, Bangladesh has been remarkably unsuccessful in transcending the circumstances of its formation. Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the charismatic leader who led the way in dismantling the Pakistan he had himself helped create, was gunned down—along with his wife and sons—on the staircase of his own residence at 32 Dhanmondi in Dhaka. Today, only that staircase remains amid the rubble of the place that was once the symbol of the liberation war. Like nearly all the other monuments of the 1971 war, the house was gutted on August 6 last year by a frenzied mob and bulldozed into rubble exactly six months later in the presence of armed police­men and soldiers of the state. On the day the somewhat incoherent judge read out Hasina’s death sentence amid thunderous cheering from the rabble in the courtroom, another lot of ‘students’ sought to finish the job of obliterating all memories of the father of the nation. Bangabandhu’s mazhar is still intact in his village in Gopalganj district on the other side of the mighty Padma river. Its sanctity has been preserved thanks to the dogged opposition of the local people to the new vandals.

Since a group of disaffected army officers gunned down Sheikh Mujib in the early hours of August 15, 1975, and installed a ramshackle government led by Khondaker Mostaq Ahmad, a reluctant Awami League leader who had attempted to cut a deal with the Pakistan authorities with US assistance in 1971, Bangladesh has been witnessing a tug-of-war between conflicting impulses.

Nominally, with the surrender of the Pakistani forces led by Lt General AAK Niazi to India’s Lt General JS Aurora on Decem­ber 16, 1971 in Dhaka, the vivisection of the Pakistan created by Muhammad Ali Jinnah was complete. On that day, the sup­pressed regional impulses of the local Muslims had prevailed over the attempt by the West Pakistani establishment—both civilian and military—to create an Urdu-speaking copy of itself on the flatlands of Bengal. There had always been two distinct Muslim societies in existence in undivided Bengal. The first stemmed from the decadent court culture of the Mughal satraps in Murshidabad and Dhaka—bolstered subsequently by the exiled court of the Nawab of Awadh in Kolkata. The other was the rustic culture of the Muslim peasantry of eastern Bengal. The Muslim League that gave Jinnah his East Pakistan was a blend of both these currents: Khawaja Nazimuddin, a scion of the Nawab of Dhaka, representing what can loosely be called the Mughal wing, and AK Fazlul Huq representing the more authentic, Bengali-speaking majority.

After the election of 1954 which was won quite decisively by a coalition led by Fazlul Huq, the Muslim League lost its political relevance in the eastern wing of Pakistan. However, despite its marginalisation, it retained a tenuous toehold on the political margins, its strength supplemented by the Urdu-speaking Mus­lims from Bihar who were employed in the jute mills, railways, and the ports. In the election of 1970 that resulted in a landslide win for the Awami League led by Mujib, the pro-Pakistan parties could muster around 25 per cent of the vote and just one seat in the National Assembly.

The old Muslim League and the Jamaat-e-Islami always strug­gled to find a place for themselves in the new Bangladesh. Their position appeared to have been permanently compromised by association with the pro-Pakistan Razakars—vigilante squads that were established to weed out pro-liberation supporters from April to December 1971. The Razakars—an omnibus term that also incorporated the fanatical Al Badr and Al Shams which systematically targeted Bangladeshi intellectuals—wallowed in their ignominy after liberation. It was Mujib’s misplaced generosity that declared an amnesty in 1973 and allowed these elements back into society and public life.

AFTER THE FORMATION of Bangladesh, the pro- Pakistan elements did not persist with any unrealistic scheme of a loose confederation with Pakistan. Instead, all their energies were focused on the gradual Islamisation of Bangladeshi society and state. They found allies in General Ziaur Rahman and the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) and General HM Ershad. Both these military rulers, who sub­sequently legitimised their positions through elections, needed a political constituency that could act as a counterweight to the liberal Awami League. Perhaps unwittingly, Ziaur Rahman ful­filled another political function: he split the ranks of Bangla­deshi nationalism and injected the anti-Awami League group with a heady dose of Islamism. With its alliance with the Jamaat, BNP began the process of Razakar rehabilitation. The Jamaat has never looked back and its relationship with mainstream political forces gave it the resilience to be able to overcome the trial and punishment of its old leadership by the Hasina govern­ment after 2009.

The crafty, behind-the-scenes role of the Jamaat-controlled Chhatra Shibir in the student’s movement that led to the ouster of the Awami League has been documented, but patchily. The Jamaat’s role was important for seveal reasons.

First, the Jamaat had a vast network of student supporters in the madrasas and the private universities in and around Dhaka. This reserve army of Islamists could be called out at short notice to replenish the small group of agitators who were being con­trolled from the US Embassy.

Second, the Jamaat helped replenish and even distribute the funding provided to the anti-Hasina agitation by Europe and US-based bodies. When official US records see the light of day, they will undoubtedly indicate that the role of the Biden admin­istration was no less than the Anglo-American help to the forces that overthrew the Mohammad Mosaddegh government and restored the Shah in Iran in 1953.

Finally, the Jamaat unquestionably gave the student move­ment of 2024 a marked anti-liberation thrust. It was neither coincidence nor mindless acts of vandalism that led to ram­paging mobs destroying all the monuments commemorating the Mukti Bahini and the war of liberation in the aftermath of Hasina’s departure from Dhaka. Although the anti-1971 pen­dulum hasn’t swung totally to the far reaches of society, it has shaped the mood in two distinct ways. There is, of course, an emerging denial of the positive role of India in the creation of Bangladesh. Instead, the departure of the top rung of the Awami League to India after the August coup has been taken as confir­mation of Bangladesh having been transformed into a client state of New Delhi under Hasina. It was even suggested that there were some 26 lakh undocumented Indians working in important positions in Bangladesh. So far, despite Yunus being at the helm for over 15 months, none of them has been detected.

The Jamaat has been instrumental in ensuring the com­plete rehabilitation of Pakistan in Bangladesh. Today, there is not merely an unending traffic of Pakistani army and intelli­gence personnel to Bangladesh, sometimes for missions that are inimical to India’s national security. These official exchanges are supplemented by the visits of Pakistani clerics and politi­cal leaders to Bangladesh. Although it is unlikely that the old confederation scheme will be revived, Bangladesh has become a new staging post of Pakistan in its never-ending bid to exact revenge for the humiliation it suffered in 1971.

In the coming months, there will be a frenzied bid by the Islamists to change the constitution and political structures of Bangladesh and ensure the permanent exclusion of the Awami League from any meaningful role in the governance of the coun­try. It is, of course, for Sheikh Hasina’s supporters to resist this exclusion. If necessary, it may even consider teaming up with that section of BNP that is uneasy with the proposed redefinition of nationhood by the brainless and corrupt student leadership and its Jamaat puppet masters. The proposed election in Febru­ary is not merely to legitimise a post-Hasina dispensation; it is an attempt to turn Bangladesh upside down.

The government in India must seriously ponder the wisdom of allowing the re-creation of a Bengali-speaking quasi-Pakistan on its eastern borders to go completely unchallenged. The forces unleashed in Bangladesh could seriously affect the peace, stabil­ity, and even integrity of West Bengal. It is in India’s national interest to ensure the departure of the interlopers next door.