Bangladesh: Don’t Write Off the Secular Nationalists

 THE PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC of Bangladesh took yet one more step into an uncertain future through the International Crimes Tribunal (ICT) passing a sentence of death on former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and former Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan Kamal. The judgment, delivered on Monday, November 17, has predictably led to widespread criticism given the public perception, a justified one, that due process was not followed. For one thing, the ICT had been taken over, in the aftermath of the political change of August 5, 2024, by a group known to be close to the Jamaat-e-Islami, a party which openly opposed Bangladesh’s independence in 1971. For another, the reconfiguration of the tribunal was a consequence of the mob violence which forced Sheikh Hasina and her government from power 15 months ago. The ICT, which in the period of the Awami League government between 2009 and 2024 tried, convicted and sent a number of the 1971 collaborators of the occupation Pakistan army to the gallows, was weaponised by the Muhammad Yunus regime to convict Sheikh Hasina.

The former prime minister and her followers as well as human rights activists have been critical of the process, arguing that those who came to be associated with the ICT had pub­licly demonstrated a bias against Sheikh Hasina through their public pronouncements. In a situation where the media has remained suppressed in Bangladesh—it has been prevented from voicing any criticism of the Yunus regime, besides being warned not to carry any statement by the former prime minister—the case remains controversial. In such circumstances, the manner in which the trial was conducted raised questions that underscore the failings of the regime in ensuring an independent working of the ICT. Sheikh Hasina, who refused to acknowledge the legality of the proceedings, was tried in absentia as she has been staying in New Delhi since the army escorted her to the Indian capital on the day her government fell in Dhaka. The Yunus regime, which lacks a constitutional basis despite assertions by its supporters that it operates by what is a vague interpretation of an article of the constitution, had the tribunal appoint a lawyer to conduct her defence. The lawyer was pictured laughing on November 17 even as he told the media that he had been pained that his efforts to defend his client had not succeeded.

It was a bizarre situation which seized Dhaka on the day the ICT delivered its verdict. The Jamaat welcomed the verdict. In Kishore­ganj, the ancestral home of the elderly former president of Bangladesh, Mohammad Abdul Hamid, was vandalised by anti-Awami League elements. In Dhaka, elements intent on destroying whatever remains of the home of Bangladesh’s founder Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman turned up in Dhanmondi but were beaten back by the police. Over the past 15 months, a systematic campaign has gone into destroying not only Mujib’s home but every symbol of the nation’s War of Liberation in 1971. What has shocked the country is the silence of Muhammad Yunus and his advisers on the violence that has been applied to rid Bangladesh of all manifestations of the history which went into its creation through a nine-month war 54 years ago. None of the men and women who today purport to govern Bangladesh ever condemned the destruction of history since August 2024.

The judgment in the case against Sheikh Hasina, who was charged with having com­mitted crimes against humanity, might well be considered the climax of everything that has been happening in Bangladesh since her nearly 16-year rule drew to a close. It might be argued that the country is caught in an existential crisis today, with individuals and political parties either opposed to the liberation or having reservations about Bangla­desh’s foundational principles (read the Jamaat-e-Islami and the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, BNP, here) dominating the political space in the forced absence of the Awami League. The former ruling party, having been put under a ban (though Yunus on his trips abroad but not at home has claimed there has been no ban), is under escalating levels of pressure since August 2024. Its offices have been destroyed all over the country; its grassroots activists have been killed or are on the run. Prisons hold hundreds of Awami League members, including former ministers and lawmakers, most of whom have been clamped with murder charges. Journalists, human rights activists, lawyers, individuals who have either been pro-Awami League or upholding the spirit of the War of Libera­tion, have languished in jail with no recourse to legal aid. Besides, no inquiry has been conducted into the deaths of scores of police­men, all of whom were lynched following the fall of the Hasina government. Media houses were seized by mobs who demanded that journalists who in their view were supporters of Awami League ‘fascism’ be dismissed. Many media organisations complied. The dismissed journalists were replaced by individuals Yunus’ interim regime as well as the mobs are comfortable with.

Where does Bangladesh go from here? The regime has promised general elections and also a referendum on a so-called July Charter for February next year but is yet to present a clear roadmap. Elections ought to have been the sole priority but when the regime decided commissions whose reports have not had much traction and can or will be considered only by an elected parliament. When it decided that the constitution called for reforms, a responsibility only an elected parliament can carry out, it brought in a Bangla­deshi-American whose questionable pronouncements on the subject evoked criticism as well as disbelief.

FIFTEEN MONTHS AFTER it took charge, the Yunus government conveys the disturbing thought that it is in office but not in power. It has been unable to enforce law and order, which has progressively been sliding. News reports speak of the non-recovery of arms looted from police stations by rioters in the days and weeks following August 5, 2024. Worse, as the crisis worsened for the Awami League in the final days of July last year, prison breaks saw scores of lawless elements, including radical Islamists who had either been convicted or awaiting trial, make good their escape. These escapees have remained at large, a factor which has significantly contributed to the insecurity citizens have felt in the last 15 months.

Much though the Yunus regime might argue that it is on top of things, the fact is that with Yunus himself and his advisers not having administered a government earlier, the interim admin­istration is clearly at sea. The state of the economy offers little comfort to citizens whose forays into kitchen markets reveal increasing impoverishment. The job market is shrinking, with scores of garment factories closing down and their workers, most of whom are women struggling to make ends meet for their families, suddenly without any source of earnings. On the street, rickshaw pullers who peddle their three-wheelers all day, loudly complain that where in the Awami League days they could earn no less than 1,500 taka per day, they now confront a condition where they can hardly scrape together a paltry 500 taka on any given day. In education, schools, colleges and universities have all been prey to violence.

For Bangladesh, the present is symbolic of a dark uncertainty. The future is yet to hint at an opening unto light. But let no one be under any illusion that the pass in which the country finds itself today is a sad commentary on its wobbly ride since it emerged as a sovereign state 54 years ago. If the past is any guide to the future, one cannot but take into account all the pitfalls the nation is up against today. Of course, with the Sheikh Hasina government in charge, Bangladesh showed promise in such consequential areas as the economy. Infrastructure building was remarkable and so was the willingness of citizens to be satisfied with the economy. Remittances from Bangla­deshis employed in the Middle East and elsewhere were a major contributor to the national economy.

One cannot, though, ignore the many turns history has taken in Bangladesh. Three years after libera­tion, a radical change was brought about in politics when the parliamentary form of government was replaced by a presiden­tial system through the fourth amendment to the constitution in January 1975. The move set in place a single-party state structure through what came to be known as the Bangladesh Krishak Sramik Awami League (BAKSAL). Only months later, in a coun­try constituted as a departure from the ugly legacy of coups d’etat and absence of democracy in pre-1971 Pakistan, it was precisely the same legacy which seized the country when Mujibur Rahman was assassinated along with most of his family in August 1975. A clutch of majors and colonels, led by Khondokar Mostaq Ahmed, a long-time Mujib associate and at the time min­ister for commerce in his cabinet, commandeered the state.

The assassinations of August 1975 were a precursor to the increasing violence that would accompany struggles for power. Barely three months after Bangabandhu’s assassination, four of the leading figures of the 1971 Bangladesh government, popu­larly known as the Mujibnagar government, were murdered in jail. Within days of that macabre incident, three senior military officers, all freedom fighters and instrumental in forcing the Mostaq cabal from power, were done to death by renegade soldiers. Power slipped into the hands of General Ziaur Rahman who swiftly moved to have the Collaborators Act put in place by the Mujib government repealed by President Abu Sadat Moham­mad Sayem in December 1975. Zia seized the presidency in April 1977 and through elections held in early 1979 had the notorious indemnity ordinance, providing legal protection to Mujib’s assas­sins, incorporated in the fifth amendment to the constitution.

General Zia was assassinated in May 1981. In March 1982, Bangladesh had another military regime foisted on it through the coup d’etat by General Hussain Muhammad Ershad, the army chief, against the elected government of President Abdus Sattar. Ershad was forced from power in December 1990 in a mass movement considered a fresh opening for a return to unfettered democracy. Or at least that was the expectation. For the first time, a caretaker administration headed by Justice Shahabuddin Ahmed, chief justice of the Supreme Court, organised parlia­mentary elections in February 1991. The elections brought BNP, at that point led by Begum Khaleda Zia, widow of General Zia, the founder of the party, to power. The Awami League, headed by Sheikh Hasina, daughter of Mujibur Rahman, took its place in parliament, the Jatiya Sangsad, as the opposition. Politics, as citizens saw it, was on its way to restoring democracy in its ideal form.

And then Bangladesh hit a roadblock in 1994 when a by-election in Magura was rigged by the ruling BNP. It was a moment when the opposition Awami League cried foul and by the time the next election came around it successfully compelled BNP to agree to a restoration of the caretaker government. In the elections held in June 1996, the Awami League returned to power 21 years after the coup of 1975. In subsequent elections, the vote was supervised by caretaker regimes—in 2001 and 2008. In 2011, however, the Awami League, which had lost the elections of 2001 but was returned to power with a huge majority in 2008, abolished the caretaker system. That move had political observers at home and abroad question the elections held in 2014, 2018, and 2024.

THE CRISIS HOLDING Bangladesh captive today can be at­tributed to the various changes in the political landscape over the five decades-plus that have gone by since the Awami League led the country to freedom. Should one expect, therefore, that with elections planned by the Yunus regime for February 2026, there is an opportunity for Bangladesh to take the road back to democracy as ordained in the constitution? The response will worry citizens, for the regime currently in place in Dhaka is a sad departure from all earlier governments. The reasons are not too hard to identify. Every effort is being made to yank Bangladesh away from its foundational moorings, with particular emphasis placed on a wholesale obliteration of the legacy of Bangabandhu, of the Mujibnagar government, indeed of the principles which went into the creation of a secular nation for Bengalis in this part of South Asia.

The wounds that have been inflicted on Bangladesh since Au­gust last year are horrendous. An unabashed policy geared to an increase in links with Pakistan, a state which has never expressed any contrition for the genocide committed by its military in 1971, is consciously being promoted by the Yunus regime. Senior Paki­stani military officers have happily travelled to Dhaka and been effusively welcomed by the interim administration.

Diplomacy on the regime’s watch has been tenuous. Ties between Dhaka and Delhi have been plummeting, with the governments of the two countries hardly making any mean­ingful contact. Relations are not being helped with the Bangla­desh authorities stridently demanding that Sheikh Hasina be extradited to Dhaka to answer for her ‘crimes’. It is a demand the Indian government will be unlikely to respond to.

And there is also the matter of growing links between Bangla­desh and the US. Questions have abounded in these last many months about American designs on such sensitive spots in Bangla­desh as St Martin’s Island, to which Bangladeshis now find hard to travel despite the place being a well-known tourist destination.

The future? The destruction since the fall of the Awami League government will take years, perhaps decades, to be rolled back. In the immediate future, it is the issue of elections which exercises the public mind. Sceptics warn that the February elections may not take place given the growing demand at home and abroad for the electoral exercise to be free, fair, and in­clusive. The operative word is inclusive and patently points to a scenario where the Awami League is given space to take part. The party holds anywhere between 35 and 40 per cent, perhaps more, of public support at the ballot box. So, it would be futile to rush the country through an election without Sheikh Hasina’s party.

The Yunus regime will have much to worry about in the weeks and months ahead. As for the Awami League, which was satisfied with the outcome of a lockdown it called prior to the ICT judgment, it requires a substantive strategy to make a return to the political centre. The problem for the party at this point is that Hasina’s presence notwithstanding, it suffers from a leadership gap owing precisely to the failure in the last 16 years for a second tier of leaders to grow around her. When Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was arrested by the Pakistan army in March 1971 and flown to what was then West Pakistan to face trial before a mili­tary tribunal, it was his able associates—Tajuddin Ahmad, Syed Nazrul Islam, M Mansoor Ali, AHM Quamruzzaman—who cobbled a government into shape and eventually led Bangla­desh to independence. That legacy has not been matched by the Awami League over the past decade-and-a-half, maybe longer.

An unstable Bangladesh, without a government elected through a process of inclusive adult franchise, will be a danger not only to its people but will also be an invitation to outside forces to derive advantage from the anarchy that is a consequence of the chaos unleashed last year.

It is important to underscore the necessity of Bangladesh’s people returning to their historical moorings by waging a con­certed and consistent campaign to take the country back from the grip of the anti-liberation forces that have commandeered it. That task will necessitate leadership that can galvanise the nation towards launching, and leading to a successful conclusion, a campaign to re-establish secularism, nationalism, socialism, and democracy as enunciated in the constitution.

It will be a long, hard and tortuous campaign, for Bangladesh is today trapped in a web of geopolitical realities. It waits for leadership, for a vision that will link its past with its future. It is in need of leadership that will eschew the mistakes of the past and reach out to all citizens, religious denominations, and ethnic cul­tures to build a credible, viable, modern, and responsive as well as responsible political framework for itself.