Sheikh Hasina: Family Tragedy

 IT IS SAID BANGLADESH might not have been born when it was but for the tropical cyclone Bhola, the deadli­est on record, which made landfall on November 12, 1970 and killed an estimated half-a-million people. It was the Pakistan government’s deliberately delayed and discriminatory response that created causal and sequential links between a cli­mate disaster, genocide, revolution, war, and liberation. None of the involved parties has rested easy since December 1971 because Bangladesh was always an unfinished business.

Rarely have political and diplomatic conspiracies, or the same conspiracy rekindled, played out as brazenly as what resulted in the assassination of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman on August 15, 1975 and the ouster of Sheikh Hasina on August 5, 2024. While the conspira­tors had never ceased and desisted, what made Bangladesh fertile ground for their persistence was the duality at the heart of its found­ing philosophy. Or identity. A duality, or conflict, had characterised the nation’s founding father too, whose statues and legacy now lie in ruins. Mujibur Rahman might have survived had he not made a series of serious mistakes. In her darkest hour—which was not the court pronouncing her death sentence on November 17—his daughter, too, made catastrophic errors of judgement.

Is Bangladesh the offspring of Pakistan or India? Is Bangladesh Bengali first or Muslim first? Is Bangladesh secular or Islamic? It could never resolve the dilemma. That’s why the Razakar collabo­rators and their patrons make cyclical returns to power in Dhaka.

Yet the aftermath of Hasina’s overthrow is unprecedented since the massacre of Mujibur and most of his family had not resulted in his full-scale delegitimisation or that of the story of liberation. Then, it was not about Bangladesh erasing itself. Gen­eral Ziaur Rahman, as dictator, did not take the first steps in turn­ing Dhaka back towards Pakistan. Mujib had done that himself.

Bangladesh cannot live with and without India. Nor could Mujib. Without Indian intervention, there would have been no Bangladesh. Nor would Mujibur Rahman have taken over the government run from exile in India by Tajuddin Ahmad. In many ways, the fate of Ahmad after liberation foreshadowed the tragedy of the new nation. And the wedge that was driven between him and Mujib—through the machinations of Pakistan and the US—was a premonition of the course India-Bangladesh relations would take.

No sooner was the country free that Mujib was complaining about Indian dominance. Either that was his old antagonism towards India borne out by his role in Direct Action Day in Dhaka—as the Great Calcutta Killings were unfolding on August 16, 1946—or he was scared by the anti-India sentiment once the job of liberating Bangladesh was done. Moreover, Mujib had by then become authoritarian, turning the nascent democracy into a one-party state. And he was desperate for diplomatic recognition from Pakistan and China to ‘balance’ Indian influence, as both he and Ahmad were being called India’s stooges.

The ghost was in the machine. Veteran Indian journalist and eyewitness to 1971 Manash Ghosh, in his Mujib’s Blunders: The Power and Plot Behind His Killing, published this year as a sequel to Bangladesh War: Report from Ground Zero (2021), writes: “From the outset of the war, the Awami League’s internecine conflict had assumed such menacing proportions that Tajuddin Ahmed, the prime minister of the interim government-in-exile… was almost ousted from power by the pro-Pak and anti-Bangladesh lobby in the party led by Khondokar Mushtaq Ahmed who was totally against the dismemberment of Pakistan. The officer cadre of the Niyomito Bahini… too was divided down the middle: one section, led by Major Zia, opposed the Indian Army training the Mukti Bahini as it did not want the muktijoddhas to be labelled ‘made in India,’ while the other section, loosely led by Major Khaled Mosharraf, found no harm in it…”

This remains Bangladesh’s battle within, over its identity and destiny. After Mujib, the liberation heroes and Awami League were banished through long, Islamised military rule. The return of Sheikh Hasina to power in 2009 for the second time began the process of a course correction, with executions of collaborators and war criminals as well as the first real attempt at secularising the country. On August 5, 2024, the clock swung back, officially. Things were headed that way for a long time but it is doubtful whether Hasina would have been overthrown without Pakistani- American intervention compounded by her own mistakes.

Mujibur Rahman, however, was guilty of egregious errors. To begin with, Mujib filled his government with the very people op­posed to the creation of Bangladesh, members of the pro-Pakistan faction, epitomised in Khondokar Mushtaq Ahmed (later president of Bangladesh and the first beneficiary of Mujib’s death) being ap­pointed commerce minister in his third administration. He did the same with the military, allowing the people who would be the first to plot against him to get too close and giving them the keys to state security. They would be the chief instruments in Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s hands to avenge Pakistan’s defeat and dismemberment.

 On a smaller but almost equally fateful scale, Hasina ignored advice to appoint Waker-uz-Zaman army chief, thinking her rela­tive (Zaman is married to the daughter of Hasina’s uncle, former army chief General Muhammad Mustafizur Rahman) wouldn’t betray her. While Zaman’s disloyalty cannot be proven beyond doubt, he did not lend Hasina the army’s backing when she need­ed it most and forced her to abandon home and office. Perhaps he saved her life in doing so but he has done little to curb either the Islamist thuggery on the street or Muhammad Yunus’ vendetta-driven governance. Zaman’s apologia for the army’s inability to quell the extremist-led violence in August 2024 is highly suspect.

If it was the fear of Pakistani-American machinations that turned Mujib against India, it did not help him in the end. But where he acted to save himself, Hasina seemed to have been too arrogant to realistically assess the threat of the international plot against her, especially when Joe Biden’s ambassador in Dhaka, Peter D Haas, was running amok in her country, holding meetings with the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) and the Ja­maat, making it clear that Washington wanted her out. She paid the price of underestimating American power. But that does not explain why she and her senior ministers could not make timely and meaningful overtures to the agitat­ing students, telling them the government was on the same page where quotas for descendants of freedom fighters were concerned, that it was the court which had reinstated the quotas while her government had abolished them in 2018, and that it had got the court to cut back on the quotas again. That mistake made the point of no turning back inevitable.

Mujibur Rahman’s dictatorial turn was shorter, sharper, and more tragic. Once he made Bangladesh a one-party state under the Bangladesh Krishak Sramik Awami League (BAKSAL), outlawed all other parties, and suppressed freedom of speech, he effec­tively legitimised the plot against him. It was Tajuddin Ahmad who had warned Mujib against both becoming a dictator and damag­ing relations with India but the former prime minister was long out of favour. Mujib acceler­ated the process of his own downfall by doing the very things he thought would protect him. By the time of his assassination, the collabora­tors practically had the reins of state in their hands because it was Mujib who had freed them, again against sound advice.

To be fair to Hasina, she never made her father’s mistake of deluding herself into be­lieving the collaborators and their inheritors would have a change of heart. Her hubris was thinking she was invincible. Her error of judgement was not taking the American threat seriously enough. St Martin’s island might have been a smaller geopolitical price to pay compared to the political cost of her exit. But in a throwback to her father, Hasina, “while seek­ing the military’s help to restore law and order, had no idea that the mid-level officers of the armed forces had been thoroughly infiltrated by the Jamaatis”. The ghost was again in the machine, irrespective of Waker-uz-Zaman’s role.

As Arabic calligraphy is scratched into the walls of the Shaheed Minar and the very language and script for which Bangladesh fought to be born may again be under threat, Ghosh asserts that “Sheikh Hasina’s Awami League is no political pushover and is far from a vanquished force and will seek to reassert its rightful pres­ence in the country’s mainstream politics.” A year is a long time in politics and Bangladesh is already unrecognisable. It will take longer for the Awami League to resurrect itself, with or without Hasina. It is unlikely to do so without outside assistance. And if and when it does resurface, which mistake will it choose to undo first?