Bangladesh Holds a Mirror to Pakistan?
By Karamatullah K. Ghori
Toronto, Canada
Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus, of Bangladesh, commenting on the toppled Prime Minister Hasina Wajid, said that under her 15-year rule, BD looked like “an occupied country.”
Muhammad Yunus has been named as the Chief Adviser to an interim government, following the dramatic developments in Bangladesh (BD) which saw ‘Iron Lady’ Hasina Wajid fleeing to neighboring India, on Monday August 5.
India had consistently loomed large over Hasina Wajid and her long, autocratic rule spanning more than 15 years.
She was abroad when her father and the godfather of BD, Sheikh Mujibur Rehman, was assassinated by the BD army officers on August 15, 1975. Soon after, she and her sister sought refuge in India and lived there until 1981 when Hasina returned to BD to take up the leadership of her father’s Awami League.
Muhammad Yunus isn’t wrong in describing her long rule over her country as a reign of autocracy and total domination by her and her alone. She had won four general elections, consecutively, since 2008. But each one of these four elections was shaded and controversial; each was decried as “rigged.”
Displaying every instinct of a dictator, Hasina Wajid had studiously and relentlessly weeded out all and every opposition to her ambition to rule over BD as if it were ‘an occupied land.’ The most notable recipient of her ruthless campaign to eliminate all opposition to her autocratic instincts was Begum Khalida Zia, the leader of Bangladesh National party or BNP. Hasina had her confined under house arrest for years.
But the iron lady’s ire wasn’t only exclusive to Khalida Zia. She rooted out, in particular, the main, and popular, Jammat-e-Islami (JI) BD, which was like a twin brother to Pakistan’s Jammat-e-Islami, founded by Mualana Maudoodi.
BD JI was accused by Hasina for its ‘crime’ of having joined forces with the Pakistan Army during the 1970-71 crisis of East Pakistan, which ultimately spawned the independent state of BD. JI’s followers were lambasted and vilified as Razakars (volunteers) of Pakistan army.
The state-sponsored propaganda against JI and its workers and followers was so intense that Razakar, in official parlance, came to be known as a pejorative for ‘collaborators’ and ‘traitors.’ JI was banned as a political party and its leader or Amir, Professor Ghulam Azam, was given a 90-year jail sentence, in 2012, at the age of 92. Ghulam Azam died in Dhaka’s Central Jail, in 2014. His son, a serving Bragadier General in BD army, was dismissed and ‘disappeared’ in 2009.
A major prop of Hasina’s autocratic rule was the patronage her government extended to the progeny of those who had fought the Pakistan army during the liberation struggle, in 1971, and were hailed as Mukti Bahini or liberators of Bengalis from Pakistan’s ‘oppressive rule.’ Hasina had reserved a whopping 30 % quota in civil services for the sons and daughters of Mukti Bahini. Through that unabashed patronage, Hasina had promoted a legion of ‘loyalists’ in the ranks of civil services and judiciary to cushion her every diktat.
It was this blatant regime of patronage that proved to be Hasina’s presumed iron chokehold’s undoing and saw the back of her autocratic rule.
Murmurs of protest had begun, after the January 2024 elections, which were seen as conveniently rigged. This was her fourth consecutive electoral victory. She and her supporters hailed it as confirmation of her unstinted ‘popularity’ with the people of Bangladesh.
However, it was the last straw on the back of the growing opposition to her long and nightmarish dictatorial, one-party, rule.
The standard of revolt was unfurled by the youths of BD whose vocal and vociferous agitation against the quota system spilled over the streets of major cities, last month in July. The student agitation gathered strength by the day. But it gained the force of an avalanche when Hasina’s government tried to quell it with an iron hand. More than 400 students were killed and tens of thousands were arrested and stuffed in jails or just disappeared.
The tipping point, or the coup de grace, came when Hasina denigrated the students agitating for their rights as Razakars. That insult proved to be an act of political suicide, or Harakiri, and sealed her fate. The groundswell of student agitation was powerful enough to submerge her and her pharaonic rule for good.
A key element in her decision to flee the country and seek sanctuary, once again, in her patron India, was the BD army high command’s categorical refusal to cushion her diabolical rule and crush the youths’ agitation with their bayonets. She was told that BD army bullets would not be used to kill the youth of the country.
(The author is a former ambassador and career diplomat)
