During her increasingly authoritarian rule, former Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and her party, the Awami League, relied heavily on different state institutions to cling to power.
The general election, that took place in January this year, is a case in point. They were boycotted by the major political parties, and saw a low voter turn-out. According to Hasina’s handpicked Election Commission, only 42 per cent of voters showed up to polling centres to cast their ballots. Some independent observers, however, do not think the number even got closer to double digits. In the absence of voters, police and Awami League members stuffed ballots.
The Election Commission numbers were low, even by Bangladeshi standards. Knowing that her popularity was plummeting by the hour, Hasina politicised the police and other security agencies by appointing members of the Awami League to these institutions.
Even the judiciary was not spared—Bangladesh’s former Chief Justice Surendra Kumar Sinha, a Hindu in a Muslim-majority country, was forced to resign in 2017. A Manipuri in a Bengali-dominated nation, he later sought asylum in Canada after being threatened by the Directorate General of Forces Intelligence (DGFI), the country’s military intelligence service. His crime was that he wanted the judiciary to work independently.
Police hangings, mob lynching
Naturally, at the fag end of her rule, Hasina didn’t have her supporters to defend her against an onslaught of public anger— she only had the police and the civil administration by her side. They bore the brunt of people’s wrath during the ‘Monsoon revolution’ that saw Hasina’s ouster from power on 5 August.
Mob lynching started in the middle of the protests. A building in downtown Dhaka that was used by snippers to shoot protesters was sieged. The policemen were dragged out of the establishment and lynched. Their corpses, when hanged from a pole, were wearing only their undergarments. Incidents like this repeated itself across the city. Most of the police stations in Dhaka were torched. Not far away from the capital, in Sirajganj, at least 13 policemen—including an officer-in-charge—were beaten to death inside a police station. It happened the day before Hasina fled the country.
If this was madness, there was indeed a method to it— no private property was touched until Hasina resigned. Once she left, the targets quickly changed from state institutions to ‘identified enemies’—members of the Awami League, their households, and their business establishments were attacked. Muhammad Yunus assumed power on 8 August, but between 5 August and 8, anarchy gripped the country and lynching became the order of the day.
News of Awami League supporters getting lynched by the mob has now become rare, as most of them have gone into hiding. But the so-called mob justice has created a worrying precedent. On 14 August, on two separate occasions, five people were beaten to death in the capital.
Since Yunus assumed power, as many as 21 people have been lynched, ranging from alleged thieves, the Awami League leaders to a film actor. These incidents clearly show a breakdown of law and order and people’s lack of trust in the judicial system.
To make matters worse, as many as 187 members of the police at various levels have not yet joined their offices after the fall of the Awami League government. An unspecified number of officials are still absent from work on various grounds, and some are trying to leave the country.
It has also been alleged that the police are not responding to events as promptly as they should—some are still loyal to the previous regime and others are just afraid of facing the public. As many as 44 cops were killed during the July protest. The brutal manner in which the police handled the events of July is still raw in public memory and images of almost naked policemen hanging upside down from polls are fresh enough to haunt the force too.
Faced with this, the Bangladesh government, last week, has given magistracy power to all commissioned Army officers for 60 days in order to improve law and order. They will act as executive magistrates across the country. But this is a small solution to a bigger problem, and, worse still, it might snowball into a problem itself.
Also read: Mobs are still calling the shots in Bangladesh. Yunus government appears weak to act
Army is no saint
Giving power to the Army officers to arrest a citizen opens a whole new Pandora’s box. Some soldiers deputed to the para-military Rapid Action Battalion (Rab) are allegedly involved in cases of torture, murder and enforced disappearances while on active duty. In fact, three army officers were handed down death penalty for killing seven people while serving the Rab in 2014.
The case of ex-Chief Justice Sinha, and the alleged presence of illegal detention centres inside the cantonment tell us that the army is no saint. Giving any and every commissioned army officer the power of an executive magistrate does not bode well for Bangladesh’s path toward a democratic future. It also smacks of a power-sharing arrangement with the army that a country like Bangladesh, once plagued with military coups, can ill afford.
The government has also planned to recruit new police officers, but the process might be long and arduous. Training and quick deployment of this new batch of police personnel will be difficult, if not impossible. The Yunus administration needs to think outside the box. Retired army and police officials can be recruited on a contractual basis. In doing so, the government must glean into their previous work ethics, non-partisan behaviour and human rights record.
Bangladesh is now at a crossroads, an unchartered territory. Muhammad Yunus and his advisers need to establish the rule of law. The sooner they are able to do that, the better. A country that, according to the UN, has witnessed 600 deaths in 28 days is indeed a ticking time bomb.
Ahmede Hussain is a Bangladeshi writer and journalist. He is the editor of The New Anthem: The Subcontinent in Its Own Words (Tranquebar Press; Delhi). He has just finished writing his first novel. He tweets @ahmedehussain. Views are personal.
(Edited by Ratan Priya)