A common mistake populist leaders make is believing in their own myth. Indira Gandhi believed India was Indira, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman wanted Bangladesh to be modelled on his vision, and Sheikh Hasina, his daughter, had almost turned the country into a party state without a viable Opposition.
The first two leaders met terrible ends, gunned down by those who had sworn to protect them. As for Mujib’s daughter, she flew out of Ganabhaban, the prime minister’s official residence, to India in a C-130 military aircraft yesterday. A sea of protestors, crying for freedom, stormed her official residence, invading her private quarters, looting her clothes and bags, and gorging on left-over fish and biryani in front of news cameras.
All this made for great TV and brought big smiles to the faces of Bangladeshis who wanted Hasina gone. But New Delhi cannot even afford a smirk right now. It may not be long before the naked hate against Hasina turns into hate against India.
His story and hers
Delhi had been a friend of Hasina’s father before it became a friend of hers. Indira Gandhi had sent the Indian Army to help the 1971 freedom fighters who had rallied under Sheikh Mujibur Rahman to wrest a new country from Pakistan. Sheikh Mujib wanted Bangladesh to be a nation that accommodated all faiths, where a common language, Bangla, would be the unifier. He was killed by a section of his own army along with most of his family members inside his official residence at Dhaka’s Dhanmondi 32. The most famous address in Bangladesh’s capital city, it is now the Bangabandhu Memorial Museum. On Monday, protesters set fire to Dhanmondi 32 and brought down Mujib’s statues.
His daughter survived 19 assassination attempts in four decades and ruled Bangladesh with an iron fist. She has been in power from June 1996 to July 2001 and again from January 2009 to Monday without interruption. Wikipedia will tell you that, on 5 August 2024, she became the world’s longest-serving female head of government. Her detractors will say she was a dictator Bangladesh is better off without.
But with Hasina at the helm of affairs, Bangladesh became India’s top-most development and largest trade partner in the region.
More than that, Hasina kept extremism at bay in her backyard. She kept a lid on homegrown Islamic terror, and her government made significant efforts to prevent the smuggling of arms to Indian separatist groups such as the United Liberation Front of Assam.
Hasina went out of her way to make Modi feel welcome in her country during his visit to Bangladesh in 2021 on its 50th Independence Day. Hasina’s police shot down protesters from the hardline Islamist group Hefazat-e-Islam when they tried to create trouble.
Also read: Sheikh Hasina made us a very proud generation. We thought Bangladesh would be next Malaysia
Return of Boycott India?
To Bangladesh’s youth, 1971 is ancient history. They grew up under the hard rule of Hasina and saw their country being turned into a party state. Widespread corruption, inflation, the jailing of Opposition leaders, police brutality and joblessness turned much of her country against her.
It did not help that the last two elections that Hasina won to remain prime minister were widely regarded as pre-fixed in her favour. Bangladesh’s principal Opposition Party, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, boycotted the 7 January elections this year. The largest Islamist party, the Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami, was barred from participating in the polls. The joke in Dhaka was that Awami League fought itself in the elections. Hasina had won even before the first vote was cast.
The anger against the former PM did not spill out on the streets with quota protests. There was the “Boycott India” movement, which began soon after she returned to power for a consecutive fourth term in office.
Popular Bangladeshi social media influencers like Pinaki Bhattacharya alleged Hasina had been able to retain power only because of India’s help. In his YouTube videos – whose viewership runs into millions – Bhattacharya alleged India was running its writ in Bangladesh through Hasina.
In Muslim-majority-Bangladesh, which has a troubled history with its minority Hindu population and is reeling with rising Islamic fundamentalism, the optics couldn’t have been worse for Hasina.
Soon after “Boycott India”, the quota reforms movement began. Hordes of students came out on the streets to protest against reservation in government jobs, demanding a complete rehaul of the system. Thirty per cent of government jobs were reserved for the children and grandchildren of patriots who spilt their blood in the 1971 Liberation War. But the new generation couldn’t take it any longer.
The Hasina government and her party alleged the protests had been infiltrated by the Jamaat, which turned it violent. Under the garb of quota protests, they wanted Bangladesh to burn.
A common slur against Hasina was that she was Hindu and pro-India. “Hare Krishna, Hare Ram, Sheikh Hasina r baap er naam (Hare Krishna, Hare Ram are the names of Sheikh Hasina’s father),” her political opponents had chanted. Till her last day in office, Hasina remained with the “taint” of being pro-Hindu and pro-India.
The fact that the Awami League has always advocated for a secular Bangladesh did not help. And now that Hasina is out, will “Boycott India” begin again?
Also read: Sheikh Hasina was no progressive. She knelt down to Islamic fundamentalists, created a demon
That White country and terror within
Political opposition and popular discontent with a long-serving leader do not explain the popularity of an Islamist political front like the Jamaat-e-Islami in modern-day Bangladesh.
In its earlier avatar as the Jamaat-e-Islami Pakistan, Jamaat opposed Bangladesh’s very independence. In the 1971 war, the Jamaat’s cadre joined hands with the Pakistan Army in mass killings and rapes in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). Though the country’s Supreme Court had barred the Jamaat from the 7 January polls, the party’s cadre was out on the streets, demanding the dismissal of Hasina’s government and introducing Sharia laws instead of “man-made” ones.
In an earlier interview with ThePrint, Bangladesh Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan had said: “Jamaat is opposed to the very independence of Bangladesh. They gave birth to the Razakars and the Al-Badr Bahini (a paramilitary force composed mainly of Bihari Muslims, which operated in East Pakistan under the Pakistani government’s patronage during the 1971 war). It is they who targeted and killed the intellectuals of Bangladesh.”
When the Jamaat’s vice-chairman and former MP Delwar Hossain Sayeedi died on 14 August last year, in a prison outside Dhaka, more than 50,000 people attended his funeral. The police had to break up the violent protests against Hasina. Sayeedi was serving a life sentence for crimes committed during the Bangladesh independence war, which included the murder, rape and persecution of Hindus.
So Bangladeshis mourned the death of a war criminal who had opposed the very birth of their country.
What was surprising, though, was that, before this year’s elections, the International Affairs Secretary of Jamaat-e-Islami, Dr Syed Abdullah Mohammad Taher, met the United States Embassy’s first Political Secretary Matthew Bey.
Bangladesh watchers wondered why America would want to engage with Jamaat. Rami Niranjan Desai, a distinguished fellow at the India Foundation, told ThePrint that the US was possibly playing a greater game—not just to control Bangladesh but to possibly contain India.
US sanctions on Bangladesh army officers, the paramilitary force Rapid Action Battalion and Awami League leaders are hugely concerning for India, he stressed. Hasina’s accusations of a foreign power wanting to carve a Christian state from parts of Bangladesh and Myanmar add to these concerns. “Hasina did not mention India but alluded to it and US interest in St Martins Island. All of these developments before her elections point towards a greater game being played out.”
In its 5 August report, the Economic Times said that months after her win, in May, Hasina had claimed that she was offered a hassle-free re-election if she allowed a foreign country to build an air base inside the country.
“If I allowed a certain country to build an air base in Bangladesh, then I would have had no problem,” the report quoted Hasina as saying.
What we are seeing today is the new Great Game East,” said Desai. “The consequences will have a direct impact on India’s borders and geo-strategic ambitions.”
India’s friend Sheikh Hasina has fled Bangladesh. If indeed a great game is on, India will have to look at new allies, make sense of the turmoil that may reach from Dhaka streets to its Parliament, and keep terror from crossing borders.
Deep Halder is a writer and journalist. He tweets @deepscribble. Views are personal.
(Edited by Zoya Bhatti)