For hours, Noor Hossain’s body lay on the street near the Zero Point roundabout, shrouded by tear-gas smoke, his stomach punctured by a bullet fired by police: “Let tyranny die,” read the Bengali words painted in white on the young man’s glistening, brown skin, “Let democracy be free.” Then, late that evening in 1987, Noor’s body was driven to a police station and consigned to an unmarked grave. Edited by martial law censors, local media chose not to carry the now-iconic photographs of the Awami League youth activist’s last moments.
“They will kill you for what you have inscribed on your chest,” then-leader of the opposition Sheikh Hasina Wazed recalled having told Noor, when she spotted him in the crowd around her car. “Apa, you just bless me,” Nur replied, “I will sacrifice my life to free democracy.”
Later, Prime Minister Hasina’s government would honour Nur with a postage stamp and an annual memorial day. General Hussain Muhammad Ershad, the military ruler Noor gave his life to bring down, apologised to his family, and looked after their financial needs. Fourteen years after her son was killed, a year into Sheikh Hasina’s second term as Prime Minister, Noor’s mother, Marium Bibi said this: “I still don’t see anything for which my son died.”
Fleeing from her homeland, Hasina might have wondered how history would remember the more than 400 people killed in the last days of her reign: The police officers beaten to death by angry mobs; the guests who died when the five-star Zabeer International hotel was set alight; the young students and activists who, like Noor, were prepared to give their lives for change.
Through the two decades she held power, Hasina helped pull millions out of poverty and crushed a jihadist movement that once threatened to push Bangladesh into war. The prime minister, though, began to transform into the tyrants she reviled. This script has repeatedly played out since the birth of Bangladesh and goes to the heart of its tormented path to becoming a nation.
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The making of a nation
Facing the cannons of the East India Company, the bamboo fortress of Narkelberia held out for just three hours: The citadel of Emperor Mir Nisar Ali, as the bare-fist boxer-turned-messiah styled himself, lived on in the memory of generations, though. Early in the nineteenth century, historian Dilip Chattopadhyay has recorded, the millenarian Islamic movements of Nisar Ali and Mahomed Mohsin Aldin Ahmed proclaimed the coming of a new order in conformity with the words of the Quran, rejecting private ownership and taxes.
Lazy pop-media caricatures of Bangladesh’s political life cast it as an irreducible confrontation between secularism and Islamism. The story is far more complex, though: Like in Pakistan, Islam has been the language of both power and resistance.
The religious rebellions of the nineteenth century, scholar Atis Dasgupta has explained, mobilised the resentments of poor, mainly-Muslim peasants against predominantly Hindu Zamindars and moneylenders. To compete with the new class of English-educated, mainly Hindu élites who emerged under colonial rule, East Bengal’s middle class also began forming itself into religious and cultural organisations. The build-up to Partition saw these sentiments harden into support for the Muslim League.
Linguistic nationalism in East Bengal, though, comfortably coexisted with Islamic consciousness. Early Bengali nationalist writing drew many of its metaphors and concepts from the idioms and institutions of Islam, the historian Ahmed Kamal has observed. Kamal notes that Sheikh Mujibur Rehman, Hasina’s father and the founding patriarch of Bangladesh, critiqued the new Pakistan in terms identical to Islamists: “When shall we get an ideal ruler like Hazrat Omar, when the era of the Four Caliphs come back?”
The decline of the Muslim League in East Pakistan, beginning in the 1950s, political scientist Ali Riaz has noted in his authoritative history of Bangladesh, did come about midst in a decline of the popularity of Islamic symbols in the public space. This did not, however, mean secularism was ascendant.
East Bengal landlords, Riaz argues, had migrated to India, undermining the basis of communal conflict. “Thus,” he argues, “the relative deprivation of the people of East Pakistan could no longer be attributed to Hindu landowners, landowners; but only to a state which was hell-bent on identifying itself as the protector of Islam.”
Islam and Bangladesh
“The main thing,” American President Richard Nixon told Secretary of State Henry Kissinger as the genocide in East Pakistan gathered momentum at the end of March 1971, “is to keep cool and do nothing.” The previous week, Pakistani troops had slaughtered pro-independence students and faculty in the erstwhile Dacca University. Large parts of the city had been bombed. In one village, an American diplomat recorded, the army “lined up people from their houses, [and] shot down the lines, killing close to six hundred.”
Figures like Jama’at-e-Islami leader Delawar Hossain Sayeedi, who worked for the state-backed death squads responsible for some of the worst war crimes, were rehabilitated and rewarded in Bangladesh.
Although Mujib ensured secularism was written into the new constitution in 1972, he was also concerned with ceding ideological space to the religious Right-wing. The country’s new leader, scholar Samia Huq notes, was careful to begin public speeches with the ritual invocation of God’s name, and his speeches remained infused with religious imagery. Following the passage of the constitution, in November 1972, Mujib led the country’s Assembly in Islamic prayer.
Even more substantial concessions were made to public piety. The state’s financial support for Islamic seminaries increased dramatically, and the Islamic Academy—banned in 1972—was revived under a new name. Later, Bangladesh participated in the Islamic Summit held in 1974 and helped establish the Islamic Development Bank.
The commitment to secularism, moreover, proved to have weak foundations. The regime of General Ziaur Rahman—the liberation war hero who came to power after Mujib’s assassination in 1975—deleted secularism from the constitution, and mandated absolute faith in Allah. Islam was rapidly re-entrenched in education and in public life. Hussain Muhammad Ershad, who took power after a coup in 1982, declared Islam the state religion. Though the religious parties never came close to winning an election, their organisational structure gave them heft.
Following the election of Prime Minister Khaleda Zia in 1991, religion became ever more embedded in the power structure. Figures in her Bangladesh National Party are even alleged to have aided Harkat-ul-Jihad Islami terrorists in a 2004 attack against Awami League members.
Like her father, though, Hasina also cultivated Islamists, seeking to deny her opponents a monopoly on religious issues. The government conceded several demands made by the Hefazat-e-Islami Bangladesh, among them tightening punishments for purported blasphemers and recognising seminary qualifications as equivalent to university degrees. Literary texts were removed from schoolbooks, and a supposedly heretical sari-clad Lady of Justice statue was removed from the Supreme Court.
A failed dream?
Less than a year after independence, the economist Mohiuddin Alamgir watched “streams of hungry people—men, women, and children—who were nothing but skeletons, trekked into towns in search of food.” Few survived, he recorded: “I myself saw an average of three to five unclaimed bodies a day in August on my way to my office, which was only a five minute walk.” The government blamed the disaster on floods, anthropologist Willem van Schendel has written, but it was clear the real causes were poor administration and massive corruption.
The government of Mujib, the Liberator, never recovered its legitimacy. Facing attacks from Maoists in several districts, the new government increasingly turned to repression. In December 1974, Mujib proclaimed a state of emergency and dismantled what little remained of the constitution the next year, by instituting a one-party state.
Even the coup against Mujib, though, couldn’t fix the problem. General Zia set up the Bangladesh National Party, now led by his wife, but ended up being assassinated by rivals in the military, after surviving 29 coup attempts. Ershad, scholar Sarah Tasnim Shehabuddin observes, succeeded in bribing his colonels to remain loyal but proved unable to survive the combined opposition of Hasina and Khalida. Their own commitment to democracy, in turn, proved ephemeral.
The core problem has been that politicians just haven’t been able to create a party system that can effectively govern and uphold democratic norms. Though Hasina was hailed for economic policies which dramatically transformed Bangladesh, the strains caused by the pandemic led to the unravelling of the country’s growth story. An authoritarian order proved unable to accommodate the rage that brewed in the country’s towns and villages—joining together Islamists, secularists, the rural poor and the urban middle class, just like the movement for which Noor gave his life in 1987.
Little imagination is needed to understand why any new government in Bangladesh will also struggle. Lacking political reach and legitimacy, technocratic leaders will struggle to persuade the people of the need for deep, and painful, reforms. The most organised force in the country, the religious parties, will be able to use the vacuum to expand their authority.
Almost certainly, Hasina’s fall, like her rise, represents a false dawn, not light at the end of the tunnel.
Praveen Swami is a contributing editor at ThePrint. He tweets @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Theres Sudeep)