Shakhawat Hossain
London-based The Economist has witnessed a slow but steady political polarization between ruling “secular” Awami League and the Islamist political parties in Bangladesh.
Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, lacking a popular mandate (elections in 2014 were deeply flawed), has become increasingly deferential to religious conservatives. In March a court took just two minutes to dismiss a petition that challenged Islam’s role as the state religion, says a recent report published in The Economist.
“Its secular credentials notwithstanding, the Sheikh Hasina-led ruling Awami League has since 2013 made compromises with Islamist groups. It resurrected the obscurantist Hefazate-Islam, to tackle Islamist groups close to Khaleda Zia’s Bangladesh National Party and its ally Jamaat-e-Islami,” the newspaper observed.
The opposition, however, led by Khaleda Zia of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), has been tacking in the opposite direction—partly, it appears, to shore up its credibility in India and the West. It has distanced itself from its main Islamist ally, the Jamaat-e-Islami, and no longer protests against the hanging of Jamaat-e-Islami’s leaders for war crimes committed in 1971 (the executions have been widely supported). A Hindu, Goyeshwar Roy, has risen within the BNP hierarchy, which would have been unthinkable only last year.
According to the report, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has said her government will not take responsibility for “untoward incidents” that befall people who express objectionable opinions. On April 17th she likened the slain bloggers’ writings to “porn” (newspaper editors, browbeaten by government censorship, omitted this word from accounts of her speech). Her stance on religious issues appears to have won over Hefazat-e-Islam, a radical Islamic outfit that used to denounce her party.
Nonetheless, the quoting Ali Riaz of Illinois State University, the same report pointed out that the killings may have gained momentum because of the state’s weak reaction. Besides, International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based NGO, observed a “deeply politicized, dysfunctional criminal-justice system” has developed in the country.
The writer is a freelance newsman
Source: weekly holiday
