‘Not sufficient credential for Hasina’s second term’

Robert Southey in 1810, in his poem The Curse of Kehama wrote, “Curses are like young chicken: they always come home to roost.”

We, expatriate Bangladeshis are beginning to wonder whether a curse indeed is haunting the Sheikh dynasty, as much as we wonder how Bangladeshi intellectuals with liberal democratic credentials could have been fooled by the fanfare around the open-air variety show of the staged Shahbag outcry for hanging of Qader Mollah, a Jamat leader accused of war crimes in 1971, taking it to be “a youth-led uprising promising to take the country to a new and better level of well being.”

Let us take the case of Sheikh dynasty first. Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the founder-President of Bangladesh, was mercilessly gunned down by a team of junior to middle ranking military officers in the staircase of his house, only about five years after he was elected as the undisputed leader of the people of Bangladesh or the-then East Pakistan in a landslide victory in 1970.

What, if any, was Sheikh Mujibur’s mistake? Did he, as some allege, betray his people? Was Mujib’s rule over his people so tyrannical that he had to face the atrocity of merciless assassination along with all members of his family present, including a minor son, on the fateful date of 15th August 1975? Common answer to these questions in the minds of ordinary Bangladeshis is simple enough.

To his people, Sheikh Mujib was the standard-bearer of democracy. They had seen, he was the uncompromising leader who had risked his own life for the cause of democracy and of the people. But, alas, when the day dawned for delivery of his promise, the great leader chose autocracy banning all other political parties and forming the Bangladesh Krishak Sramik Awami League (BAKSAL), the only legally recognised party of Bangladesh founded on 7 June 1975 as the method of the deliverer, instead of democracy. The blood of thousands of dissenters had already soiled his hands, and an armed mutiny in collusion with his party colleagues sealed his fate.

PM Hasina neither acquired nor inherited her father’s qualities of magical leadership, brilliant oratory and candid statesmanship that helped Sheikh Mujib’s rise to the height of his glory as the founding father of a nation-state, Bangladesh. There is but one quality, or a curse as one might say, which both the father and the daughter share in equal measure, and that is their inability to grasp the limit of their power and recognise the signs of disenchantment amongst the people.

In the case of Mujib, his failure was in overestimating his people’s threshold of tolerance for his use of absolute power, and in the case of PM Hasina, her failure may prove to be her disdain of people’s threshold of tolerance for her misuse of power. Crossing the Rubicon of people’s patience with maladministration and misfeasance is instantly perilous indeed.

Let us now look at the case of Shahbag bloggers. Of all Sheikh Hasina’s follies as the Prime Minister of Bangladesh was her impulse to provide comfort and open support to the so-called ‘atheist bloggers’ of Shahbag. This, in the eyes of her people, was one foul-play too much to swallow from their Prime Minister.

Who then are the Bloggers of Shahbag? Well, they are a new generation of Bangladeshi elite divorced from the masses of the people and intolerant of religious sentiments and rituals— particularly of Islam. They may be entitled to their notion that mankind can afford to be Godless, but they cannot deny others the faith that mankind needs God and must submit to Him for the good of the common herd and of the individual soul.

Islamic faith in particular prescribes voluntary devotion: God did not decide in His master-plan of human-creation to subject humans to compulsory submission to Him. Instead, God decided to leave human beings to their own devises, with adequate warnings only of either reward or punishment for obedience or disobedience respectively; and even that to be accorded at God’s own appointed time and not anytime before that. It follows that until God’s appointed time of accountability, mankind is absolutely free to behave in the manner each and every human being may individually choose to follow. As a result, throughout the history of mankind there would, inevitably, be people in God’s kingdom who would prefer absence of accountability to God, or even absence of God altogether.

As the champions of ‘secular’ conduct suggesting that religion be kept private and a matter of individual choice for every citizen, it would have been proper for the Bloggers of Shahbag not to try to impose their rituals of agnosticism and un-Islamic symbolism on the rest of the population of the country who do not subscribe to their pervert method of secular regimentation and contra-devotion.

But the bloggers showed no regard for other people’s sensitivities. They took up positions in the centre of the capital city of Bangladesh to propagate, by way of public display and social media, their abject lack of faith in God and their virulent hatred of Islam and the prophet of Islam.

The result was a sharply polarising divide between the permissive society of our upper classes and the god-fearing traditionalism of our common folk. The contradiction was compounded by the ruling coterie’s attempts to derive political dividends out of the situation.

PM Hasina needed to come out clean before the nation, and assuage the hurt feelings of the common folk. But to her great peril she sided with the Shahbag bloggers, and immediately thereupon the whole spectacle of the bloggers of Shahbag turned into a “political” campaign, albeit with a negative content of maligning and ostracising the Opposition alliance as ‘promoters of Islamic terror’.

Suvolaxmi Dutta Chowdhury, an Indian political analyst patently sympathetic to Sheikh Hasina and to Shahbag bloggers, corroborates in an article the triggering of this unfortunate switch. She noted in her commentary in the journal of the Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies as recently as June 6, 2013:

“How has the Shahbag movement impacted the prospects of the Awami League in the impending elections? Has the ostensibly non-political Shahbag Square assumed a political colour by the close association of the Awami League with the upsurge?

“The Shahbag movement has surpassed its initial demand of death penalty for 1971 war crime convict Abdul Qader Mullah, to include banning the Jamaat-e-Islami party, many of the stalwarts of which have been convicted. Crucially, the upsurge has also called for the banning of economic and social institutions in sectors like banking, education, etc where the Jamaat holds the reiens.

In February 2013, the Parliament amended the International Crimes (Tribunals) Act, 1973, which along with enabling an appeal against the war crimes tribunal verdict, also empowered the Awami government to try and punish any organisation for 1971 war crimes. This move could lead to nailing the Jamaat.

Pro-opposition media channels and newspapers are also not spared from the wrath of this movement. Offices of the Daily Amar Desh and Nayadiganta, Daily Sangram, and Diganta TV were attacked and vandalised. Interestingly, these media networks had published stories portraying an anti-Islamic picture of the slain blogger and Shahbag activist Ahmed Rajiv Haider.

Despite the fact that the furore at the Shahbag Square has waned more recently, it is undeniable that the movement assumed a popular character. Therefore, it is safe to assume that the ensuing elections would bear an imprint of this (elite-led) massive upsurge.

Associating itself with the Shahbag movement has not entirely been a smooth ride for the Awami League. It has had to maintain a tough balancing act between its secularist proclivity and the rising ride of Islamism in the country. The government had arrested four bloggers on charges of blasphemy in early April this year. This move by the government has been severely criticised by Bangladesh’s liberal civil society circles for mollifying the Islamists.

“A report by the Indian intelligence organisation RAW, in February 2013, has a dismal forecast for the Awami League in the forthcoming elections for its inconsequential performance while in government, massive corruption charges, etc. Awami’s traditional warmth with global and regional players like the US (?) and India imply that these powers would seek its return. Begum Khaleda Zia’s BNP, on the other hand, has linked the Shahbag upsurge to New Delhi in recent months.

“For the Awami League, the fact that it could associate itself with a popular movement of a massive scale has arguably brightened its prospects and given it a fresh lease of life ahead of the elections. However, the electoral arena is laden with many diverse complexities and scoring high on the Shahbag platform is not a sufficient credential of the Awami League to pull off a second consecutive term.”

Realistic as the commentary is about the lack of any electoral dividend for Sheikh Hasina from the Shahbag current, it did not mention anything at all about the counter-current countrywide of the Hefazate Islam led upsurge. World media, nevertheless, did observe if not understand, the reaction of the 90 percent people of the country who are also officially represented by PM Hasina. They came out too, and came out from all parts of the country in very large numbers (especially in their ‘long-march’ and ‘Dhaka seize’ programmes), and voted with their feet in a manner that the nation had never witnessed before. They told Sheikh Hasina – point-blank – that she could no longer retain their mandate to govern unless she changed side. But captive as she can she do it?

If fine, I quote another English poet and philosopher, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In his poem, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798), a mariner kills an albatross (a holy sea bird). He is punished by his shipmates to wear the bird hung around his neck and parrot: “Instead of the cross, the Albatross About my neck was hung.”

Source: Weekly Holiday