Sadeq Khan
On 17 September the Bangladesh Supreme Court, after nearly a couple of months of hibernation over appeals against the 1971 war crimes Tribunal’s award of life sentence to Abdul Quader Mollah, a top leader of Jamaat-e-Islami party, gave a majority (4:1) verdict of death penalty to the convicted Islamic leader
The immediate reaction of bursts of violence in the streets by followers of Jamaat and its student wing Shibir throughout urban Bangladesh, and an economically paralysing 48-hour continuous hartal call over the next two days, have brought Bangladesh back into the headlines and strips of world news in major global television channels. The ongoing heated battle of words between the two principal contenders of power in Bangladesh in the general election, expected to be held this winter, receded to the background.
But the threat of boycott of election by the Opposition, if the Government insists on holding elections with the prime minister and cabinet members remaining in office and the parliament members continuing to enjoy privileges of their office, assumed a garb of reality of ominous proportions.
The crisis of political transition in Bangladesh has been succinctly described by Subir Bhowmik, a BBC correspondent and geopolitical analyst in an article in the Indian newspaper, The Telegraph of Calcutta as follows:
“Bangladesh’s battling begums, Hasina Wajed and Khaleda Zia, have told the United Nations secretary-general, Ban Ki Moon that they are not willing to climb down from their positions over the conduct of the next parliament elections. That torpedoes the possibility of a dialogue to find a mediated settlement to the issue of how the polls will be conducted. The United States of America and the European Union have already tried to mediate between the country’s two leading political parties and the coalitions they lead. In August, even the media-shy Chinese ambassador in Dhaka, Li Jun, suggested that ‘we have tried with our friends in both the parties’, only to admit that the effort has not yielded much of a result. Both sides, he said, had expressed ‘sincerity’ to hold a dialogue, but asserted that their positions were not negotiable.
“The prime minister, Hasina Wajed, has already announced that the parliament will end on October 25, its last business day, and that the parliament polls would be held within the mandatory constitutional limit of 90 days, within January 24 next year. The law minister, Shafique Ahmed, made it clear that the government had ‘no plans whatsoever’ to bring about a constitutional amendment to re-introduce the neutral caretaker system that the coalition led by the Opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party wants — and without which its leader, Khaleda Zia, has ruled out participating in the parliament polls.
One party rule?
“If that were to happen finally, Hasina’s Awami League may manage to stay in power but live forever with the stink of having won a poll without the country’s principal Opposition participating in it. The Opposition has already alleged that Hasina was ‘conspiring to stay in power’ and ‘establish one party rule’, alluding to her father’s BAKSAL experiment just before he was assassinated in a military coup.
“Since Hasina came to power, five city corporation elections have been held in Bangladesh. In the absence of state governments, these polls provide a limited alternative. The Awami League has lost all the city corporation polls, beginning with Chittagong in 2010 and ending with Gazipur, once an Awami League stronghold, two months ago. Rajshahi, Khulna, Sylhet and Barisal have also been lost to the League. The defeats have raised the spectre of anti-incumbency which, so far has ensured a change every five years since the fall of Ershad.”
That spectre of anti-incumbency, by design or by default of incumbents, appears to have started now a perilous chase to dislodge the party in power, much ahead of the intended time (after Eid-ul Azha) for a combined opposition ‘push’ towards that end. The verdict has unleashed such wrathful protests and such heavy-handed counter measures by the incumbents in power, causing several deaths, many injuries, detentions and destructions, that the cumulative effects are very likely to go out of control.
The spectre of anti-incumbency in Bangladesh is particularly worrying for our big neighbour India. Unlike the US-led international community which has made a show of diplomatic Good Samaritan moves to obtain a negotiated settlement between the ruling coterie and the opposition leaders in Bangladesh for “free, fair and credible polls”, the Indian security state still sets a lot of score and high hopes on Sheikh Hasina.
India’s stakes
As Bhowmik says in the conclusion of his September 10 article in The Telegraph (a week ahead of the death penalty verdict against the apellant Jamaat leader): “For India, much seems to be at stake. Hasina has addressed India’s security and connectivity concerns as none in her country has done before. Her crackdown against Islamist radicals and (India’s) north-eastern rebels has spared India a second front of terror in the east. She is all game to allow India to use the Chittagong port to access the Northeast, but India’s failure to sign the Teesta water-sharing treaty and formalize the Land Boundary Agreement has naturally peeved her. The ‘India factor’ is ruining her electoral prospects. If the political deadlock is broken and the BNP participates in the polls and beats the Awami League, India would have lost a trusted friend – and forever.”
That sentiment, in favour of Sheikh Hasina’s continuance in power in Bangladesh, has been corroborated in much stronger terms by Shekhar Gupta, editor-in-chief of The Indian Express and a media celerity in India in an open letter to Narendra Modi, India’s main opposition party BJP’s prime minister designate. He wrote: “Dear Narendrabhai, You want a Bengali speaking Af-Pak or a liberal, secular Bangladesh? You can decide now.
“You, Narendrabhai, need to weigh in. Because moments like these arrive only once in decades in a nation’s history.
“Because the issue — and the country it refers to, Bangladesh — is a red rag to your party and the RSS, who see it as the Pakistan on our eastern borders. But here is an opportunity to change the story and the history with Bangladesh. Not one senior leader of your party has, as yet, produced an argument against the land boundary agreement that India and Bangladesh have signed and which now awaits ratification through a constitutional amendment. On several occasions, your party president, Rajnath Singh, has very sagaciously stated that his party supports the agreement. Yet, it hasn’t been able to vote for it because of last-minute objections. The opposition of the BJP’s Assam unit etc are just convenient excuses.
‘Strategic opportunity’
“Why is this agreement a once-in-a-generation strategic opportunity? Because the democratising (pro-Indianisation?) of Bangladesh’s politics, society and public discourse is as important to India as that of Pakistan’s. And Sheikh Hasina has been doing just that. From being a sanctuary for our rebels, particularly the ULFA, and a playground for the ISI and jihadi forces, Bangladesh is now an ally. Remember how it has handed over our fugitives, particularly Arabinda Rajkhowa, and is holding Anup Chetia, and the political risks this entails. If Tripura can convert some of its underground gas into power, it is only because Bangladesh has let you transport those giant generators by barge through its rivers. They would have never reached there through the narrow, winding mountain roads.
“Hasina has forced the ISI to shut shop. She has also disbanded the Bangladesh Rifles, which had become such a malevolent presence on our borders — remember that ghastly visual of the bodies of our BSF patrolmen, killed by the BDR, being carried, hanging by their limbs from bamboo sticks? The courts, under her, have given judgments holding both the martial law impositions (by Generals Ziaur Rahman and Ershad) unconstitutional, and thereby laws enacted by them, which effectively converted Bangladesh into an Islamic state, have been abrogated. Bangladesh is therefore restored to its original, secular, liberal constitution. One can always have a super-liberal argument against the government banning the Jamaat-e-Islami, on its handing out death sentences to old radicals and Jamaatis for complicity in the Pakistani army’s atrocities in 1971. But, certainly, that cannot be your party’s argument, or yours.
“The truth is, while the world celebrates the rise of secular Indonesia as a great liberal success story in the Islamic world, Bangladesh, with its 16.3 crore, mostly very poor, people, 89 per cent of whom are Muslim and 10 per cent Hindu, deserves that admiration first for the way it has transformed. Nothing underlines the positive change in Bangladesh better than the fact that its high commissioner, Tariq A. Karim, specially called on you in Ahmedabad onJuly 27 for an hour-long meeting to seek your support for the land boundary agreement, when Americans have not yet taken you off the blacklist, Europeans are engaging with you but still sort of gingerly, and diplomats of no other Muslim-majority country will like to be seen near you. He and his government got their share of abuse for this back home, but they did not flinch.
“And you want to know how fragile these gains are? The first radical to be convicted and given the death sentence, Abul Kalam Azad, the red-bearded ideologue better known as Bachchu Razakar or Lal Daadhi, has already escaped, and where else but to Pakistan, now harboured by the jihadis there. Scores of others, under trial now, are praying for the defeat of Hasina’s Awami League this winter and the rise on the streets of a group called Hefazat-e-Islam, which grew, like much Bangladeshi radicalism, from Chittagong and whose 13-point charter is borrowed straight from the Taliban. I may or may not agree with you, Narendrabhai, but I know you believe you are being swept to power next summer. What kind of Bangladesh would you rather be dealing with on your eastern borders?”
India’s ‘security damage’
A veteran of the Indian security state, former foreign secretary of India Krishnan Srinivasan, had expressed the same concern about Delhi’s inability to back up Sheikh Hasina’s bid to return to power more effectively. He wrote in a September 4 article: “Attention has been centred for the past few months on the opposition of the Trinamul Congress and the Asom Gana Parishad to the conclusion of the land boundary and the river Teesta sharing agreements with Bangladesh. These two setbacks in relations between India and Bangladesh are estimated to have weakened the position of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, before Bangladesh goes to the polls around the end of this year and, therefore, to have gravely damaged India’s short- and long-term national and security interests. Hasina’s political party, the Awami League, is being derided by its opponents for its alleged dependence on, and ‘selling out’ to, an unreliable and capricious India that asks too much and gives too little in return.
“Contrary to the voluble denunciations of Hasina by her opponents, who have launched a series of hartals and various other measures, sometimes violent, of civil disobedience, there is much to record on the credit side of the bilateral balance sheet that is worthy of close attention. Bangladesh has doubtless rendered outstanding service to India in security, anti-insurgency and anti-terrorism cooperation. This has expended a considerable degree of political capital on the part of Hasina’s government, and it must readily be acknowledged that it has led directly to a much improved security situation in India as a whole, and a marked betterment in the containment of the insurgency and terror threat in the whole of the Northeast. The Awami League has permitted transshipment over Bangladesh territory of over-sized cargo for the Palatana power project in Tripura. This has enabled that state to fulfil its great promise in the generation of power to the Northeast and beyond.
“Both the governments in New Delhi and Dhaka have serious domestic problems. In Dhaka, general elections must be held by January 25, 2014, and Hasina is facing the unwelcome prospect of a boycott by the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, the main Opposition group, because she has done away with the non-party caretaker system to supervise the polls. Nothing, so far, suggests that there could be an understanding between the two parties.”
Indeed, it may be too late already for India to offer any saving grace, and as Srinivasan pragmatically concludes: “Hasina needs to lament that she did not inspire constructive youthful aspirations when half the population is under 24, did not empower women who yearn for more technical skills, and was seen as more interested in retributive justice for the assassins of the Liberation War and Mujibur Rahman’s family than in initiating any reconciliation process in her country’s fractured society.”
Source: Weekly Holiday
