The current crisis which the Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina is facing from the challenge thrown up by the students, is actually of her own making. All through her successive regimes for the last decades, she had behaved in an authoritarian way, suppressing parties of the Opposition and dissident civil society organizations by putting their leaders, cadres and activists behind bars. Even the parliamentary elections conducted regularly by her at the stipulated time, have been marked by violence, rigging of votes and intimidation of voters by gangsters patronized by her Awami League. The latest elections in 2024 which brought back Sheikh Hasina to power, making her serve the fifth term as Prime Minister, were accompanied by clashes between her supporters and her opponents and charges of widespread irregularities in the conducting of the polls. It is significant that the main Opposition party, BNP (Bangladesh Nationalist Party) headed by her rival, the veteran Khaleda Zia, boycotted the elections in protest against pre-poll violence. Hasina thus won almost uncontested.
The present outburst of public protest has been triggered by Sheikh Hasina’s announcement of a quota system for applicants for government jobs that reserves 30% for descendants of veterans who fought in the 1971 liberation war. The anti-quota agitators argue that most of the beneficiaries will be relatives of the Awami League leaders who claim the monopoly of leadership of the war, while followers of many other political parties like the JSD (Jatiya Samajtantrik Dal) and the Left who equally fought against Pakistani forces in 1971, are being kept out. It is significant that as in the past on occasions of anti-state agitations which were initially sparked off by student protestors, today also the current movement against Sheikh Hasina’s regime has been heralded by the student community.
Sheikh Hasina has been ruling Bangladesh for a period spanning 20 years (barring a few interregnums, as in 1991 when she lost to Khaled Zia, but bounced back five years later), making her the longest surviving Prime Minister of Bangladesh. To her credit, we should acknowledge that she has lifted her people from utter poverty to a position today where they enjoy the benefits of a thriving economy that is fuelled by their exports (of garments among other things). We also have to recognize her courageous stand against the domestic Islamic fundamentalist terrorists, whom she is determined to eliminate, as evident from the punishment being meted out to them by the courts – some of them even being sentenced to death.
But even after acknowledging her achievements, we also cannot ignore the fact that her tenure had been marred by allegations of suppression of human rights, laws curtailing press and civil freedom, and crackdown on Opposition leaders and cadres. Soon after returning to power and becoming the Prime Minister of Bangladesh in 1996, Sheikh Hasina passed a law – Constitution (15th amendment) which allowed the centralization of administration in the hands of the Prime Minister – in other words herself. Protesting against such trends, even the Bangladeshi Nobel Prize laureate Muhammad Yunus, who pioneered the global micro-credit movement, accused her government and Awami League party of authoritarianism and corrupt practices. In retaliation, a vindictive Sheikh Hasina kept on persecuting Yunus, and on the eve of the 2024 polls, compelled the judiciary (which is a subservient tool of hers) to pass a judgment sentencing him to imprisonment on false charges of violation of labour laws. Yunus is now on bail.
Recalling Sheikh Mujibur’s record of authoritarianism – a legacy inherited by his daughter
When blaming Sheikh Hasina for her misdeeds, we should not ignore the fact that she has inherited this proclivity from her father, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. While Sheikh Mujib rightly deserves to be hailed as the hero of the Bangladesh liberation struggle, we must also remember that once Mujib came to power in the newly liberated Bangladesh, he started behaving in a partisan and authoritarian way. He allowed middle level leaders and grassroots followers of his Awami League to indulge in large scale corruption and smuggling. This created distress among the people, leading to starvation. On a personal note, let me narrate my own experiences while visiting Dhaka in 1972 – just a year after Iiberation. Walking down a street, I saw this writing scrawled in huge Bengali letters on a wall: Bhaat de, haramzada (You bastard – give us rice). There were wide spread allegations of corruption and high handedness against his two sons, Sehikh Kamal and Sheikh Jamal.
By the end of 1974, thousands of peasants in the rural areas fell victims to famine. Mujib had to visit Washington to seek aid, but returned empty handed. Other Bangladeshi political parties started organizing protests. Facing growing unrest, and in a bid to crush all political opposition, in December 1974, Mujib replaced the parliamentary system with a presidential system under a single party called BAKSAL, his own creation, and annointed himself as the President. Political opponents were put behind bars. Siraj Sikdar of the Sharbohara (Proletarian) Party was captured and killed in police custody. But all these authoritarian measures could not put an end to the protests. Even within the Bangladesh army, signs of distrust in the Mujib regime began to surface. Their distrust originated from their bitter experience in April 1974. At that time, under the advice of the then army chief General Zia, Mujib had been persuaded to hand over the responsibility of conducting anti-smuggling and anti-hoarding operations to the armed forces (since the local police stations failed). But the majority of the culprits that the army personnel arrested turned out to be members of the Awami League, who were found in possession of smuggled goods. Quite predictably, Mujib in order to protect these cadres of his party, pulled off the army operation.
This created discontent among the army ranks. Most of them came from the peasant stock in the rural areas, where their families were feeling the pinch of economic distress while watching the local Awami League functionaries amassing fortunes at their expense. Frustrated with Mujib’s growing megalomania which led him to dismiss all advices given by the army chief General Zia among others, they turned rebellious seeking a replacement of the head of the government. On August 15, 1975 a group of army personnel from the Bengal Lancers and the Bangladesh Armoured Corps, invaded Mujib’s house and killed him and more than forty members of his family. They were led by two majors – Abdur Rashid and Syed Farooq. Both of them fled to Libya. About a decade later (by which time they had been promoted as Colonels in absentia under the post-Mujib regime), both of them came out with their reminiscences in a jointly-written Bengali book entitled Muktir Path (Road to Liberation) published in Dhaka in 1983 (when General Ershad was in power after a military coup). These two assassins of Mujib’s were highly qualified persons who during the 1971 liberation war, quit their privileged posts in the then Pakistan army (where they had gained entry after graduation from the Pakistan Military Academy) and joined the freedom fighters. But after liberation, they found to their dismay that under Mujib’s rule “the anti people steam roller of oppression had changed hands from the Pakistani rulinq clique to Sheikh Mujib and his party in whose hands it had assumed a far more fearful form.” After referring to the prevailing trend of corruption and the government’s ban on Opposition parties, long imprisonment of their leaders and killing of their cadres, they explained why they took the extreme step of assassinating Mujib by citing three reasons: “ (i) the unbearable pain that our brothers and sisters are suffering from the endless harassment, exploitation and deception (by the regime); (ii) betrayal of the fundamental spirit of the liberation war; and (iii) trampling on the past tradition of our nationality.” They described their act as solely motivated by these three factors, adding that they
personally never nourished “any ambition or desire for power.” But Rashid and Farooq were to be disappointed soon. They found that the “beneficiaries” of the assassination of Mujib were the “political and military leaders Khondakar Mustaque Ahmed and General Ziaur Rahman….who took over power.” They blamed the two for lack of wisdom and political foresight that made the “situation more complicated and confusing.” (Muktir Path. pp. 40-42)
Replication of the Mujib rule by his daughter in today’s Bangladesh
It is necessary to take a leaf from the above history and have a look at it in order to understand the present situation in Bangladesh. The political system in Bangladesh had always fluctuated between military rule and return of democracy. But the democratic structure was also ridden with the conflict between preferences for parliamentary and presidential systems – as evident from Mujib’s role.
Besides, what is alarming is that the economic and political crisis that is plaguing Bangladesh today resembles the situation that prevailed there in 1975 on the eve of Mujib’s assassination. There are the same public demonstrations of protests against acts of discrimination, corruption in the public distribution system, victimization of Opposition party leaders and followers
Significantly, they are led by students – the same section of the population who heralded the liberation movement in 1971, and later fought against the military regimes of Zia and Ershad, forcing them out of power. Sheikh Hasina has unleashed the police against these sections of the present generation – resulting in the killing of more than hundred. All these events resemble the happenings that took place in Bangladesh on the eve of Mujib’s assassination. They are ominous signs of a frightful future. One hopes that Sheikh Hasina curbs her authoritarian impulses and avoids the fatal consequences that overtook her father.
Sumanta Banerjee is a political commentator and writer, is the author of In The Wake of Naxalbari’ (1980 and 2008); The Parlour and the Streets: Elite and Popular Culture in Nineteenth Century Calcutta (1989) and ‘Memoirs of Roads: Calcutta from Colonial Urbanization to Global Modernization.’ (2016).
