Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s unceremonious exit from power and the country has been too sudden and swift. Many are still trying to comprehend how the “Iron Lady”, seemingly in complete control until the student movement intensified, could be compelled to step down and even leave Bangladesh. Not that her leaving the country has cooled tempers. Far from it. Bangladesh has descended into chaos and mindless bloodletting, driven by a wild urge for vendetta. Ms. Hasina’s partymen, religious minorities, policemen and border guards have been targeted, leaving dozens dead and hundreds injured, not to speak of the huge loss of property. The most worrying part is the systematic attacks on police stations and the looting of weapons by elements believed to be religious radicals.
Editorial | From hope to despair: On Bangladesh after Sheikh Hasina
There is a strange repeat of history for Sheikh Hasina. In August 1975, with almost her entire family , including her great father, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, dead in a bloody coup, Sheikh Hasina and sister Rehana had to seek shelter in India. That was made possible on the personal intervention of then Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, who shared a great personal bond with Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. The only difference is that in 1975, Ms. Hasina was a housewife and a daughter of a great leader who had led his people to freedom. But now, Ms. Hasina has been one of the world’s longest serving women leaders, having served four full five-year terms as Prime Minister.
Development but also a disconnect
One could easily blame her predicament on stars and dwell on astrological calculations, but Ms. Hasina’s fall has happened because of a growing disconnect with the masses — the undoing of many leaders who swing towards authoritarian governance. Ms. Hasina has presided over a decade of exceptional economic turnaround for Bangladesh when the country’s per capita income surged past India’s and there was a huge boost in infrastructure — ports, roads, railway expansion and power generation. The country’s human development indicators also showed marked improvement, specially in areas such as women’s education and health. Bangladesh was close to becoming the world’s top garment exporter and remittance incomes surged as the diaspora, hopeful of the country’s future, sent more money back home.
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The iconic 6.15 kilometre bridge on the mighty Padma river, which Ms. Hasina pushed through with Bangladesh’s own funds, was completed in her time , raising hope of greater connectivity with 21 districts and a boost to the country’s GDP. At one point, Ms. Hasina came to believe that if she delivered on development, she could get away with the country’s growing democracy deficit.
Her detractors blame her for three less than fair elections marred by large-scale rigging that did not reflect the ground realities in Bangladesh. She was also accused of turning Bangladesh into an one-party police state like Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt, where extra-judicial killings, enforced disappearances and the muzzling of the Opposition by large-scale arrests, often on trumped-up charges, became a recurring feature. In a way, this democracy deficit affected the Awami League more than the Opposition. With victory in elections a foregone conclusion, the Awami League had lost the urge to spot and promote popular leaders with a strong mass connect, who were capable of holding the ground in any crisis such as the one presented by the recent anti-quota student protests.
Awami League’s transformation, politics
In fact, during the last decade, the Awami League’s leadership character underwent a massive transformation. Once the party of the poor and the middle class, the Awami League was led by ideologically-driven middle-class leaders respected at the grassroots — teachers, professionals and lawyers. But in the last decade, businesspersons had begun to muscle their way into the party leadership, bribing their way to secure nominations for Parliament seats. They had very little connect with the grassroots let alone the party’s own organisation. The only way they could win elections after securing nominations through doubtful means was to grease the palms of the police and civil bureaucracy and hire musclemen to help rig the elections.
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Many of these businessmen-turned-politicians also sullied the party’s image with their nexus to organised crime and corruption.
All this while, Sheikh Hasina also came to repose lesser trust in the party old guard and turned more and more towards some of these business tycoons. One of the worst bank defaulters of the country, also accused of large-scale money-laundering, was inducted into the Prime Minister’s council of advisers. He became such an independent power centre that many began to call him the ‘deputy PM”.
Bangladesh’s economic growth was adversely impacted by this burgeoning corruption and badly hit by the COVID-19 pandemic. Unemployment soared dangerously, with 30 million now jobless in a population of 170 million. Foreign exchange reserves have fallen by 44% in three years, raising apprehensions of Bangladesh’s capacity to pay back loans taken from multilateral organisations. The value of the Bangladesh Taka has dropped 28% this year. Spiralling inflation and price rise, often attributed to the growth of ruling party-backed extortion syndicates who fleece businesses, turned the country into a boiling cauldron waiting for a trigger to light up.
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A mishandling
That happened with the anti-quota protests and its mishandling by Ms. Hasina and her inner coterie. On June 5, the High Court upheld the quotas in government jobs, triggering furious student protests who wanted them abolished to pave the way for a merit-based system. Ms. Hasina’s government had agreed to scrap the quotas in government jobs (56% in all, 30% for descendants of 1971 freedom fighters) during the 2018 student agitation but a case was filed challenging the government’s decision. All that Ms. Hasina had to do was to bring the student leaders to the table and assure them of challenging the High Court’s decision in the Supreme Court, which her government ultimately did.
Instead, she initially ignored the protests. Then, a comment of hers upset the students when she said: “ If not for descendants of freedom fighters, should we create quotas for those of Razakars”. Razakar is a derogatory word in Bangladesh, denoting those who backed the Pakistan Army’s suppression campaign during the 1971 Liberation War. As the movement intensified, Ms. Hasina resorted to a brutal crackdown by the police and her own student wing, the Chhatra League. That proved counterproductive and the situation spun out of control. In the end, Ms. Hasina paid a heavy price for her arrogance of power, for losing the mass connect that had once propelled her to high office. It is no mean feat for a traditional housewife to take on her father’s mantle after the assassination of almost her entire family and bring to power a party that had been badly demoralised by a bloody 1975 coup. But, in the end, the loss of that mass connect proved to be her undoing.
Subir Bhaumik is a veteran BBC journalist and author. He has served as Senior Editor in the Dhaka-based bdnews24.com
Published - August 08, 2024 12:16 am IST
