Bangladesh Remains in Political Turmoil

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Fredericton, NB] Daily Gleaner

Apparently even the founder of Pakistan, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, was at first reluctant to have British India partitioned into Muslim and Hindu majority states. He would have preferred a federated polity which would have also guaranteed the political security of the tens of millions of Muslims who would otherwise end up as minorities in a Hindu country.

But it was not to be. Instead, he got what many described as a “maimed, moth-eaten Pakistan,” comprising the far western and eastern areas of the subcontinent, separated by 1,600 kilometres by the new sovereign Indian nation.

Two former provinces were themselves partitioned. In the west, Punjab’s Muslim majority became part of Pakistan, while the Hindu and Sikh areas were incorporated into India. In the east, Bengal was likewise split in two. The western part, including Kolkota, went to India, the Muslim east to Pakistan.

Even this Pakistan, whose people had little in common save their Muslim faith, did not last. The Bengali Muslims in 1971, tired of domination by the west, fought a liberation struggle and formed their own nation of Bangladesh.

Bangladesh is a homogenous nation-state, a rarity in this part of the world, yet it has remained in political turmoil, with fraudulent elections, military coups, political violence, and the assassination of several political leaders, including its founder and first president, Sheik Mujibar Rahman, in 1975, and one of his successors, General Ziaur Rahman, murdered in 1981.

In recent years, two women have, so to speak, inherited power and taken turns running the country. Begum Khaleda Zia, the widow of President Ziaur Rahman and head of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), became prime minister in 1991, followed five years later by the Awami League’s Sheikh Hasina Wajed, the daughter of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman.

Begum Khaleda Zia returned to power in 2001, but lost the 2008 election to Sheikh Hasina, who won three more elections in 2014, 2018, and 2024. But she was ousted on August 5 of this year, just seven months into her term. What happened?

Well, the nation’s last two general elections proved “controversial,” with complaints of crackdowns on opposition parties and ballot stuffing in favor of her ruling Awami League.

Before 2011, Bangladesh had a “caretaker” system intended to prevent ruling parties from rigging and manipulating elections. Under that system, when an elected government finished its mandate, a caretaker took over the state administration for three months in order to hold free and fair elections.

Caretaker administrations conducted general elections in 1996, 2001, and 2008, and the polls were considered free, fair, and inclusive.

However, the system came to an end in 2011, and the ruling Awami League was in power at the time of the general election of 2014. With the safeguards gone, the vote was clearly fraudulent, with almost all major opposition parties boycotting it. Accusations of massive vote rigging also tainted the subsequent 2018 and 2024 polls.

Opposition figures alleged that more than 20,000 BNP supporters had been arrested on “fictitious and concocted charges,” including Begum Zia. They also claimed to have documented hundreds of cases of enforced disappearances and extra-judicial killings by security forces since 2009.

“Democracy is dead in Bangladesh,” Abdul Moyeen Khan, a senior BNP leader, remarked prior to the Jan. 7 vote. Less than 10 per cent of the eligible voters bothered to turn up to cast a ballot.

It all came to a head this summer. Weeks of student-led anti-government protests toppled Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, who resigned and fled the country to India. They were protesting of a quota system that reserved government jobs for the children and grandchildren of those who fought in the 1971 liberation war. Students called for most of jobs to be filled on merit alone.

Huge crowds stormed her official residence in Dhaka amid reports of looting and disorder in the capital. More than 1,000 people were killed in the unrest, most of them civilians shot by security forces.

Her 15-year rule was known for human rights violations. The United States placed sanctions on the elite Rapid Action Battalion, linked to disappearances and extrajudicial killings. Human Rights Watch said in a report in 2021 that nearly 600 people have been forcibly “disappeared” by security forces since 2009.

Former Prime Minister Khaleda Zia is now free, and Mohammad Yunus, the developmental economist who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for his work with microcredit through Grameen Bank, is leading an interim government as a “chief advisor.”

How will this affect relations with India? When Sheikh Hasina fled Bangladesh to New Delhi, she was greeted by India’s National Security Adviser Ajit Doval. She is believed to have been living in and around the Indian capital. But calls for Hasina’s extradition back to Bangladesh are growing.

The general secretary of the opposition BNP,, Mirza Fakhrul Islam Alamgir,, told Indian media that Hasina must be extradited and tried in Bangladesh. Muhammed Quader, the chairman of the Jatiya Party, echoed this demand on the same day. Quader was the opposition leader of the Bangladesh parliament that was dissolved on August 6.

“India should help Bangladesh seek accountability from her as she has evidently done great deal of harm,” Alamgir was quoted as saying by Indian media. A slew of legal cases, including murder, face her.