Bangladesh coup
Rashed Rahman
The more than one month long agitation in Bangladesh against the quota policy has finally ended in a military coup. Army chief Waker-Uz-Zaman led the army action, giving Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina a 45 minute ultimatum to quit. Sheikh Hasina, accompanied by her sister Sheikh Rehana, resigned and fled in a military helicopter to Agartala, Tripura, India (a name that brings back memories of the Agartala Conspiracy Case against her father Sheikh Mujibur Rehman). It is not yet clear whether the ousted former prime minister will remain in India, in which successive governments, including the present one led by Mr Modi, have been well disposed towards Sheikh Hasina, or she will opt to move to some other country. The army chief addressed a press conference after the startling development to announce that he had met the opposition (the main component of which is the Bangladesh Nationalist Party or BNP of Begum Zia) and agreed to set up an interim government to deal with the chaotic situation that has emerged after the continuous protests, led first and foremost by students, yielded 300 dead at the hands of Sheikh Hasina’s police and security forces.
The news of the downfall and flight out of the country was treated with joyous celebrations on the street, which had been the theatre of the clashes between the protestors and the security forces. Reportedly, apart from the deaths and injuries, more than 1,000 protestors were under arrest, who will now no doubt be released. The issue that sparked the protest movement was a salariat revolt against the quota (30 percent) of government jobs reserved for the families of liberation war fighters. The protestors’ argument was that a half century after independence in 1971, the quota was reserved for Sheikh Hasina’s government’s supporters and it was high time it was abolished in favour of a merit system. On the face of it, the demand was not so radical that it could not be contemplated. However, in the polarised polity that has characterised Bangladesh since its birth, Sheikh Hasina would not budge and even went so far as to ask mockingly whether the quota should be given to the Razakars(Volunteers). These were informal armed militias raised by the Pakistan army during the struggle in East Pakistan in 1971 and allegedly were guilty of bloody repression of the people suspected of being supporters of East Pakistan’s breaking away from Pakistan. This remark of Sheikh Hasina’s acted like salt on the wounds of the protestors and lent new fury to their rallies on the street.
Sheikh Hasina’s departure led to the Prime Minister’s House being raided and looted by celebrating protestors. A statue of her father, considered the father of the nation, was vandalized. This act could be considered confirmation of the fact that Sheikh Mujib’s legacy no longer remained a symbol of the liberation war but, instead, Sheikh Hasina’s politics of repression of the opposition. In the dying days of her government, it once again banned the Jamaat-i-Islami, considered since 1971 to be a collaborator enemy of Bangladesh, and some of whose leaders were tried and hanged during Sheikh Hasina’s tenure in power for over 20 years.
A glance at Bangladesh’s troubled history since it broke away from Pakistan (with Indian military help) would reveal the instability from which the country has suffered almost from day one. Sheikh Mujib and his family were murdered in an army coup in August 1975. Sheikh Hasina and her sister Sheikh Rehana were only spared because they were abroad at the time. This was to be the first of 29 military coups till the last one in December 2011, some of them unsuccessful. Bangladesh’s post-independence tumult was the result of the factionalisation of the Bangladesh army, composed of former Pakistan army personnel, liberation fighters, and post-independence recruits. This mix, far from developing a disciplined army, yielded coups, counter-coups, coups-within-coups repeatedly. As far as the political class is concerned, if the Awami League of Sheikh Hasina wore the mantle of the leader of the independence struggle and the halo of Bangabandhu, Sheikh Mujib’s status as the father of the nation, the main opposition party, the BNP, is led by the widow of military coup maker General Ziaur Rehman. With this kind of fractured and polarised military and polity, all that has transpired (and seemingly continues to bedevil) in Bangladesh’s independent history does not come as a surprise.
There are lessons to be learnt from the happenings of late in Sri Lanka, Kenya and Bangladesh. Perhaps the time has come that the underdevelopment imposed by the current global order is breaking down before the desperation and mass protests of the suffering peoples in the poorest countries of the world. If their rulers continue to rely on repression and manipulation of the political order to run things, more countries could soon be facing their own people’s mass protests. Pakistan too should take heed and register the anger and frustration at poverty, joblessness, inflation, high electricity prices and so on bubbling beneath the surface of a deceptive calm of an internally increasingly desperate people.
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