For A ‘New’ Bangladesh: An Astute Strategic Prism? – OpEd

The sweeping protests in July-August 2024 that ousted Bangladesh’s Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s (Hasina) authoritarian rule, won the country an innovative brand---the “New” Bangladesh minus the earlier steamroller governance. In the wake of that upheaval, which still rings throughout the country, two hot-button disputes reemerged from its not-so-hidden past: While Hasina’s sudden tumble ripples like a political earthquake in India, will New Delhi be a threat to Bangladesh’s future stability and sovereignty? Should Bangladesh reset its ideological and identity sensitivities as a bulwark against a future despotic menace? Both are existential questions. But Dr. Mohammad Yunus is now busy navigating between the populist cry for a retribution against the perpetrators of the banished tyranny, responsible for wanton killings and repression, and the simmering demands for an early restoration of an elected democracy.

The post-Hasina leaders need an astute strategy to deal with the emerging Bangladesh-India encounters and the ideological contents for the country’s national integrity and sovereignty. Neither the strategic imperatives nor the ideological probes will take care of themselves---not in “new” Bangladesh where Hasina’s earlier autocratic rule is more than a painful remembrance! Her swift collapse has severely jolted India, the persistent benefactor of the hegemonic leadership that rigged three consecutive elections boycotted by the opposition parties. And the maximum number of Bangladeshis are more confident now, which is likely to pop up in their domestic and diplomatic aspirations.

Geo-politics, however, does not give Bangladesh easy choices in dealing with its big and powerful neighbor that surrounds the country from three sides. But India’s enormous size and its military as well as economic prowess have not yet offered an unrestrained diplomatic advantage over Bangladesh, still blistering against its ousted autocrat, now sheltered in India. New Delhi’s old political ties to the AL and its remnants scattered across the band evoke deep suspicion in Bangladesh. Not long ago, Guardian, the British newspaper disparaged India’s strategy of putting all its diplomatic eggs in the basket of one leader (Hasina) and one party (Awami League/AL) as a “myopic” venture. India hopes for Bangladesh’s “eternal obligation” to yield to New Delhi’s wishes because of its overt and covert help towards the 1971 struggle for independence. Narendra Modi’s brazen anti-Muslim policy is humiliating to the Bangladeshi Muslims although the Hasina government did not raise an eyebrow against India’s Hindutva zealots. It will be a thorn in the future Indo-Bangladesh relations. New Delhi tries to handcuff Dhaka’s domestic and foreign policies on the grounds of the (Bengali) Hindu minority’s alleged insecurity in Bangladesh while the Indian media continues to smear Bangladesh’s current Interim Regime for its apparent capitulation to the Islamic militants and their leaders. Badruddin Umar, a senior socio-political commentator in Dhaka recently pointed out that the Indian intellectual community has been mostly silent about the unprecedented protests that recently dislodged a dictatorship after an enormous loss of lives and destruction of infrastructures.

Hasina’s rapid plunge on August 5 dramatized India’s loss in Bangladesh, but India’s popularity faltered with the bulk of Bangladeshis, not long after the 1971 independence. As New Delhi became the enabler of the Hasina-led single party (AL) juggernaut, India’s unpopularity spiraled in Bangladesh throughout the last decade. India will be a threat to Bangladesh’s internal politics and stability if New Delhi tries for a “regime change” by rehabilitating and regrouping Hasina and her AL. She has settled in a virtual exile in India, but scores of the AL leaders have also fled to India, and the whispering reminiscences of the 1971 Indian military intervention stoke up anxiety in Bangladesh. The Bangladeshis itch for Hasina’s extradition to face a domestic or international trial for the hundreds of students and ordinary citizens deliberately killed or wounded by the politicized police, security forces and the AL-hired goons during the tumultuous civil unrest in July-August 2024. China, New Delhi’s archrival may now extract more geo-political advantages from the post-Hasina regime; it will not be welcome to India and the western rivals vying for influence in the region.

The storm of protests that evicted the Hasina government changed the country’s political calculus. The secular Bangalee nationalism that gained an unprecedented ascendancy against the earlier Pakistani Muslim nationalism exhausted its political traction since 1971. Secularism and Bengali nationalism provided an ideological cover for Hasina’s long tyrannical rule. She also postured her regime as a thundering protection against Islamic orthodoxy in Bangladesh. Those appeals, exclusionary in their substances, merit a reset although it is not yet certain if Dr. M. Yunus’ cabinet is ready to step into emotionally charged identity debates.

The western style secularism has failed to take roots in most Muslim countries including Bangladesh mainly because the social, political, and religious interactions in the Muslim-majority countries are not identical with those of the European and North American nation-states. The stringent secular rhetoric that indeed equated conventional Islamic expressions with hardline fundamentalism hastened the country’s political polarization. The Muslim political inheritances of Colonial Bengal, the 1947 Partition and former East Pakistan connect with what is independent Bangladesh today. Not surprisingly, the Bangladesh government exiled in India in 1971 did not have enough time to deliberate on the details of the expected country’s ideological and identity configuration. Even though their political and historical contexts did not match, Bengali nationalism sauteed in Rabindranath Tagore’s patriotic song as the national anthem became a convenient choice blessed by India at those critical hours. Later in Bangladesh, the “pro-liberation forces” and their “cult of patriotic fervor,” a vocabulary borrowed from (late) Ashok Mitra, a West Bengali leftist intellectual, denied the Muslim inspiration’s space in the country’s chronicle. But those ideological postures effectively helped the AL to consolidate its authority multiple times---by Hasina in recent years, but also by Sheikh Mujibur Rahman (Sheikh Mujib) at the dawn of Bangladesh.

Muslim distinctiveness, not a religious extremism, is a security asset for Bangladesh’s sovereignty, independence, and integrity. Once A.K. Fazlul Haque, in the 1940s, called upon the people not to apologize for being Muslims. The liberal perception of the Islamic groups as the “enemy” of Bangladesh sovereignty is a dangerous appellation that undermines national harmony. The Islamic parties stand for the curse of the liberal intellectuals and politicians---the stance goes beyond the right-wing parties’ controversial resistance to the 1971 breakup of Pakistan.

In my Asian Survey, November 1994, article, “The Liberals and the Religious Right in Bangladesh,” I observed that the right-left controversy eventually destabilized peace and democracy in Bangladesh while, globally, that time-worn dichotomy gradually yielded to a more pragmatic and multilateral view of life. The feisty Muslim consciousness, however, survived through their populist roots. Partly, the liberal-secular clash emanates from the liberal establishment’s “blind spot” about religion. Anyone who appeals to Islamic values endures the relegation as a Maulabadi (fundamentalist/fanatic), enemy of Bangladesh independence scratching for zealotry. The AL and their liberal allies abused this epithet as a political capital against the so-called religious right. But the country’s strategic future and its democratic development call for participation of all groups including the Islamists in the political process.

Majority of the liberal leaders, their outfits and the cohorts did not raise a hell against the New Delhi-supported authoritarian regime for the last fifteen years. Hasina’s ultimate downfall came from the swelling anti-job-quota roil that transformed into a fearsome coalition against her long dictatorship. The widening political upheaval involved diverse elements--- the opposition-blessed protestors, rightwing Islamic campaigners and the ordinary citizens who came out of their hiding plus a handful of human rights NGOs. The courageous student coordinators from both sides of the ideological scale blasted through deaths and destruction conducted by the police and the armed partisans. But it was an effective example of a strategic partnership between the right and left to exorcise a merciless autocracy that consistently denied democracy, fair election, and a peaceful political transition in Bangladesh.

• This article was published in the New Age (A Bangladeshi national daily, Dhaka), 07 October, 2024.