The country of Bengal is a land where, owing to the climate’s favouring the base, the dust of dissension is always rising – so said the Mughal court chronicler Abul Fazl in the 16th century.
Protests and popular uprising is nothing new to Bangladesh. The region had produced peasant movements and urban revolutionaries against the British. Student protests had repeatedly rocked the Pakistani establishment, culminating in the Liberation War of 1971. Students had brought down a military ruler in 1990. And on August 5, they brought an end to the 15-year iron-fisted rule of Sheikh Hasina.
There is, however, one way the end of Hasina’s rule differs from the other successful youth-led uprisings in Bangladesh. Both Ayub Khan (of the then united Pakistan) and HM Ershad resigned in the face of popular uprisings, but they did so after negotiating an exit with the opposition politicians and the civil-military establishment, addressing the nation before their departure with calls for calm and unity.
Not so for Hasina, who resigned when the generals informed her that people – students, factory workers, housewives, office workers, hundreds of thousands of citizens of Dhaka and many more from around the country – were marching towards Hasina’s official residence to reclaim their house (the residence is called Ganabhaban, which translates as the People’s Palace) and the forces would not stand in the way.
Hasina could not negotiate a dignified exit. No farewell address to the nation for her. In fact, it now appears that she did not even inform her senior ministers about her resignation. Her party leaders and other high-ranking members of the regime were unprepared for the collapse, and had to seek refuge in the cantonment to save themselves from the public wrath.
Even as Hasina was preparing to flee, the regime’s henchmen and street enforcers were using violence against the unarmed people across the country.
Hasina had fled Bangladesh on a helicopter without any of her political aides, not only leaving a power vacuum in the country, but also showing little regard for the cronies who had propped up her regime for the past 15 years or the party that she had led for the past four decades.
Hasina’s hasty end may appear surprising. But a look at her record in office underscores how her seemingly selfish flight befits her 15 years in power.
Bangladesh is a unitary republic with a unicameral legislature and a first-past-the-post voting system –all legacy of the Raj. To this, the country’s constitution added a provision that prohibited floor-crossing. Further, the local governments’ powers have been whittled away over the years.
This meant that the country’s fledgling democracy between 1991 and 2006 was an extreme winner-takes-all zero-sum contest where those losing an election were consigned to political oblivion, and sometime physical elimination. It was in this context that a military coup in 2007 attempted to retire Hasina, along with her rival Khaleda Zia, from politics.
That attempt failed and Hasina came to power after winning the December 2008 election promising din bodol (changing days).
She had a historic opportunity to reform Bangladesh’s democratic institutions. A rapprochement with Khaleda was very much possible, indeed expected. No radical ideas needed to be entertained. Stuff like free elections to strong local government bodies, regular consultations with the opposition on matters of national importance, and letting the judiciary and the media to work independently – the stuff that would be taken for granted in any democracy – would have sufficed.
Instead, from very early on, Hasina chose a very different path.
In moves that could have come out of Bollywood or Hollywood crime capers, Hasina hit at a personal level the two individuals who could rival her in stature. Khaleda Zia, a twice-elected prime minister, was evicted from her home of four decades on flimsy legal grounds in 2010.
In the following year, again using legal machinations, Muhammad Yunus, the Nobel winning microcredit pioneer, was evicted from the Grameen Bank that he created. In subsequent years, the former would be jailed, and the latter continued to be harassed through the legal system, including appearing before the court in an iron cage earlier this year.
The twin hits sent out a chilling signal to Bangladesh’s civil society and the political class that no one would be safe from Hasina’s wrath. Fear was the key to her power. And she used it to rig three elections in the most blatant manner possible.
Recognising the high stakes at elections, political parties had devised the caretaker government system where a consensus group of people would administer elections within 90 days. This was first tried in 1991, and then codified into the constitution in 1996.
Hasina junked this in 2011. The opposition boycotted the election in January 2014, and Hasina acquired a majority in the parliament through MPs who were returned unopposed. The opposition joined the December 2018 election after she made a personal promise that it wouldn’t be rigged – a promise honoured in breech as she let her partymen and local administration stuff the ballot boxes on the night before the election day.
And in January this year, when the opposition again boycotted, she put up a Potemkin election where her partymen were asked to run as ‘dummy independents’ to avoid the repeat of the 2014 embarrassment.
One can see a pattern here – the use of the court, the constitution, and other legal covers to put up an appearance of democracy in a manner that made men like Vladimir Putin look like novices.
She had also used violence to get her way. Extrajudicial killings – euphemistically called encounters in India and crossfire in Bangladesh – were not invented by the Hasina regime. Nor was custodial torture. However, she had upped the ante of brutality by not just turning up the numbers of victims, but also introducing enforced disappearance into the mix. Over the years, perhaps over a thousand individuals were known victims of these brutal state enforced human rights violations in Bangladesh.
And in Bangladesh, the state meant Hasina.
Chillingly, Hasina made promises to the families of the victims of her brutality, promises she knew to be false. For example, Ilyas Ali, a former opposition lawmaker, was abducted in 2012. Hasina told his family that she would help find him.
While many individuals kept in her security dungeons – one installation is sadistically called Aynaghar (the House of Mirror) – has returned home after the despot had fled, Ali hasn’t,
At other times, she dismissed the victims in a cruel and cavalier manner. For example, two journalists were murdered in 2012 when they began investigating corruption in the energy sector. Hasina callously said the government couldn’t provide safety in people’s bedroom.
As an aside, Hasina had passed a law earlier forbidding any such investigation into the energy sector. This law has been scrapped by the interim administration currently running Bangladesh, and hopefully we will soon learn about the scams involving some of the richest Bangladeshis (as well as, of course, India’s Adani Group).
This was, of course, not the only law impinging on the freedom of speech. For example, laws ostensibly to protect individuals from cybercrime were used to imprison people for their social media jokes about Hasina, her family, or her government.
And then there was the Bangladesh Chhatra League, ostensibly the student wing of the ruling party, but in practice killers and enforcers of the regime at the grassroot level across the country who killed not just political opponents, but random individuals.
For example, Biswajit Das, a tailor in Dhaka’s old Hindu neighbourhood of Shankari Bazaar, was killed by the BCL goons in December 2012 when he was on his way to his shop.
That, dear reader, was Hasina’s Bangladesh. A personalised despotism redolent of rajahs and sultans of a bygone era, where former prime ministers and Nobel laureates were not safe from her packed courts, where journalists and politicians, and ordinary people, would be killed, tortured, or illegally abducted.
Meanwhile, her cronies ran a corrupt system that plundered billions from the country’s energy sector, banks and various infrastructure megaprojects.
Did it have to be thus? Was Bangladesh destined for Hasina’s tyranny?
There is a strand of thought that posits that Hasina’s personal traumas – her family was killed in the putsch against her father, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, in August 1975, and she herself survived an assassination attempt in August 2004 – have contributed to her vindictiveness.
Future scholars will undoubtedly explore that theme. However, a few points should be noted.
Hasina is not the only victim of political violence in our benighted subcontinent. Can one imagine the Indian opposition leader to transmogrify into a cruel dictator because he lost his father and grandmother to assassins’ bomb and bullets?
Further, the killers of the August 1975 massacre were tried, convicted, and executed in accordance with the law. Hasina could have used the process as an exercise in national healing, acting to ensure that never again would the country experience politics of violence and vendetta.
She clearly did not do that.
Indeed, she had not even pursued a proper investigation and trial of the 2004 assassination attempt against her. She had tortured a key accused of the assassination attempt to claim in 2011, four years after his arrest and initial confession, that Tarique Rahman, a senior opposition leader and the son of Khaleda Zia, was involved in the plot.
Incidentally, the police officer in charge of procuring the tortured confession would run on the Awami League ticket in the fraudulent election of this January.
Another argument often made is that two violent incidents early in her rule made it all but impossible for her to leave power voluntarily. In February 2009, before her government was even 2‑months old, a mutiny in the Bangladesh Rifles – the border security paramilitary – had killed 57 army officers. Hasina failed to grasp the gravity of the situation, quell the mutiny, and save the officers.
Four years later, between February and May 2013, large youth demonstrations rocked Dhaka, with some demanding the hanging of those accused of siding with Pakistan in 1971, and others claiming to protect Islam from atheists and apostates.
Instead of diffusing the culture wars underpinning these protests, Hasina fanned them for political end, until a grand rally of madrassah students became too large for control. At that point, Hasina ordered her special forces to use sound grenades and automatic weapon in what looks like a dress rehearsal for the events of Monsoon 2024.
Perhaps Hasina was afraid of a future government digging into these tragic events. Perhaps the transgression made it impossible for her to leave office voluntarily. So, she doubled down.
Hasina ruled through fear. She thought herself invulnerable. She mocked and ridiculed her opponents, and then repressed them.
She had dismissed the students protesting against public service hiring practices as descendants of those who collaborated with Pakistan in 1971. The callow insult triggered the student uprising that she couldn’t suppress with her party cadres and politicised law enforcement agencies, despite killing nearly 900 people by official counts – the bloodiest act of political violence in Bangladesh’s history barring the War of 1971.
By the first few days of August, Bangladesh had seen the largest mass participation in political protests since Mahatma Gandhi’s call for swaraj over a century ago.
Hasina’s sudden denouement might have come as a surprise. But her disgraceful flight out of Dhaka shouldn’t have. She fled in the manner that she ruled.
Jyoti Rahman is a Bangladeshi writer. His pieces are archived at https://jrahman.substack.com/
