Hasina must learn from Rajapaksa ouster

POLITICAL street violence in Bangladesh has been a recurring event for nearly three decades. But even by these standards, the killing of over 100 people, many of them student protesters shot dead by the police, is a new low in the five-decade history of the country. With this, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, who in January won a fourth consecutive term in office in an election boycotted by the Opposition, on a barely 40 per cent turnout, has entered politically hazardous territory.

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For Delhi, which has placed all its Bangladesh bets on Hasina, her political actions and clear unpopularity are bound to put increasing pressures on bilateral ties.

The Bangladesh Supreme Court’s order slashing the quota of 30 per cent of government jobs for descendants of freedom fighters, and bringing down all reservation to a total of 7 per cent from the previous 56 per cent, may not end the Bangladesh leader’s troubles.

The protests against the quota for freedom fighters are just one manifestation of deep anger against a Prime Minister who was once hailed as a model of democracy and secularism in the Islamic world, but who has since consolidated her hold on power in the manner of an authoritarian – describing the Opposition as ‘terrorists’, jailing its leaders, lashing out at critics as ‘traitors’ to the nation, muzzling the media, and being accused by rights activists of using enforced disappearances and extra-judicial killings to silence them. Hasina, who has survived more than one assassination attempt, would like the world to see her as the last woman standing between Islamist extremism and her fragile country. But even her supporters are finding it hard to justify her methods.

Writing in these columns recently on the 75th anniversary of the Awami League, the party of Bangladesh’s liberation that Hasina has led for four decades, Mahfuz Anam, editor of The Daily Star, described how it had lost its way badly. The Awami League, he wrote, “today is its own judge and jury. It is a typical example of a political party living in its own bubble. And since it has monopoly control on all the levers of power, the bubble, as fragile as it is, can also be dangerous. This is so because the reality presented by the bubble can form the basis of decisions that can fatally harm us all.”

Hasina has been in office continuously since January 2009. Her landslide victory in the December 2008 elections came after a tumultuous period for the country and was hailed internationally as a win for progressive forces in Bangladesh. But a mutiny by officers of the Bangladesh Rifles in February 2009, a month after she was sworn in, shook her government.

Hasina survived that crisis, with Delhi holding her hand. In the 15 years since then, Bangladesh’s economic turnaround and its solid progress on human development indicators — the country is set to graduate from the Least Developed Category in 2026 — won her much international admiration, at the same time as her increasingly authoritarian political style drew criticism and made her unpopular at home.

The 2012-13 fast-tracking of a process to punish Pakistan’s Islamist collaborators during the 1971 Liberation War, which led to the execution of six Jamaat-e-Islami leaders and one of the opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) after a quick trial and conviction by a special court, fuelled polarisation in the polity. The Jamaat-e-Islami was banned, and the BNP has since boycotted two elections — in 2013 and 2023 — over its unmet demand for a caretaker government to oversee the electoral process. The party contested the 2018 election, but its leader, Khaleda Zia, was convicted and jailed, and not allowed to run.

The Hasina government’s counter-terrorism response after a wave of Islamist-linked killings of secular activists culminating in the 2016 terrorist attack on a cafe in Dhaka, is seen to have been effective. But Hasina’s one-party rule and the government’s single-minded focus on wiping out the political opposition have led to a vacuum in the polity that is being filled by a yearning in large sections of the public for Islamic governance. This is especially so as Bangladesh’s economic dream run has now run out of gas, literally. Russia’s Ukraine war slowed down the country’s post-pandemic recovery, with a direct impact on the citizens. Food inflation is high. An acute unemployment crisis has worsened people’s lives. And a young population is demanding political accountability from an unresponsive government. This is why the quota in jobs brought students out on the streets, resulting in last week’s bloodshed.

For Delhi, which has placed all its Bangladesh bets on Hasina, her political actions and clear unpopularity are bound to put increasing pressures on bilateral ties. On the one hand, Hasina’s crackdown on Islamist groups, which Indian security agencies link to Pakistan, as well as against northeastern insurgency groups with safe havens across the border, is exactly what Delhi wants. In this respect, the Khaleda-led BNP coalition government was a nightmare that India has no desire to relive. Like all other countries in South Asia except Bhutan, Bangladesh has signed on to China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Hasina wants Beijing to invest more money in Bangladesh’s infrastructure development. This was her objective during a recent visit to Beijing. Other than Pakistan, Bangladesh is the only country in the neighbourhood that buys weapons and other military equipment from China. So far, this has put no apparent strain on ties with India, though Beijing’s interest in developing the Teesta reservoir rang alarm bells in Delhi, and sent the Foreign Secretary rushing to Dhaka with a matching offer, reiterated during her visit to Delhi in June.

On the other hand, Hasina’s detractors and opponents see her using her proximity to Delhi to claim political legitimacy at home, which feeds directly into her unpopularity. More so as it has failed to deliver Bangladesh’s most important demand, a share of the Teesta waters. Instead, what Bangladesh got was an untendered power purchase deal with an Adani power plant in Jharkhand, which ran into a storm of criticism for the high coal price written into the agreement. In the event, an ‘India Out’ campaign, following on a similar agitation in the Maldives, was hardly a surprise. Hasina’s pushback ensured it was shortlived, but it showed the sentiment exists. How long Hasina, with her depleted political capital, can stand as a buffer is a valid question.

July 2024 in Dhaka is not July 2022 in Colombo. Bangladesh’s condition is not as precarious as the dire straits in Sri Lanka that triggered a people’s movement and the ouster of Gotabaya and Mahinda Rajapaksa from the leadership of the country. But Sri Lanka should be a cautionary tale for Hasina. Her description of protesting students as ‘razakar’, a term of abuse for collaborators with the Pakistan army in 1971, lays bare Hasina’s fragile bubble. If she does not break out of it, something may give soon in Bangladesh. At a point when India’s neighbours are all politically and economically unstable, Delhi’s Neighbourhood First policy seems more important than ever.