When the extraordinary ouster of Sheikh Hasina from power in Bangladesh on August 5 through a nationwide revolt led by young students took place, the country experienced a precarious paradox: the state of sovereign power in Bangladesh became lawless. “The country”, a friend of mine, Mohinder Singh—who teaches politics at JNU—messaged me, “moved from an undeclared state of emergency (by the Hasina regime) to a declared state of exception by the people.” It was simultaneously the most dreadful, and the most promising, moment of sovereignty.
Hasina ruled by autocratic methods – not holding fair elections, repressing dissent, corrupting state institutions and the media, indulging in extrajudicial killings and enforced disappearances. The secret prison run by Bangladesh’s military intelligence agency was named ‘ayna ghar’, or the ‘house of mirrors’ – more a house of horror. It is a metaphor for Hasina’s rule. She ran a sham democracy like a police state.
As Hasina dramatically fled in an army chopper to India, demonstrators vandalised her home and stole her personal belongings including her undergarments. Statues of Bangladesh’s founding patriarch, Sheikh Mujibur Rehman, were dismantled like Lenin’s during the 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union. A professor who is said to have supported Hasina’s International Crimes Tribunal was attacked near Dhaka airport. Two anonymous bodies hung upside down from a pedestrian bridge in Dhaka. The shadow of retributive politics that loomed over Bangladesh’s polity since its independence in 1971 took on a monstrous shape. The new possibility for democracy had also exposed political – and communal – faultlines.
Also read: ‘Amago ki Hoibo?’: A Repeat of the Same Political Script in Bangladesh
The rapidity of the violence is because the targets were visibly identifiable. Till August 4, student demonstrators of the anti-discrimination movement and their supporters were under attack by state forces as well as by members of the Awami League (including its students’ wing). As power changed hands, so did the political identity of the victims. Awami League leaders and cadres were targeted across Bangladesh. The country’s Hindus too bore the brunt of targeted violence: According to the Bangladesh National Hindu Grand Alliance, there have been attacks and threats against the Hindu community in 278 locations across 48 districts. ‘This is not just an attack on individuals but an assault on the Hindu religion’, its leaders said at a press conference in Dhaka on August 13. Temples have been attacked, Hindu homes and businesses (including a restaurant) were targeted. Of the estimated 250 people who have been killed in disturbances since August 5, five are Hindu.
The attacks on Hindus brought alive the old alarm of persecution they have faced over the years at the hands of Islamists in Bangladesh. In a gesture of solidarity, Muslim clerics and students stood guard outside temples to prevent attacks. Hindu and Muslim neighbours stayed awake at night to guard against loot and robbery. The foot soldiers of the Hindu right in India made a mockery of the suffering of the Hindu community in Bangladesh by peddling fake news and exaggerating their real state of distress. What the right in India wants is to manipulate the Bangladeshi Hindu’s troubles to fuel animosity against Indian Muslims. For this reason, it is incapable of partaking in the woes of the community it desperately wants to represent.
The Hindu community in Bangladesh came out in large numbers in Dhaka, Chittagong and Gopalganj, demanding safety and justice. The Jamaat-e-Islami visited temples as an image-building exercise to pacify beleaguered Hindus and requested them to report any violence purportedly carried out by members of the party for them to take necessary action. The Jamaat is not a law enforcing body. Just as the RSS says there are no minorities in India, the Jamaat’s ‘emir’ says no one is a minority in Bangladesh as everyone is equal before the law. This is nothing but a majoritarian ploy to sideline the demand for minority rights.
After he landed at Dhaka airport on August 8, the 2006 Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus aired his hopes of a government that protects its people. He called the attacks on minorities and political opponents “part of a conspiracy”, though he did not name the conspirators. Yunus emphasised that those who indulged in violence and lawlessness were enemies of Bangladesh’s new journey. He wanted those who indulged in such acts to be brought into the democratic fold by making them understand the significance of law and order, and not by teaching them a lesson through counter-violence.
Also read: What’s there for India in Post-Hasina Bangladesh?
Speaking to the media after taking oath as chief adviser of the interim government, Yunus said Bangladesh was experiencing its second independence. He emphasised the importance of bringing order and justice. He further mentioned that students sacrificed their lives to usher in a free and fearless society. The dawn of a new regime must ensure a free expression of views, and a life without fear. Meeting the Hindu community at the Dhakeswari temple in Dhaka on August 13, Yunus reiterated a nationalist commitment towards (universal) “human rights”. He said the people must come together and not as Hindus or Muslims but as people of Bangladesh. Hindus asking for special safeguards, Yunus said, was diversionary in relation to a common humanist aspiration. He requested Hindus “not to compartmentalise their demands” and stick to the “main task”.
Bangladesh’s liberals and religious right seem to be equally reluctant to create special constitutional provisions for anti-discriminatory rights regarding minorities. No wonder, both groups have tried to misrepresent the attacks on Hindus as “political” (i.e. Hindus were targeted for siding with the Awami League), and not “religious”. If a religious group is attacked for political reasons, the religious aspect doesn’t get obliterated but enhanced. Yunus’s humanist discourse obfuscates the problem. Muslims are scared as Muslims when they are targeted as a community in India. Hindus are scared as Hindus in Bangladesh in similar circumstances. Fear among minorities is minoritarian fear. This fear comes from the lack of political strength compared to the majority. The national idea of “one people” must accommodate this radical imbalance of power if Bangladesh wants to call itself a democracy.
When a student leader was asked about the enforced resignation of judges and heads of other public institutions, he said it was necessary to remove Hasina’s “legacy”. Students took to the streets on August 10 demanding the resignation of the chief justice – who quit immediately. The Supreme Court of Bangladesh had to be refurbished to get rid of the law’s political garb. An old Bangladeshi writer considered far-left quoted Mao. “Revolution is not a dinner party”, he said, evoking the fear of the enemy and of “counter revolution”. He argued that Bangladesh has a long way to go before the sacrifice of blood gives way to the promise of the ballot. For him, democracy has to wait till the war against the previous regime is over.
Institutional morality can’t justify purges. The removal of fear and enmity that Yunus mentioned must also include the exorcism of the fear of imaginary enemies. Fear is a Hobbesian condition of violence that seeks the moral intervention of the law. Democracy is the transformation of a politics of enmity into the politics of representation. The caretaker government’s decision to abolish August 15 as a national holiday for mourning Mujibur Rehman’s murder in 1975 is a petty move. Settling ideological scores through this kind of erasure damages the history of political memory and the memory of political history. It weakens the foundations of a democratic country’s legacy. Mujib’s contribution to Bangladesh’s independence can’t be eclipsed by the dark years of Hasina’s rule, just like Nehru’s place in India’s history isn’t tainted by his daughter Indira’s declaration of Emergency in 1975.
There is light in the hope of a democracy to come, and a lingering darkness of old apprehensions that a military-backed regressive regime might come to power and set the clock back. Hasina is gone and Bangladesh must now face up to the risk of democracy.
Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee is a poet, writer, translator and political science scholar. His latest book is Nehru and the Spirit of India.
