Mustafa Malik

Category: Sheikh Hasina

Can Bangladesh keep democratic?

 

BANGLADESH HAS BEGUN the first annual celebration of its struggle for the restoration of democracy.

 

A student-led movement during last July and August overthrew Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina Wajed, ending her 16-year-long repressive autocracy and ushering in the interim government of the Nobel laureate Chief Adviser Muhammad Yunus.

 

Opening the celebrations, Professor Yunus called on Bangladeshis to remain vigilant so “autocracy can’t raise its ugly head again.”

 

At a separate event, Syed Abdullah Muhammad Taher, deputy leader (naeb-e amir) of the Jamaat-e Islami party, echoed Yunus’s call but warned the celebrants to watch out so “the BNP doesn’t restart looting” after coming to power again.

 

The Bangladesh Nationalist Party, or BNP, had been accused of engaging in corruption under Prime Minister Khaleda Zia’s 2001-2006 regime. Her son, Tarique Rahman, was blamed for embezzlement and other criminal activities through what was known as “Hawa Bhavan” schemes.

 

The BNP and the Jamaat had been allies in previous governments. In December 2003, Martiur Rahman Nizami, then Jamaat chief and industries minister in a BNP-led government, told me at his Shilpa Bhavan office in Dhaka that his party’s alliance with the BNP was “an alliance of values.”  He meant Islamic values because the two right-of-center parties were pitted against the staunchly secular, pro-Indian Awami League party.

 

(Nizami would later be executed by the Hasina government on seemingly trumped-up charges of sedition and crimes against humanity.)

 

The BNP and the Jamaat are now the largest political parties in Bangladesh, and their old rival, the Awami League, is in the political wilderness. Having no other rivals, the two parties are gearing up to fight against each other in the next parliamentary elections, which are expected to be held early next year. Jamaat leader Muhamad Taher’s dig at the BNP appears to be a preview of their upcoming election campaigns.

 

Holding elections isn’t the biggest challenge facing Bangladesh, however. Establishing Democracy is.

 

The Bangladesh independence movement began in the late 1960s as a struggle to restore democracy in old Pakistan, of which Bangladesh was a province. Nearly a dozen parliamentary elections have been held during Bangladesh’s 54-year-long history, and yet democracy has eluded the country.

 

Sheikh Mujibur Rahman launched the Bangladesh independence struggle in East Pakistan and became the founder of independent Bangladesh. He was elected the country’s first prime minister, but transformed himself into a brutal dictator, ruling the country under a one-party government. Having assassinated democracy, Mujib himself fell victim to assassins’ bullets in August 1975.

 

The BNP was launched by one of Mujib’s successors, Maj. Gen. Ziaur Rahman, after he had grabbed power through an army coup d’état. President Zia ruled Bangladesh with an iron fist. In August 1978, I asked his titular prime minister, Shah Azizur Rahman, in Dhaka about “the status of democracy” under his boss’s civilian government.

 

“It takes a while,” replied the old stalwart of the Pakistan movement.

 

Zia’s civilian government followed an election, and after an interlude of another military dictatorship, elections were restored in 1991, returning the BNP to power, followed by a string of Awami League governments under Hasina.  All elections held under Hasina were rigged.

 

The student-led upheaval that toppled Hasina and drove her into India last Aug. 5 was an outburst of Bangladeshis’ pent-up outrage at her and her Awami League, who had not only unleashed wanton tyranny but relegated all levels of society into their servitude.

 

In July 2022, I was waiting for my turn to see a physician at his private chamber in Sylhet town, where I live. Suddenly, the doctor’s assistant dropped her phone and told him that the vice president of the town’s Awami League branch had arrived for a visit with the doctor.

 

Did he have an appointment? I asked the assistant. She nodded no.

 

The doctor ordered us to wait until the Awami League bigwig was served. As the mighty visitor lumbered through the waiting room, everybody – except me – rose in veneration. The man incinerated me with his blazing gaze before entering the doctor’s chamber.

 

Bangladeshis are waiting impatiently to see democracy restored once again to their country. The challenge they face will be to build a democratic culture and keep up their vigilance against the forays of future autocrats.

 

In 1787, a Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia adopted the American Constitution. Having got the document approved by delegates, Benjamin Franklin, one of America’s founding fathers, stepped out into the street.

 

“Is it a monarchy or a republic, doctor?” a woman asked the sage, who was commonly called “doctor,” even though he didn’t have a doctorate or a medical degree.

 

“A republic, madam,” Franklin replied, “if you can keep it.”

 

Muhammad Yunus and his interim government are striving to have democracy restored in Bangladesh. It will be up to the Bangladeshis to keep it.

 

~Mustafa Malik, the host of the blog ‘mustafamalik.com,’  worked for more than three decades as a reporter, editor and columnist for American newspapers and as a researcher for American think tanks.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A crusader for the oppressed

By Mustafa Malik

THE 14TH ANNIVERSARY OF Mahmud Ali’s passing fills my mind with memories of the man I had come to know as a human incarnation of Pakistan. Among those memories was his forecast that Bangladesh would establish good relations with Pakistan “sooner than you think.” The last time he repeated this prognosis to me was in June 2000, when he was visiting with me and my family in Washington. I remembered his prediction just yesterday as I ran into the headline “Hasina calls for strengthening ties with Pakistan” in the online edition of the Pakistani newspaper Dawn. Sheikh Hasina Wajed is the prime minister of Bangladesh.

Mr. Ali was the first of my two political mentors, the other being Nurul Amin, once chief minister of East Pakistan who became Pakistan’s last Bengalee prime minister. In 1970-71 both statesmen opposed the breakup of old Pakistan, which they had struggled onerously to help create, and they lived the rest of their lives in self-imposed exile in what was left of Pakistan after Bangladesh, formerly East Pakistan, had become independent. Years of repression and economic discrimination by West Pakistan-based military and political elites, culminating in a brutal military crackdown, led to Bangladesh’s secession from Pakistan. The two countries have since been estranged politically, diplomatically and economically. 

Mr. Ali (like me) was born in the British Indian province of Assam. In 1946, as the general secretary of the All-India Muslim League in Assam, the young leader helped split the old Hindu-majority Assam province through a referendum so our native Muslim-majority part of it could join the Muslim homeland of Pakistan.

Born into an aristocratic family, he cut his political teeth in the Pakistan movement and breathed his last during a speech in Lahore, having barely finished a sentence calling for the realization of one of Pakistan’s unfulfilled causes: the liberation of Indian-occupied part of the Jammu and Kashmir state.

Besides being one of Pakistan’s architects, Mr. Ali will be remembered as a top leader in its struggle to wrest democracy back from the clutches of military dictatorships. He was one of nine leading Pakistani statesmen who in 1962 issued the first clarion call to then military dictator General Mohammad Ayub Khan to restore democracy, which Ayub and a group of other army generals had usurped through a coup d’état.

It was Mr. Ali’s battle for “the emancipation of the peasants and workers,” as he termed it, which lured me to him at age 17.  The 38-year-old revenue minister of East Pakistan was presiding over a public meeting in his native Sunamganj district, in a field covered with the stubble of a newly harvested rice crop. The crowd of peasants, fishermen and a smattering of students greeted other speeches with mild applause. But when Mr. Ali began denouncing, passionately, the “exploitation” of impoverished people by zeminders (owners of large landed estates), money lenders and industrialists, they went wild with the slogans: “Mahmud Ali Zindabad” (long live Mahmud Ali), “Pakistan Zindabad,” and “Krishok-Mazdur ek ho” (Peasants and workers, unite).

I had just finished my matriculation (high school graduation) exam and was attending the meeting as a campaign activist for a progressive candidate for election to the East Pakistan legislature, supported by Mr. Ali, and was deeply impressed by his speech. The meeting over, I met him at a nearby dak bungalow and embarked on my lifelong association with him.

I had opportunities to come in contact with most of Pakistan’s major politicians and interview many of them for my column in the Pakistan Observer newspaper, published from Dhaka, now the Bangladeshi capital. Except for Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the founder of Bangladesh, Mahmud Ali was the most politically courageous and ideologically committed statesman I have known in Pakistan and Bangladesh. Mr. Ali’s relationship with Sheikh Mujib alternated between close friendship and bitter ideological and political rivalry.

Bangladesh-Pakistan ties

Among the last of Mr. Ali’s political projects was the one to promote solidarity among Muslim communities in Pakistan, Bangladesh, Kashmir and other parts of the Indian subcontinent through his movement Tehreek-i-Takmil-i-Pakistan. He remained optimistic about this goal to the last days of his life.

During our discursive discussions, he recalled that “the enthusiasm that Muslims in Bengal and Assam” had demonstrated for the creation of Pakistan, they had never before shown for “any other movement of causes.” That was mostly because, he said, they saw Pakistan as a “promise of liberation from Hindu zeminders and money lenders. And from caste-Hindu oppression.” Lower-caste Hindus, he went on, also shared with Muslims that aspirations for “freedom from the oppression and suppression” and in the 1937 and 1946 elections in Bengal, many of them voted for Muslim candidates. Eventually, he predicted, Muslim communities in the subcontinent would revive some kind of “solidarity as they showed during the Pakistan movement.” Bangladesh and Pakistan would, he added, establish “good relations sooner than you think.”

The last time he shared this optimism with me was, as I mentioned, in our very last meetings during June 22-24, 2000.  A federal minister in the Pakistan government, Mr. Ali was on an official visit to Washington. He was staying in Omni Sheraton Hotel in Washington but was kind enough to visit with me and my family for dinner on two of those evenings.

All his life, my mentor was a staunchly secular, progressive man, whose struggle for workers and peasants earned him the “Communist” label from his conservative political opponents. Among them was one of my uncles who warned me against associating with him because “Communists don’t believe in Allah or Islam.” In reality, Mr. Ali had plunged into the Pakistan movement because he saw it as a struggle to alleviate the suffering of Muslims in the Indian subcontinent, who happened to be mostly repressed and impoverished, from exploitation of the landed and moneyed class, which happened to be mostly upper-caste Hindus.

In the course of his long political career Mr. Ali changed political parties and some of his political views. But he stuck with his two things that defined him. One was his trademark costume in social and political life, a sherwani and tight pajamas. The other was his advocacy of and deep empathy for the poor and oppressed.

  • Mustafa Malik is a writer in Washington. He hosts the blog Community.