The Uprising in Dhaka: Lessons for India

 

The Uprising in Dhaka: Lessons for India

In the face of a shocking turn of events on 5 August 2024, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina of Bangladesh, once considered an invincible ‘Iron Lady’, was forced to resign and flee her country, abruptly ending her 15 years uninterrupted reign. It wasn’t a military coup. What began as a peaceful students’ demonstration against the reservation of jobs by the students quickly turned into a nationwide movement, exposing the vulnerability of the Hasina’s government. What led to this dramatic development? It is alarming that the factors that led to the uprising in Dhaka are also at work in India. Hence, India must draw lessons from this mass uprising in Bangladesh to avert such situation taking place, though in a vast diverse country of 1450 million people a revolution of this type is a rare possibility.

 

Lesson 1:  The quest for total domination and an Opposition-mukt politics is doomed to fail. Sheikh Hasina’s increasingly authoritarian rule has overshadowed whatever economic and development success she achieved.  She cracked down on terrorist camps and campaigned against radicalisation. However, she used the same strong-arm tactics on her opponents, refusing to give any space for dissent, using an iron fist against rival political parties, particularly the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), confining its leader Khaleda Zia to House arrest, and putting hundreds of opposition leaders and activists in jail.  She centralised power and oppressed the Opposition and every political dissent. Her party the Awami League won the last three elections in 2013,2018 and 2024 by compelling the Opposition to boycott the polls and using the methods best described as dictatorial. 

The war tribunal hanged Jamaat-E-Islami leaders for 1971 war crimes. Hasina’s crackdown extended to the dissenting voices in civil society and media as well.  As the editorial in The Free Press Journal, August 7, says, “She skilfully crafted and utilized draconian laws to suppress dissent and maintain firm control over the nation. The absence of the Opposition in Parliament, the Hasinafication of the media, and her tendency to surround herself with cheerleaders insulated her from public criticism.” It sounds as if she was inspired by the ‘Modification’ of India. Her governance had a striking resemblance with Modi’s India.  “Authoritarian repression can work only up to a point”, opines Pratap Bhanu Mehta.

 

Lesson 2: Economic progress alone cannot sustain a leader’s popularity. The development in Bangladesh is a lesson that economic growth cannot sustain a leader’s popularity in the face of eroding democratic values and civil liberties. During Hasina’s rule, Bangladesh was transformed larger neighbour, India. The country’s per capita income tripled in a decade, and the World Bank estimates that over 25 million people were lifted out of poverty in the last 20 years. Hasina’s government undertook ambitious infrastructure projects, such as the 2.9-billion-dollar Padma Bridge across the Ganges, using a combination of domestic funds, loans and development assistance.  But these economic gains came at a huge cost. The government increasingly relied on hard power to maintain control, creating a climate of fear and repression.  The Digital Security Act, 2018, became a potent weapon for the government and ruling party activists to silence critics and stifle freedom of expression. With the economic grow, the disparity between the haves and have nots has grown.  The growing economic inequality, coupled with rampant corruption, fueled public discontent despite the overall economic progress.

The middle-class leadership of the Awami League was replaced by a new class of business persons known for their proximity to Hasina. Some of the country’s worst bank defaulters ended up as her advisers and ministers. Seventeen members of her extended family were the members of the Parliament. The economic prosperity did not reach the common people, resulting in huge unemployment.   Some 32 million youth are unemployed, in a country of 170 million people. And when Hasina government announced reservations of 30 per cent jobs in civil services for the descendants of freedom fighters in the Bangladesh Liberation War, the students saw it as an attempt to favour the Awami League members and their families, leading to anger and mass protests. In India,83 percent of the youth are unemployed, as per the India Employment Report 2024 published by the International Labour Organisation and the Institute of Human Development. The fall of Hasina’s government serves as a lesson that concentration of economic power in the hands of few poses a threat to political stability.

What led to the sudden and swift unceremonious exit of Sheikh Hasina, who seemed in complete control until the student movement intensified? Subir Bhaumik, a veteran BBC journalist, in his article The leader who lost touch with Bangladesh (The Hindu 8/8/24) succinctly summons up why she was ousted from power:"...business persons had begun to muscle their way into the party leadership, bribing their way to secure nominations for Parliament seats. They had little connect with the grassroots... The only way they could win elections was to grease the palms of the police and civil bureaucracy and hire musclemen to help rig the elections.... the growth of ruling party backed extortion syndicates who fleece businesses, turned the country into a boiling cauldron waiting for a trigger to light up. That happened with the anti-quota protests and its mishandling by Hasina and her inner coterie... a comment of hers upset the students: 'If not for descendants of freedom fighters, should we create quotas for those Razakars'. Razakar is a derogatory word, denoting those who backed the Pakistan Army's suppression campaign during the 1971 Liberation War. As the movement intensified, Hasina resorted to brutal crackdown by the police... That proved counter productive and the situation spun out of control. In the end, Hasina paid a heavy price for her arrogance of power, for losing the mass connect that had once propelled her to high office."  

 

Lesson 3: Importance of free and fair elections. There are serious allegations that the elections in Bangladesh are rigged to favour Sheikh Hasina’s Awami League. The election held in January 2024 lost the credibility. With the main opposition BNP boycotting the election, the ruling party – Awami League - was accused of fielding dummy candidates and threatening people to turn up to vote. The BNP said it didn’t have any confidence in Hasina presiding over a free and fair election. It demanded she step down to make way for a caretaker government to conduct the election. The demand was met with a severe crackdown, which saw tens of thousands of BNP members arrested, 11 of them killed by security forces during street protests. 

To ensure the results are in favour of the ruling party, the government allegedly used law enforcement machinery and intelligence agencies to intimidate and threaten independent candidates, making a mockery of democracy, registering a low voter turnout of 40 per cent. In many constituencies, members of the ruling party have been accused of threatening to strip people of the government’s social benefit schemes if they fail to vote. The result was the Awami League won more than 330 seats (including 62 dummy independents) out of 350 seats in the Jatiya Sangsad (Parliament), with 95% vote share. What a sham election!  India’s External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar, in a statement in the Parliament on 6 August said: “Since the election in January 2024, there has been considerable tension, deep divides and growing polarisation in Bangladesh politics This underlying foundation aggravated a student agitation that started in June this year.”

 

India too had general election, conducted in seven phases to the Lok Sabah between April-June 2024. There are accusations of the Election Commission of India failing to ensure a level playing field and conduct free and fair elections. A Research report by a poll watchdog, the Association for Democratic Reforms, revealed discrepancies in vote counts in the elections. The report expresses concerns about disparities in votes credited, based on EVM, increased voter turnout, non-declaration of the actual number of votes polled, unreasonable delay in releasing vote data, and data being pulled down from the ECI website. On 22 July 2024, another report released by the Maharashtra-based civil society group, Vote for Democracy, revealed that there was a cumulative increase of 4.65 crore votes from initial estimates to final figures in the 2024 general elections. The report claims that this increase had benefited the Bhartiya Janata Party led National Democratic Alliance in 79 seats across 15 states.

  

Lesson 4:  A weak foreign policy could pose threat to national security. The Government of India has not been able to follow an assertive independent foreign policy. Its stand on Russian aggression on Ukraine and the Israel-Gaza conflict is more a matter of expediency rather than a principled one. Now India will have to scramble to respond to the swift changes in its neighbouring country. With the Army taking over and forming an Interim Government in Bangladesh, we see the return of the army to run the government.   Like Pakistan, Bangladesh also witnessed several military coups. Nahid Islam, Dhaka University student, a national coordinator for ‘Students Against Discrimination’, who spearheaded the movement against Hasina says the students would not allow return of fascist military rule in Bangladesh and not accept any government led by the Army: “Any government other than the one we recommended would not be accepted.”  They demanded Noble peace prize winner Md. Yunus should head the Interim Government.  President Md. Shahabuddin dissolved the Parliament and announced that Md. Yunus would head the Interim Government.

 

The mass uprising in Bangladesh has resulted in backlash on minorities, with the Hindus and Hindu temples being attacked. However, a report in The Times of India August 7, says, “several students’ organisations and youth wings of political parties stood guard outside temples and churches to keep them safe…groups of Muslim clerics guarded temples…” This is a positive development. It is important that the Modi government check the anti-Muslim rhetoric and communal passions invoked by his partymen and Hindu extreme right-wing elements so that the Hindu minorities in Bangladesh are safe and secure and there is no retaliation against them

 

India is surrounded by hostile and unfriendly neighbours – Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Nepal, Maldives, Bangladesh and even Bhutan. They are close to China. India is isolated and encircled with the Chinese sphere of influence extending to its neighborhood. China occupied more than 4000 km territory in Eastern Ladakh and is building huge military infrastructure all along the LAC, and renaming the places in Arunachal Pradesh.  India failed to resolve the four-year long border standoff with China.  A weak Modi government is unable to contain the Chinese expansionism and win friends. It is a threat to national security. India’s Act East policy is not working in the immediate vicinity. Myanmar is caught in a vortex of military authoritarianism, ethnic insurgencies and democratic resistance. In Nepal we have a pro-China communist regime which is more amenable to Beijing’s interest than that of Delhi. Even a tiny country Maldives in the Indian Ocean forced the Indian government to vacate its citizens from the country, because of a hostile government that is keen to deepen ties with China.

Bangladesh shares some 4100 km border with India from all the sides, except a small strip with Myanmar. This could pose a threat to national security both to India and Bangladesh with refugees from Bangladesh escaping to India to protect their lives, and the militants and insurgents from the North-Eastern States of India infiltrating into Bangladesh seeking their own security, creating problems there. Much depends on how the new government in Dhaka and the Modi government in Delhi treat each other. 

 

These are some lessons for India. It is imperative to ensure that the Modi government adopts an attitude of tolerance of dissent and accommodation towards the Opposition, providing an all-inclusive constitutional government. A leader of the principal Opposition party said: "what happened in Bangladesh could happen here." There is a limit for people's endurance. History is a testimony that whenever the people lost faith in a political system to deliver justice, the mob furry took a bloody violent turn and overthrew the existing order.