WE may find a useful clue on Aug 15 to the direction the turbulence-stricken Bangladesh is heading in. Aug 15 marks India’s Independence Day, but it also became the day in 1975 when the founding father of Bangladesh, Sheikh Mujibur Rehman, was assassinated in a military coup. The Awami League government of Sheikh Hasina Wajed subsequently decreed it as the National Mourning Day of Bangladesh.

Now that she has been ousted from power and has taken refuge in India, it would be interesting to see if the usual black flag is hoisted and whether the national flag is kept at half-mast to remember the founder-president of Bangladesh, who was the deposed prime minister’s father.

Mujib’s family members present at home on the fateful morning were all killed, but Sheikh Hasina survived by not being in the country. Indira Gandhi gave her refuge and assigned her Bengali colleague, Pranab Mukherjee, to take care of her. Her father’s killing and her refuge in India were clearly an extension of the cat and mouse the contending superpowers played in third countries during the Cold War. India, Pakistan and Bangladesh are good examples.

The visuals of assaults on Mujib’s towering images in Dhaka during the mass protests brought memories of the pulling down of Saddam Hussein’s statue in Iraq under the US army’s watch. Which makes it tricky for the interim administration to tinker with the importance of the day the founder of the nation was murdered by antibodies among his own people.

Would it be easy to undermine Mujib’s towering legacy for the makeshift government?

Would it be easy to undermine Mujib’s towering legacy for the makeshift government? The interim leader named by ‘the students’ and endorsed by the army is a genial economist who won the Nobel Prize for setting up a village bank in 1976, a year following Mujib’s murder. It is said to have helped millions of women, mostly, come out of poverty with the help of tiny, unsecured loans. That the bank would get involved with the Ford Foundation was a curious development, say its critics.

There is already looming suspicion about the involvement of a ‘foreign hand’ in Sheikh Hasina’s ouster, even though she herself was the chief progenitor of the theory. Was Hasina masking her failure to read the runaway alienation and her unpopularity by blaming the ubiquitous foreign hand for precipitating the mass violence?

On several occasions as prime minister, she did refer to a ‘white man’ who met her to convey US interests in Saint Martin, a small coral island off Cox’s Bazaar peninsula in the Bay of Bengal. Had she heeded the wishes, she would be safely ensconced as the ruler in Dhaka, goes the claim.

According to her story, the US wants to set up a base on the eight-kilometre stretch abutting the strategic Strait of Malacca. And it would be a vital listening post also to China in the north. The idea could have carried weight at some point, but why would the US need a base on Saint Martin’s when they have no dearth of real estate in India as their observing post for China, and when the Indian navy could be co-opted to patrol the straits? Unless, of course, for obvious reasons, India is no longer deemed the trusted ally the US was looking for?

The flip side to the claim is, would a US base in the neighbourhood suit India, leave alone its close friends in Moscow? However, it was the foreign minister in the Vajpayee government who had reportedly clamoured for the US to use India as its base for the operations in Afghanistan. Pakistan won the trophy though.

On the one hand, it is not uncommon to see those that never had much to do with the creation of their nation, including those that were opposed to its creation, usurp power. The Jamaat-i-Islami in Pakistan, for example, opposed the creation of Pakistan and remained hostile towards its founding fathers. And yet it did not hesitate to grab power — in insidious and indirect ways — in the country whose very being it had opposed.

Ditto with the JI of Bangladesh, an offshoot of the Pakistani parent. It fought hard against the independence of Bangladesh, but then sought a share in power by aligning with the Awami League before switching sides to the rival BNP of Khaleda Zia. And look who is ruling India? They are the ideologues of a worldview that was opposed to the national movement. And, like the RSS celebrated Gandhi’s murder with sweets, according to Sardar Patel, the JI was thrilled with Mujib’s death.

So, who are these students who are credited with bringing down Hasina’s government? Do they have an ideology? It’s difficult to think of students as being only committed to human rights. As Howard Zinn said astutely, it’s a fallacy that one can remain neutral on a moving train. India’s Akhil Bhartiya Vidyarthi Parishad is a student’s front of the RSS, like the SFI is for India’s largest communist party. They have been rivals, mostly, but were strongly bonded in bringing down Indira Gandhi’s rule in 1977. The RSS has been quietly courted by the US for being vocally anti-communist. Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Narendra Modi have been beneficiaries of the affection.

Something flipped in 1991. The Cold War ended, and Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated. Someone tapped Narasimha as prime minister. The obscure man was packing to leave politics and was not a member of any assembly or house of parliament. He tapped Manmohan Singh as finance minister, who, like the new Bangladesh leader Mohammed Yunus, was an economist.

The West has seldom courted an Indian finance minister as Manmohan Singh was lionised. When he became prime minister, Singh received George W. Bush, the man who was in bad odour everywhere, including his own country, telling him that Indians loved him. Yunus may be a variant of Manmohan Singh, but Bangladesh is not India.

The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.

jawednaqvi@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, August 13th, 2024