Trajectories of Pakistan and Bangladesh

Bangladesh and Pakistan muddle along on a similar path even after separating.

Many thought Bangladesh (BD) broke away from Pakistan because it wanted to go in a different direction. But after its secular birth, it adopted the same trajectory as Pakistan. Like Pakistan, it was taken over by the generals. Even the names tallied. General Ziaur Rahman amended the 1972 Constitution of Sheikh Mujib and removed the word ‘secular’ from it. The 5^th Amendment introduced Islam as the ‘guiding principle’ of the constitution.

Anti-India General Ershad (who was somewhat like General Yahya but who wrote bad poetry in English) went further with his 8th Amendment, (sic!) declaring Islam as the religion of the state. He dubbed the Awami League pro-India and kept it suppressed.

Ershad was finally pulled down. Then, like Zulfikar Bhutto’s PPP, Mujib’s Awami League entrenched itself in the political system as a ‘liberal’ option that didn’t hate India too much; General Ziaur Rahman’s legacy was Bangladesh National Party (BNP), the right-wing lookalike of Pakistan Muslim League (PML).

The latest parallel is described in Understanding Bangladesh by S Mahmud Ali (Hurst & Company, 2010). Like General Musharraf in 1999, General Moeen tried to oust both the big parties dominating BD’s bipartisan system in 2007. That year, Musharraf began to fail to keep Benazir and Nawaz Sharif out; for a more intelligent General Moeen it took just two years to realise he couldn’t keep Sheikh Hasina and Khaleda Zia out.

Both the armies thought the expelled leaders were corrupt. They were right to a large extent. In the case of Bangladesh — which was externally financed as a ‘least developed’ country — the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and India encouraged its army to intervene. The OECD threat to the BD army was ouster from the lucrative UN peacekeeping chores. [BD sends the largest number of troops on UN assignments] (p.251).

General Moeen didn’t seem to have Musharraf’s ambition to take over and hang on. Electoral mechanisms were revamped, earlier follies shown up and corrected, and a relatively even playing field created for the restoration of elective governance. Like Musharraf, he was secular in outlook. He arrested people from both parties but included senior leaders of Jamaat-i-Islami too. [Musharraf, instead, allowed a clerical alliance, Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal, to win in NWFP.] General Moeen lifted emergency at the end of 2008; and, after elections in January 2009, ‘liberal’ Awami League returned to rule, just like ‘liberal’ PPP in Pakistan, in 2008.

Musharraf was helpless in the face of state-sponsored jihad through the madrassa network. Moeen had no such constraints. Jamaat-i-Islami was forced to change its constitution, acknowledge Bangladesh’s 1971 war of independence — as opposed to its past insistence that this had been a civil war between factions within Pakistan — and change its name from Jamaat-i-Islami Bangladesh to Bangladesh Jamaat-i-Islami (p.254). He arrested Sheikh Hasina and Khaleda Zia together with the latter’s profligate sons, Tareque Rahman and Arafat Rahman.

There were hundreds of corruption cases against the two ladies but they collapsed as the BD army’s will to press on with cleansing the system collapsed. Author Mahmud Ali says the reason was an ‘activist judiciary’ and the challenge the army faced in 2008 in the Bay of Bengal. Myanmar sent ships owned by South Korean Daewoo and two state-owned Indian companies into the Bay of Bengal to survey Bangladesh’s waters, “but with drills”.

Bangladesh talked to China for mediation, and talked to Seoul and sent in frigates (p.267). Earlier, India had escorted an Australian driller into Bangladesh’s maritime economic zone. BD sent in its battleships. Indian vessels refused to leave. India invited BD for talks and contested the zone together with Burma. BD and Pakistan muddle along on a similar path even after separating.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 1^st, 2011.