Bangladeshi whodunit

Bangladesh's simmering crisis and the ongoing transition have thrown many pundits off balance. This was to be expected. How often do you see such a dramatic, if effective, use of people's power? Particularly caught off guard are the Indian commentators and TV pundits. Since then, two distinct versions have emerged. One sees conspiracy in everything and robs the people of Bangladesh of all agency. The other sees it as a totally organic and laudable popular uprising against the tyranny of an abusive dictator. Here, too little is offered to explain why Sheikh Hasina Wazed, initially considered a democratic force like Aung San Suu Kyi and Benazir Bhutto, transformed into this hated politician against whom the entire nation rallied.

First, a few words on our Indian colleagues who, in this day and age, never cease to shock me. I have known many of them personally and found them remarkably talented individuals who were perfectly capable of rational thought and putting one foot in front of the other instead of in their mouths. Something terrible must have happened in the intervening ten years, and they now appear to be thicker than a brick.

Take their conspiracy theories, for instance. China, America and Pakistan came together to overthrow Mrs Wazed. Brilliant. So, was all the talk about the emerging great power rivalry and the new Cold War fiction then? Another version quotes Mrs Wazed to prove that it was America's CIA that deployed Pakistan's ISI to bring about the change. Wrap your head around it. Imagine America using Pakistan, which doesn't share a border with Bangladesh, as a proxy to hurt India and China's combined interest in the region. Combined is the operative part. So, there wasn't any tug of war between India and China in the region or the country? Another version sees America's direct hand in the whole thing. By now, you must notice they are flying close to the sun and risking their own interests. If America has the kind of wherewithal in the region to effect a regime change in a hotly contested country, indeed, it doesn't need India to contain China. Others only blame Pakistan. Sure, man. A country with a struggling economy, which at times is at its wits' end to quell its domestic unrest and to tame its western neighbour, has the power to overthrow the heavily subsidised government in an Indian protectorate. You surprise me.

So what happened? There is no denying two critical facts. That the last two tenures of Sheikh Hasina's rule were highly repressive and that, at its core, the movement that overthrew her government was organic and channelled valid grievances of the people. But Hasina was not new to power. She knew how to survive such pressures. So, what changed? And why this sudden snowball effect? Here, we may need to investigate the nature of the Bangladeshi political parties and India's relationship with the country.

While the two leading parties in Bangladesh view themselves as democratic movements, they are primarily creatures of authoritarianism. Khaleda Zia, the country's first female prime minister and the head of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), is the wife of a former dictator assassinated in 1981. Sheikh Hasina's Awami League (AL) was crucial in legitimising and prolonging General Hussain Muhammad Ershad's military rule. The third largest party is Ershad's own Jatiya Party (JP), which won substantial seats in the 2014 election following the BNP's boycott. When Hasina returned to power in 2009, she failed to fulfil her promise to the JP that Ershad would be made the country's president. Ershad died in 2019, and his wife now heads the party.

Now, India's relationship with Hasina and Bangladesh. We know that India was instrumental in the creation of an independent Bangladesh. India exhibited forethought by not trying to annex the country after the 1971 war and supporting Hasina's father as the country's founder and first ruler. But this was essentially an Indira Gandhi and Congress Party project. India's incumbent BJP did not exist then; even in its formative phase in the 1980s and 90s, it had little to do with Bangladesh. Indira herself struggled to stay in power after the war. She had a rough ride until her assassination, and in the 70s, she also imposed an emergency in the country, which might have contributed to the emergence of the BJP in the next decade.

When Hasina returned to power in Bangladesh, it was Manmohan Singh's government in India. A self-professed secular party with a strong bond with India suited a secular-minded Congress government. But when Narendra Modi came into power, he had no secular hangovers. A secular government in an aligned Muslim country ran counter to his global Islamophobic project. Muslims had to be projected as an undemocratic, unsecular, violent bunch that refused assimilation in non-Muslim countries and chose to cause instability. He put up and worked with her because, like in Afghanistan, India had no other option at the time. But it looks like Afghanistan gave them a better roadmap. India has the financial and diplomatic muscle to create influence in the chaotic aftermath of the fall of an allied government. Ajit Doval, in his 2014 Sastra University speech, said as much. The biggest highlight of Afghanistan was never the US withdrawal or the Taliban's takeover, it was the sudden and inexplicable collapse of the Indian-trained Afghan security and intelligence forces. The word has it that it all happened after Ashraf Ghani's national security adviser, Hamdullah Mohib, received a call from Delhi. A similar example is of the collapse of Bangladesh's policing operations.

Hasina didn't make Modi's job easy. To her credit, she struck a delicate balance between China and India. When things were about to come to a head, she was visiting China. After extending $8 billion worth of line of credit to veer Bangladesh away from Beijing, there was a distinct feeling of being extorted in Delhi. Perhaps Modi could have digested that, too. But she committed the cardinal sin of meeting with the Congress leadership during her visit to participate in Modi's oath-taking. That day, her fate was sealed.

India did not need to do much to bring her down. The country was already boiling. Modi's Hindutva extremism in his own country has caused a massive right-wing backlash in Bangladesh over the past decade, forcing Hasina to adopt an incrementally repressive approach with every passing day. All India needed to do was withdraw its support, which it did. Of course, the infusion of some miscreants in the movement who attacked Bangladeshi symbols like Mujib's statue, various public and private properties and minority communities was a useful ruse. It drew attention away from India and helped both in the Islamophobic project and the Hindu consolidation. That last part is the only one where the Indian media seems to be on message.

If the Indian media is so clueless, it is because the Indian government thinks it is worthless and has stopped taking it into confidence. If you disagree, ask yourself why none of the Indian pundits has questioned why Hasina is still restricted to a military base and why the media has been denied access to her. But you will hear no such thing.