Is the Bangladesh National Party (BNP) having second thoughts about the interim government led by Nobel Laureate Muhammed Yunus? Is Bangladesh, as a whole, worried about the direction that the country is taking?
The rank and file of the opposition BNP, which had been walking on air after former PM Sheikh Hasina Wazed was forced to flee Dhaka for New Delhi on August 5, is being pushed out of the shrinking popular political space.
The BNP leaders, victimised by the Awami League for fifteen long years, had believed in August, that their time had finally come. Hopes ran high when BNP secretary general Mirza Fakhrul Islam Alamgir headed to London in late November, with expectations that he would fly back home with Tarique Rehman, the acting chairman of the party.
Instead, Tarique, the political heir of ailing former premier Khaleda Zia, is said to be having second thoughts about a homecoming that would end his 16 years of self-imposed exile in London, where he has lived since he was released from a Dhaka jail after being brutally tortured.
Tarique’s return had earlier almost been a given after a Bangladesh High Court acquitted him in the grenade attack case that targeted former premier Sheikh Hasina at an Awami League rally in Dhaka in August 2004.
But Fakhrul, on his return to Dhaka, aired plans to fly Khaleda Zia out for medical treatment, and spoke of the party’s concern over the many cases that are still hanging over Tarique’s head that could see him arrested if he sets foot on Bangladeshi soil.
Fakhrul’s call to “start on the path to holding elections” was the dead giveaway that the BNP was unsure of the path ahead, for itself and indeed, for Bangladesh.
The promise of polls being held within six months of the takeover has already been exposed as hollow. On both sides of the political divide, it has become clear that the interim government’s primary focus is not only the erasure of Bangladesh’s founding father Sheikh Mujibur Rahman imprimatur from public spaces but also the suppression of any alternative political force — whether it be the BNP or the Awami League, whose leaders are being eliminated or forced into exile.
US deep state and the ‘six-month-long planning’ bombshell
While no one has been able to answer who brought Mohammed Yunus in to head the interim administration, the speculation that the US — the deep state in tandem with the Clinton Foundation and George Soros Open Society Foundation — played a role to stymie Hasina’s re-election may be closer to the truth than previously envisaged.
The playbook appears to be similar to the one used in Afghanistan, where the Taliban militia, unschooled in governance, were backed into edging out the unpopular Ashraf Ghani dispensation. Just as in Syria, where an Al Qaeda off-shoot, the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, has now toppled the brutal Assad regime, Bangladesh’s radical Hizb ut-Tahrir has a huge following among the educated, academia and student community across universities, particularly Dhaka University. They were encouraged to co-opt the students movement against the job quotas for freedom fighter’s kin and end Hasina’s long run.
Fakhrul’s is not the only voice to raise the alarm.
Respected Supreme Court lawyers like Tania Amir, whose father was part of Bangladesh’s founding father Bangabandhu Mujibur Rehman’s first government, raised the issue of the release of a slew of convicted terrorists from jails. She also highlighted the subsequent explosion of violence against minorities, and desecration of Hindu, Christian, Buddhist, Shia and Sufi places of worship.
Tania puts it down to the growing reach of the Hizb-ul-Tahrir whose leader, Mohammed Mahfuz Alam, is a key member of the Mohammed Yunus interim caretaker administration.
Yunus, respected worldwide for his economic credentials, has rapidly lost credibility since he took over in August. Unable to stem rising prices of food and other essentials, or staunch the violence against minorities, he is seen now as being no more than the face of this interim administration.
In fact, the real power rests with a troika of student leaders including Alam, the 29-year-old whom Yunus praised publicly as the “brain behind the whole revolution”.
Speaking at the Clinton Global Initiative event in New York this November, Yunus dropped a bombshell on Hasina’s removal from office saying “it was planned six months before”.
Unwittingly or otherwise, Yunus has told the world what had long been suspected – that the students’ movement was not apolitical, reinforcing the narrative that it was instigated and planned a full six months before the radical Islamists climbed on the students’ bandwagon and made it their own.
The Hizb ut-Tahrir troika, which includes three student leaders including Alam who pull Yunus’ strings, is unlikely to allow any popular political force, even the ant-Hasina BNP, to hijack their agenda. The term ‘transition’ government is now in question, with insiders suggesting it could be more permanent.
Fear of an Islamic state rising and the role of the army
Political observers stress that the transition government’s lack of constitutional mandate undermines the legitimacy of the numerous committees Yunus has established to rewrite the constitution, governance structures, and the judicial system.
Critics argue that these reforms aim to pave the way for an Islamic theocracy, dismantling the current parliamentary democracy.
There are indeed some analysts who say the Awami League — and now the BNP — are raising the bogey of the imposition of an Islamic state, to get the west, particularly the outgoing Joe Biden administration to step in and stop a previously secular Bangladesh from becoming an Islamic theocracy.
But then the fact is that the US has continued to look the other way. This despite the media being forced to blank out any statements by Hasina. The interim government has also been brutal in its crackdown on politicians, the intelligentsia and Hindu monks from ISKCON. The last of these has driven a wedge between Dhaka and Delhi, prompting the Indian Foreign Secretary to fly down in an attempt to mend ties with a once trusted ally.
The Bangladesh Army chief, General Waker-Uz-Zaman, who ensured that Sheikh Hasina was flown to safety, has stayed largely silent. But there are unconfirmed reports of a deep unease within the top brass over the rise of the Islamists.
Whether the Army will move and take control, as it has done multiple times before, is open to debate amid some speculation that the US has reined them in.
Outreach to Pakistan?
Insiders claim the US’ ‘Restore Democracy 2023’ plan to replace Hasina, who rejected US pressure to allow free and fair elections and BNP’s participation in the polls, was part of a ‘deep state’ outreach to Pakistan’s ISI.
Pakistan’s spymasters have never taken their foot off the pedal in Bangladesh, despite the 1971 war that separated Pakistan’s eastern wing from West Pakistan. Washington, concerned over Beijing’s growing footprint in Bangladesh, has fallen back on its once trusted ally, the Pakistan Army to control a country that it sees as a vital bridge to South and South East Asia. India, given its strong links to Hasina, was kept completely out of the loop.
Pakistan Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Al Qaeda and the Islamic State Khorasan had kept communication lines open with the Salafi Islamists from the well-funded Islamic Chhatra Shibir, the Hizb ut-Tahrir and the Jamaat-e-Islami Bangladeshi. This helped in setting up covert sleeper cells across the country that Mahfuz Alam and his cohorts reportedly activated once the students movement gathered momentum.
Alam’s singular act of defiance as he was being sworn in to office as special assistant to Yunus by the President came in a telling gesture. He turned to the portrait of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman that was hanging behind him and tore it to pieces.
With even Bangladesh’s judiciary seemingly keen on appeasing the powers-that-be by banning the use of ‘Joy Bangla’ as the national slogan, it’s clear that there’s little joy in a Bangladesh that was once a model of good governance in South Asia.
Certainly, it’s not a country that Tarique Rahman would dare to return to.
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