Amitava Mukherjee
(amitavamukherjee253@gmail.com)
I am a regular visitor to three Bangladeshi newspaper websites: the Daily Star, Dhaka Tribune, and Ittefaq. In the jungle of newspapers in Bangladesh, these three are the most reliable and respected ones. But for quite a few days, the three abovementioned newspaper websites were not available on the internet. Obviously, the all-pervasive crackdown by the Bangladeshi government is having its effects.
One thing is clear: The massive countrywide unrest in Bangladesh is not just protests against various quotas in government jobs. The unrest carries a deeper meaning. First, it is a spontaneous outburst against years of misrule in Bangladesh. Secondly, opposition parties are helping to organise and provide sustenance to the protests. But that is exactly the duty of the opposition. No one can fault it for doing this.
But Hasina Wazed has committed exactly this faux pas. Her party functionaries have accused the unrest of being the handiwork of the opposition parties, and the Prime Minister of Bangladesh has branded the protesters as Razakars. Razakars are those who collaborated with the Pakistani army during Bangladesh’s liberation war and committed murders, rapes, and various other forms of torture against the common people. Is it justified to equate the present protesters with the Razakars of yesteryear? The word razakar has a wider connotation. It denotes anyone who is a fundamentalist and is prepared to commit crimes against humanity. Can Hasina aver that her Awami League does not have Razakars in its ranks?
Let us go back to history. The two most dreaded organizations during the time of the liberation war were Al-Badar and Al-Shams. They used to provide information to the Pakistani army about movements of freedom fighters, used to guide the army not only to the houses of freedom fighters but to the abodes of liberal-minded people, and committed all kinds of crimes there. Their most heinous deed was the mass murder of Bengali intellectuals on the eve of the Pakistani army’s surrender. After the liberation of the country, many of them fled to Pakistan, and others lay low. But in independent Bangladesh, who declared a general amnesty that facilitated the fugitives’ return to Bangladesh and encouraged those of the same ilk living in the country to become active again? Sheikh Mujibur Rahaman was Hasina Wazed’s father and the first Prime Minister of the country.
Still, it must be admitted that the Awami League is a party steeped in the concept of Bengali nationalism and opposed to the idea of any Islamic religious identification. It is also true that Hasina Wazed has severely punished many high-ranking Razakar leaders and sent several of them to the gallows. But she has to admit that Bangladesh has fallen prey to misjudgments and maladministration not only during her tenure but also during the time of her father. There was no need for Mujibur Rahaman to join the Organization of Islamic Conference during the early 1970s, which provided a certain religious tinge to the administration of the newly-born Bangladesh. Then grapevine has it that during the 1991–1996 period, the Awami League under Hasina Wazed had a cosy relationship with the Jamaat-i-Islami.
The anti-quota protests have reasons behind them, and the reasons are economic in nature. In spite of the praise that Hasina received from national and international media for her ‘success’ in the economic recovery of Bangladesh, the recent picture does not hold out much hope. Despite decades of sustained GDP growth and improvements in social indicators, the economy of the country is on fragile footing now, and what is more dangerous is that the country is running out of foreign exchange reserves.
How grave is the situation? Well, Bangladesh under Hasina Wazed could have easily gone the Sri Lanka way, but for loans from the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the Asian Development Bank. However, in the current fiscal year, the country’s GDP growth has been experiencing a steep decline, and the rate of inflation has reached almost 10 percent.
The soft underbelly of Bangladesh’s economy is that it has just two lifelines: garment exports and remittances from expatriates. On both counts, the results show declining trends. In the western world, the principal destination for Bangladesh’s readymade garment exports, Dhaka has an unfavourable image. It is still suffering from a 2013 US sanction when Washington removed it from the list of countries under the generalized system of preference for violations of labour rights. It has prevented Bangladesh from diversifying its exports. That legacy still remains. The result is a stagnating effect on the economy.
There is no way visible before Hasina Wazed for coming out of the economic noose, and she has not shown any farsightedness to get over the crisis. To create employment, her country needs investment and imports of goods, which Dhaka cannot do because of a lack of foreign currency reserves. Reserves have declined from a high of USD 48 billion in August 2021 to just USD 20 billion in April 2024.
So the result is growing unemployment. Burgeoning inflation has hit the middle class and lower income groups most. It is noticeable that most of the protesters in the anti-quota agitation come from these social sections. In the economic field, the next possibility is capital flight. If that starts happening, then Bangladesh will sink into a deeper crisis.
Hasina Wazed is no consummate leader. Her handling of the Teesta water controversy is its proof. A very simple solution—reshaping the cropping pattern in the Teesta river basin—is always there. She never looked at it. Instead, she displayed the China card off and on. Some of her cabinet colleagues are also known to favour a pro-China tilt. This has further complicated the situation for her. There are reports that during the ongoing anti-quota agitation, the Chinese embassy in Dhaka has been found to be active in its own way. When an administration becomes directionless, its woes multiply. This has been happening in Bangladesh now.