In the coming Bangladesh elections, India does not have the luxury of NOTA (none of the above), even if it secretly wishes it did. In statecraft, decisions dwell beyond love or loathing.
That Sheikh Hasina remains India’s best bet in Bangladesh shows, at one level, the failure of diplomatic imagination or intent on its part.
Along her current 15-year stint, she has become increasingly unpopular in her nation for random imprisonment and forced disappearances of her opponents and critics, allegedly hijacking elections, nepotism, corruption of those close to her and police and cadre violence which did not even spare children.
The January general elections in Bangladesh will be fought without the main opponent, BNP, which has boycotted it calling the process rigged and farcical. In hundreds of seats, the ruling Awami League will be fighting its boat symbol against its own party aspirants fighting under the independent symbol, eagle.
Many in Bangladesh blame India, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi in particular, for propping up her regime with the help of R&AW. Hasina’s unpopularity rubs off on India.
Jamaat-e-Islami, crippled on several fronts by Sheikh Hasina, has been capitalising on this disenchantment against Bharat, fomenting the anger with social media posts by its IT cell, Basher Kella (‘Fortress of Bamboos’), which mainly operates out of the UK.
Bangladesh is strategically too important for Bharat to be indifferent to this groundswell of negativity.
Besides, Hasina’s regime has been hobnobbing with China. Intel reports say Sheikh Rehana’s (Hasina’s sister) part of the family have been the main interface with the dragon. China has been giving massive kickbacks to the regime’s politicians and officials to push projects and loans.
And while the Teesta river treaty with India remains elusive because of Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee’s reluctance, China has been moving fast on a mega dredging project on the same river.
But the most painful letdown by Sheikh Hasina has been her failure to protect Hindus. Just in 2022, 154 Hindus were killed, 66 women raped, and 333 forced to eat beef, according to a 2022 report released by the organisation Bangladesh Jatiya Hindu Mahajot. Among the atrocities were 519 houses of Hindus torched by Islamists and 891 families attacked that year.
Bangladeshi human rights group Ain O Salish Kendra reported in 2021 that at least 3,679 attacks had taken place on the Hindu community since January 2013. Hasina has been in office in her latest stint since 2009.
Some of the worst perpetrators have been men from Hasina’s own Awami League, or its student wing Chhatra League. The Bangladesh PM has also been unusually generous with Hefazat-e-Islam, which is as influential and virulently Islamist as Jamaat and controls thousands of Qwami madrasas across the country.
As you read this, a group of Islamists could be celebrating New Year’s Eve with a ‘beef barbecue party’ at Chandranath temple in the hills of Chittagong. The place happens to be one of the 51 Shakti Peeths strewn across the subcontinent, where Sati Mata’s right arm is believed to have fallen.
Deep Halder and Avishek Biswas in their new book, Being Hindu In Bangladesh, capture the uninterrupted river of blood from the pre-Partition Noakhali and other riots to perhaps the world’s worst genocide of 1971 to the systematic wiping out of a people from their ancestral land till today. They write:
“Through the years, there has been a constant political pressure to regularise Urdu in Bangladesh, a country formed after rejecting Urdu!
“It started with a constitutional amendment in 1975 that replaced the phrase ‘Bengali nationalism’ with ‘Bangladeshi nationalism’. It continues through the spurt in the number of Qwami madrasas that adopt their own syllabus with predominantly religious content that greatly emphasises Arabic, Persian and Urdu language studies.
“No language should be abolished from the land. The romance of a foreign tongue can never be overemphasised. What should not perhaps be underemphasised is the reason why East Pakistan became Bangladesh — rejecting Urdu for Bangla, embracing the syncretic Bengali identity over a religious identity. As demand for Urdu goes up, as attacks on Hindus continue to make headlines in modern-day secular Bangladesh, one wonders if 1971 has seeped through the intervening decades and come to haunt our present.”
Why then does Bharat still stand by Sheikh Hasina so resolutely?
Why does India negotiate hard with the United States — which is alarmed by China’s growing influence in Bangladesh and wants ‘free and fair’ polls — to leave the Awami League government alone?
Because the alternative can be far worse.
Hasina’s main rival, the BNP, has always had a deep link with Jamaat. It has been traditionally allied to Pakistan and its agency, the ISI. India fears that if the BNP comes to power, Islamism could become a far bigger spectre.
Also, several of Jamaat’s leaders have married their children to the leaders of Rohingya terror groups. If a BNP in power shows any softness towards Jamaat, it would open up a direct, deleterious corridor from Myanmar’s Rakhine to the India-Bangladesh border. Hasina has kept a check on that.
India has to prepare for a post-Hasina scenario, look closely at succession. An interim government, drawing relatively clean and effective politicians from the main parties, as well as from civil society, could be an option. Such a coalition may look good on paper and the nation may welcome it for now, but it may lack the ideological cohesion needed for the long game.
But it would still be a start. Even if the experiment stumbles after a couple of years, it could prepare ground for a new, honest and inclusive leadership to emerge.