It is truly tragic that so many young people were killed in what was expected to be a regular and simple protest against the job quota reinstated by a High Court verdict.
The government which had previously scaled down the quota in 2018, had filed an appeal with the Supreme Court against the verdict. The students, however, descended on the streets before the Supreme Court could deliberate over the merit of the appeal. By the appearance of it, ironically, both the protesting students and the government were on the same side, and yet the protest was against the government.
The conflicting logic of it all is quite intriguing. Is it all an accident or a “tragedy” of errors? We need to ask this question and look deep beyond the surface.
By the optics of the tragic deaths and their accounts, it is true that the government appears to be responsible, but is it also possible that this was an enacted optics to trap the government in an indefensible corner or in fact to unseat it? It might quite well be a managed affair to weaken the prime minister by the joint effort of people within her own party and outside her party.
No government leader in Bangladesh, regardless of their political orientation, would ever blunder into firing on student protestors, knowing full well how the student protests have shaped the trajectory of our national history; and this government actually had a history of acquiescing to the quota-related demand of the students in 2018.
The prime with her own background as student leader and as someone who had been so dedicated to the development of the country and cementing the nation-hood legacy of Bangabandhu
Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, is the last such person expected to blunder into stigmatizing her own legacy at the twilight hour of her tenure as a leader.
So, what really might have brought the nation to this juncture? One cannot go by the reasoning of the optics alone, as many of us have tended to do. Perhaps, it is good to recall that the Oscar winning movie Wag the Dog was meant to educate us for moments like this when all common sense reasoning seems tangled in a conflict.
It does not take expertise in rocket science to extrapolate that for a country like Bangladesh which has few ideological friends or natural friends, no government would ever go to this extent as that of the recent bloodshed unless it truly felt threatened existentially. And for the current government with the US seemingly ever ready to step on its tail, this would be suicidal.
So, how could all commonsense alternatives get eclipsed for a government that had been there for four consecutive terms and had gone through some serious difficulties internationally and domestically like the international misgivings about the legitimacy of two elections, string of sanctions imposed on its security and defense personnel, and an emergency like the BDR killings?
A seemingly innocuous, albeit unanticipated, protest setting off the fuse to a network of explosion of students-protests across the country, seems quite dramatic and unanticipated. This indeed needs some reflection and analysis.
The prime minister has earned the reputation of being the iron-lady in the western media. What does that really mean? Well for one, she has forged ahead with her development agenda at a hurtling speed, steamrolling over any or all obstruction, domestic or international.
The successful construction of the Padma Bridge despite the World Bank pulling the rug under her feet, is one example. It put to shame some international figures.
She has changed the cityscape and infrastructural landscape across the country. Dhaka today is unrecognizable from Dhaka 15 years ago. She has played hardball with world powers in preserving our sovereignty and walking a delicate diplomatic path of balance. She has remained under the US diplomatic microscope for every opportunity to squeeze her into submission.
Remember, Pakistan was invited to the Summit for Democracy sponsored by the US, but Bangladesh was not? The US is ever so actively sanctioning Bangladeshi officials while turning a blind eye to other client countries with client officials of worse history; these continual sanctions make headlines at home and abroad that embarrasses the government.
We especially need to recognize that the US is in a morally weak position when negotiating or dealing with the PM. Their well-documented role in the August 1975 massacre is an ever-present phantom stalking the space of US-PM dialogue.
So, the US and some if not all its allies would be happy to see anyone from within AL or outside AL to replace her, and will not let go any chance to defame her. The political economy of corruption in countries such as ours is not difficult to fathom and understand for a country with top social scientists and world class think tanks, and yet they act as if corruption can be removed at anyone’s bidding. They know very well that the campaign to eradicate corruption will create internal friction and slow the development process significantly. The question as to whether the cost of corruption is worth developmental gains is a difficult question.
For a small country that is Bangladesh, the prime minister with her quiet determination to stay independent is a headache that needs to be cured once and for all. This is no different than how Bangabandhu was perceived, and possibly the very reason he was assassinated with his family with such brutality.
Bangabandhu’s crime was that he had embarrassed the US by winning independence despite US active opposition and had courageously pursued a non-aligned foreign policy. Is the PM a cause of embarrassment because she has pulled Bangladesh from the edge of poverty and built a robust economy against what the late Dr Kissinger had proclaimed as a case of “bottomless basket”? And for her temerity to stay independent in her foreign policy?
Could a student protest over the job quota ever be suspected of such a scope as becoming a tide of protest across the country. Certainly not, unless they were the front enacted and managed by the opposition to bring the government down. Plain protest could not have threatened the government unless there was violence and student death. In Bangladesh no death is as politically lethal as the death of a student in student protest -- this is a part of our political culture, a part of our political lore. And the PM herself has been in student politics and suffered the deaths of almost all her immediate family members through a brutal massacre. It is unthinkable that she would order this. So, what really happened? How do we account for the deaths?
The BNP and Jamaat had long been trying to spark a movement against the government; movements seem to be how many political changes have been mechanized in the past. In recent times the movements seemed to be timed and predicated by the elections. Neither the BNP nor the Jamaat succeeded in building a movement of self-sustaining momentum and had eventually settled on the alternative of last resort, that is boycotting the elections.
The concept of movement in Bangladesh is generally understood as protests in streets amounting to halting life as usual, and often burning of public and private transportations etc, basically a show of debilitating mass power. The recent positions taken by the US and other governments decrying destruction of public and private property as an illegitimate and culpable form of protest has taken much of the political wind out of political protests as we have known. So, indeed the political opposition had come to an impasse as to how to mechanize their political aspirations through tangible pressure.
They needed a spark to set a nationwide conflagration. The haystacks had already been laid out in terms of Jamaat activists; the BNP does not have the organizational outreach to coordinate with discipline anything like what we witnessed. The Jamaat could have launched such agitation before the election, but then it would have been labelled as "rival party conflict" or conflict between "pro-liberation and anti-liberation" forces and the public narrative would have gone in favour of Awami League. Damage of public property would have squarely fallen on Jamaat's shoulders. So, they badly needed an issue and a demographic shield that they could use, and this is exactly what they did. If any party had an incentive to construct and use this shield and had the organizational wherewithal, then it is Jamaat.
Job quota concern is primarily an issue that incites agitation in the educational institutions of urban centres, but the speed with which it spread across the country to rural towns, it could not have happened without a previously planned underlying organizational work. The targeted damage to public property could not be the work of innocent and apolitical private university students. It seemed quite well-planned -- somewhat carried out in the spirit of obliterating signs and symbols of progress under PM Sheikh Hasina. Why this personal targeting of the prime minister?
The bloody events of August 15, 1975, and the following change had happened through the connivance of (US-proxy) elements of Awami League and rightist elements outside it. I will not be surprised if this is proven to be the same here. This also coincides quite propitiously with the succession intrigue going on within Awami League as the prime minister is possibly serving her last term. Struggles and rivalry can breed or engender disloyalty. The PM's reputation as an iron lady has definitely made many Awami League leaders unhappy or insecure. So, there might have been Awami League insiders in collaboration with anti-PM outsiders; such is the nature of selfishness pursuits -- it makes strange bedfellows.
Eerily enough, not much before August 15, 1975, Bangabandhu, in a public speech in Gopalganj, regretted that he was surrounded by thieves, and suggested that he failed to do as much as he would love to do for his people. Quite like that, in a recent interview, the PM regretted that even her peon had amassed a wealth of 400 crores and she feels helpless in stemming corruption.
And lo and behold then came the student protest as a seismic wave, which, as it now appears, had no other goal than to bring her down. The student protest was against a High Court verdict that the government itself had appealed: so why did the students have to get down to streets against the government when the government was itself challenging the verdict? Why could the students not wait until the Supreme Court verdict was out? Did they expect the prime minister to contradict or obstruct the judicial process?
Historically, they had no basis to obstruct the government since the government had scaled back the quota in 2018 upon student protest itself: what basis did the students have to doubt the government’s intention. On the contrary, the students are at fault for not allowing time for the due process to conclude: the question is why? It seems more likely that they did not want to lose the opportunity of rallying around a cause delivered to them by the High Court verdict that could have been snatched away from them by the Supreme Court if they waited until that time.
The muted statements of concern of the western countries who are otherwise too-ready to decry the prime minister and Awami League gives proof that the powers that be were either almost dead sure of their immediate success and were quite dumbfounded by its failure, or that the game has not been fully played out.
It is also quite possible that they have intelligence corroborating the position of the government. Some newspapers, in Bangladesh and abroad, have raised the spectre of corruption in criticizing the government, alleging that the prime minister presides over widespread corruption in the government. Yes, there is corruption without doubt, but to say that she presides over corruption is to impeach the prime minister of corruption, which is highly questionable.
Corruption is the price we have to pay for multi-party democracy in underdeveloped countries; in single party democracies or one-dominant party democracies. Show me one government in a multi-party democracy in the developing or underdeveloped country where corruption does not exist. People of countries such as ours would be lucky to have a dedicated corruption-free leader; we need to understand that the corrupt surrogates are the ones that have the strongest political constituency because they have the means and methods of rewarding loyalty; the honest surrogates are generally lone rangers. So, even the most committed and welfare-minded leaders are hostage to corrupt surrogates in multi-party democracy, and even more so when the society is politically as fractious as ours.
The belligerent and ugly, often vulgar, language used in describing and decrying the prime minister is indicative of frustration among the party men who had planned this. They have started a social media campaign in a concerted and vulgar way. Note the language used like "firaun," and then the adaptation of "Yahya Khan's bloody face" to represent the prime minister and other references to 1971, all belong to the thesaurus of the rightists.
They are even trying to launder the stigma of "betrayal" from the word "rajakar" by using it as a slogan. These are all by design, and people seem to have fallen for it. Even some educated critics of the government use irreverent expressions like, "Amra karo baaper jonnyo ekhanay ashini…” Many of the spokespeople seem to have an axe to grind with the government or have a well-documented family background of being opposed to liberation.
The prime minister is clearly trapped, but we have to be vigilant as a nation and should not allow ourselves to be duped by political expedience or choosing moral positions that make us look good. Bangladesh has attained its current eminence with great effort and sacrifices. We cannot throw it all away because someone planned the optics of "massacre by government" to distract us away from our patriotic role in making coherent sense of the events. We should not be misled by surface appearances.
I am told that the government is enlisting the support of the UN for a deep investigation into the deaths and the protests. The dead bodies are being held for forensic examination of the cause of death and the ammunition used. This needs to be done by third-party investigation bodies.
I hope we will come out of these events better united as a nation. No one is our friend outside the country, but when we have enemies within us, either through ignorance, or through political myopia, then we are truly insecure and indeed we have no worse enemy than that. May we be guided to the truth and actions based on patriotic wisdom.