A New York Times report published last year puts the number of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) affiliated individuals embroiled in legal woes at around 2.5 million. The staggering number is not only putting a strain on the country’s already overworked justice system, but it is also perpetuating and, in fact, compounding the political crisis by placing the victims up against the government.
An indictment significantly diminishes a person’s life chances. In Bangladesh, that individual is rendered ineligible for government jobs. For many men, marital prospects take a hit as parents are generally unwilling to marry off their daughters to men with a beleaguered past haunting them in the present, as well as in the future. In an interview given to BBC Bangla, Dr Muhammad Yunus says that even their children are struggling to tie the knot. The court cases themselves drag on for decades, forcing the defendants to spend a considerable amount of their working hours in courtrooms, thus jeopardizing their career.
Migration to other countries, a major way for many in Bangladesh to climb up the socio-economic ladder, becomes difficult for those with a criminal record as the visa processes of many of the developed countries require a police certificate that Bangladeshi authorities deny them. Some high-flying corporate jobs, and the ones requiring a security clearance, within Bangladesh also become inaccessible.
A defendant may also choose to neglect the seemingly never-ending legal processes, resulting in the issuance of arrest warrants against that person. While the warrants are seldom executed, they confine the fugitive defendants to small businesses or menial jobs drawing little to no attention.
The criminal cases hopelessly pin not only those implicated in them but also their families against the government. Without any prospects of rehabilitation so long as the AL is in power, their only shot at a return to normal life is to help bring the regime down by any means, constituting an ever-lurking threat to Bangladesh’s political and economic stability.
The crisis is aggravated by the presence of the discourse of infiltration within the AL. Acting less like a political party and more like an ethnic group, AL is no longer willing to embrace individuals with different political ideologies or allegiances in the past, branded as infiltrators as opposed to new members. Indeed, merely having an uncle with the BNP or a late grandfather with the Jamaat-e-Islami (JI) may constitute sufficient grounds for excluding an individual from the AL-run system.
One of the markers used by pundits to distinguish between a political party and an ethnic group is that the former is relatively malleable. Entering and exiting a political party, reflecting an individual’s personal journey, and evolving and often competing interests, should be fairly easy, but AL has permanently shut its doors to a sizeable segment of the population.
Despite the undeniable economic progress that Bangladesh has witnessed under the AL, the perpetual marginalization of millions of people, primarily through the instrumentalization of criminal cases, for their perceived or actual ties with the opposition presents a constant source of instability. Their marginalization ensures that they perpetually remain tied to the BNP-JI nexus despite these parties’ leadership incapable of producing a viable alternative.
Perhaps more dangerously, the alienation of a huge segment of Bangladesh’s population runs the risk of turning Bangladesh into an apartheid, fueling extremisms of all stripes, including the violent ones. The AL’s foremost threat is no longer established parties like BNP and JI, dealing with which is a cakewalk for AL, but the marginalized millions susceptible to foreign and domestic plots to destabilize the country.
A general amnesty will go a long way in securing AL’s grip on power by significantly reducing the opposition to its rule. More importantly, it will allow AL to better deliver on its development promises that cannot be actualized without involving in the process the millions implicated in criminal cases.
Turning millions into criminals is counterintuitive; it guarantees chaos and destruction instead of stability and growth. It is in the interest of the AL and Bangladesh’s development partners that millions on trial in Bangladesh return to a normal life.
Md Ashraf Aziz Ishrak Fahim has a BA in International and Global Affairs from Mahidol University, Thailand and an MA in Social and Political Thought from the University of Leeds, UK. He is currently a graduate student of Contemporary Islamic Studies at Hamad Bin Khalida University in Qatar. He can be reached at mdfa48907@hbku.edu.qa.