As India-Pakistan Drew Global Attention, Bangladesh Slid Into Islamist Rule With Awami League Ban And Rising Extremism

Even as the world’s eyes remained riveted on the India-Pakistan conflict last week, three significant developments have reshaped Bangladesh’s political landscape—each more consequential than the other.

Last Saturday, the Bangladesh government banned the Awami League—the party that led the nation’s liberation struggle in 1971 and which has governed the country for nearly half of its five-and-half decades of existence. This unprecedented move marks a turning point in the nation’s history, signalling the collapse of the post-1971 secular-nationalist order.

Secondly, the Islamist forces that were always behind the August 2024 coup d’état, which drove out the Sheikh Hasina government, have now come openly to the fore. Having used and then jettisoned their temporary allies, ranging from the student movement to the left, they now stand alone at the helm of affairs.

Their message is clear: 1971 has been reversed. These fundamentalist groups are now attempting to mould Bangladesh in their own image—an Islamist state that looks not towards its liberation history but toward a fundamentalist revival aligned ideologically with Pakistan.

Thirdly, the embattled Yunus government—desperate to protect itself from mounting public anger over its failure to deliver basic goods, ensure law and order, and prevent the country from sliding into chaos—has chosen to side with the Islamist agenda to protect itself from a possible counter-putsch.

The public fury against Yunus has also been fuelled by his government’s decision to cede to a demand by the United States to give a corridor through Chittagong to the Arakan Army-held areas in Myanmar’s Rakhine state through which supplies to the Arakanese rebels will travel.

The Yunus government is indeed between the sea and a hard rock. On the one hand, it seeks to stave off a possible military coup and public revolt, while on the other hand, it wishes to satisfy geopolitical forces who may have helped it come to power and play ball with fundamentalist forces who now dominate the narrative on the streets.

The symbol of this transformation came at Shahbagh on Saturday, during the closing stages of a mass demonstration jointly held by the Islamists and student protesters demanding the ban on the Awami League. As the students began to sing the Bangladeshi national anthem, they were shouted down by Islamist voices, voices that rejected the anthem as a symbol of the secular ideals of 1971.

That moment captured the final rupture: the spirit of liberation drowned out by the march of religious fundamentalism.

An eerie slogan could also be heard being repeated by part of the multitude at the Saturday rally: “Ekta, ekta League dhor, oder dhore jobai kor (Catch the Awami Leaguers one by one and then decapitate them)”.

The forces that now wield power behind the throne are the Jamaat-i-Islami Bangladesh (which acted as the Pakistan Army’s militia in 1971), the Hefajat-e-Islam (which was formed by Hasina to counter Jamaat), various small Islamist parties and an increasingly empowered bunch of militants, many of whom are on global terror lists—these include Ansarullah Bangla Team, Hizb ut-Tahrir and the Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen (JUMB). Worryingly, both Hizb ut flags and known ABT leaders, who were till recently in jails, were spotted at Saturday’s rally by pressmen covering it.

After Saturday’s gazette notification by the Yunus government, the Awami League can no longer work as a legal party. Meetings, including closed-door ones by its supporters, are banned. Even comments in cyberspace deemed favouring the Awami League could lead to arrests and legal actions.

Though the League had not been banned after the August coup, it was never allowed to hold rallies or protests, and the “crime” of attempting any such move had, in the past ten months, led to mass arrests and custodial beatings resulting in many deaths.

Most of its leaders, who could not flee the country in time, have already faced arbitrary arrest on trumped-up charges to become cell companions of hundreds of journalists, writers, poets and intellectuals who were seen as liberals.

One of the direct outfalls of this ban move will be that at least 35 per cent of the riverine nation’s population, which had even in its worst days banked on the Awami League, will now stand disenfranchised, without a political party or ideology to support or be supported by.

The Islamists are, of course, hoping that they can coax, cow or bully the Awami League’s former voters into casting their lot with them to ultimately legitimise their ascent to power. However, the other main party of Bangladesh, the BNP, led by an ailing Begum Zia, is also hoping that the known vote bank of the Awami voters, in the absence of the League, will shift loyalty towards it.

Analysts warn that there could be yet another unintended consequence for the Yunus government. The Awami League, long criticised for consolidating power and suppressing opposition voices, could now reposition itself as a political victim, turning accusations of authoritarianism into claims of persecution to ride back on a wave of popular support.

The BNP, for its part, has officially supported the ban but distanced itself from demonstrations demanding the move. Some say that is so because it fears that at some stage a confident Islamist political rabble-turned “army” could also effectively hobble or ban it too. There is a bit of history which lends credence to such fears.

Soon after the military had taken over in January 2007, a formula had been floated by pro-Western intellectuals in Bangladesh called the “Minus Two”. It was a ‘simplistic solution’ to what these unelected think tanks considered “unnecessary political instability”: remove both the Awami League and the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, the two parties which had ruled the South Asian nation (whenever the military itself was not running Bangladesh), and bring in a “professional” government led by Grameen Bank founder Mohammad Yunus!

The idea did not find many takers, and it led to the Awami League and the BNP joining hands to force an election. The recurrence of such an eventuality in the face of the rise of Islamic fundamentalist groups cannot be ruled out even today.

While it is difficult to see which way Bangladesh will go from here, suffice it to say that the rise of an army of Islamists which has as its comrades-in-arms—known terror groups—is not exactly the best of news for an India which has just managed to overcome a terrorist infiltration from its western borders.

The writer is former head of PTI’s eastern region network.

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