The irony of freedom betrayed Sheikh Hasina

Gratitude in politics is an absurd notion like an iOS app operating on a smartphone.

Former Bangladesh CM Sheikh Hasina (File Photo | AP)

Freedom is the window to independence. Martyrs die upholding the cause of freedom so that successive generations can be independent of their enslaved past. Bangladesh, thanks to the Indian Army, got freedom from Pakistan, but did not gain independence from its former master’s legacy. Sheikh Hasina is a victim of that geopolitical and geo-religious contradiction.

Gratitude in politics is an absurd notion like an iOS app operating on a smartphone. Hence India, expecting gratitude from Bangladeshis for restoring their Bengali identity in Punjabi-dominated Pakistan is looking for hilsa in a Madurai fish market. More than 3,000 Indian soldiers died to free East Pakistan. Bangladeshi memory seems short enough to have forgotten their sacrifice and forgiven the murder of nearly three million of their own and the rape of over two lakh Bengali women by Yahya Khan’s soldiers.

Sheikh Hasina expecting laudation from Bangladesh’s youth for her father Mujibur Rahman’s role in giving them a country of their own is futile in the age of religious and nationalist revision. The quota vandals of Bangladesh, funded and orchestrated by Pakistan’s ISI and China, who pulled down Mujib’s statues are no Mukti Bahini. Hasina was not necessarily wrong in supporting a job quota for the children of freedom fighters and calling its detractors “razakars”. Many savage massacres and rape in East Pakistan were committed by razakars, who are denoted by the Bangladeshi government as collaborators of the invading Pakistani forces.

The irony of gratitude in politics is that virtue subverts itself in new circumstances. Philippe Pétain, the Lion of Verdun who defended France from Germany during WWI became a Nazi collaborator in WWII and murdered thousands of his countrymen. Mao was a hero who turned into a mass murderer. Communist Fidel Castro, who liberated Cuba from dictatorship, turned out to be a bigger tyrant than Batista, the man he overthrew. Mujib’s fall was his Socialist ideology, which led him to nationalise private businesses and industry like his idol Indira Gandhi did.

Perhaps she was his model of a powerful, popular politician; a new ideology named Mujibism was founded by his sycophants. In January 1975, the Sheikh introduced single-party rule, banned all newspapers except state-owned media and amended the Constitution, giving him greater power. In 1977, Bangladesh army chief Ziaur Rahman assumed Bangladesh’s presidency and walked back Mujib’s mistakes. He brought back banned political parties and press freedom, privatised industry and re-opened the Dhaka Stock Exchange.

A democratic general, he held the country’s second general election in 1979. Ironically, both men who left different legacies were assassinated. Hasina’s biggest political foe is his wife, Khaleda Zia. Power is an amnesiac; popular politicians forget it is the people who gave them a job and pay the price. In the end, democracy doesn’t forgive personality cults.

Hasina may never get to see her country again. Her life was saved in exile in the ’70s, after Indira gave her political asylum. Now it will be the turn of Narendra Modi with whom she shared an excellent rapport as an unflinching Indian ally. There is only one lesson in this unfolding story of liberation, democracy, dictatorship, hero worship and a midnight escape. It is a lesson, history teaches strong leaders.

The multiple similarities between the characters in the Bangladesh political drama, all powerful personalities driven by an unshakeable conviction in their place in history, is that they came to a tragic or obscure end. What went wrong? Mistaking their independence for freedom.

Ravi Shankar

ravi@newindianexpress.com