Global Express | The Bangla Blowback

On August 5, Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina Wajed – one of the world’s longest serving female leaders - was given less than 45 minutes to leave the country.

She resigned as Prime Minister and fled, minutes before mobs ransacked her official residence, set fire to the home turned museum in Dhaka's Dhanmondi of the founding father of the country, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and in an eerie repeat of what happened at Baghdad’s Tahrir Square where mobs toppled Saddam Hussain’s statue, the most compelling image of all, Sheikh Mujib’s statue was brought down. Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujib's and Hasina's posters are being scrubbed clean.

Is this the end of the Mujib legacy, tarnished by a daughter who turned from victim to unfeeling autocrat?

And as the streets have erupted, mobs on the rampage, there’s been a bloodbath. Some 450 people are dead. Minorities have been attacked. Hindu temples vandalized. Sheikh Hasina’s Awami League leaders killed in their homes across the country. Police stations looted of their guns.

The Chief Justice who had lit the spark by passing the resolution on reserving jobs for the children of freedom fighters forced to quit on Saturday.

As Nobel laureate Dr Muhammad Yunus takes over as head of a caretaker government at the behest of the student leaders -Nahid Islam and Asif Mahmud Sajib Bhuiyan – it’s still mob rule.

Can Dhaka weather this storm? Or, is it on the brink of civil war? Is Bangladesh facing a near implosion?

As the right wing Islamist Jamaat -e-Islami and the Opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party led by the ailing Khaleda Zia, cash in on the pent up anger against Hasina for the forced disappearances of opposition leaders and now the cold-blooded killing of their unarmed teenage children who participated in the student led uprising, this is a blowback that could push Bangladesh to the brink. And singe India on its vulnerable eastern rim.

What are the strategic implications for India, as it loses its strongest ally in the region?

Is this a South Asian Spring?

Sri Lanka had an Aragalya...Pakistan, an Army versus Imran Khan time bomb that is still ticking away…Maldives, a Muizzu.

Can Dr. Muhammad Yunus – sworn in as chief adviser of an interim administration - bring a measure of calm to the country?

*WHO HOLDS THE REINS OF POWER?

Does power rest in the hands of the Army chief Wakar uz Zaman?

OR does it lie with the student leaders who rule the streets but are already running up against the entrenched political interests of the Opposition Jamaat -e-Islami, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party's Khaleda Zia and her son Tarique Rahman who want elections, so they can cash in on the anti-Hasina anger in the country?

WHO WILL CALL THE SHOTS IN BANGLADESH IN THE DAYS and MONTHS TO COME?