No happy endings for India on Hasina’s road to exit

Sheikh Hasina’s abrupt and dramatic exit from Bangladesh after resigning as prime minister, similar to the dramatic departure of Gotabaya Rajapaksa in Sri Lanka just two years ago, leaves Delhi with no friends in Bangladesh. Within hours of her exit, mobs tore down a statue of the liberator of Bangladesh, Bongabandhu Mujibur Rehman, and set fire to his home in Dhaka’s Dhanmondi, where he was assassinated with 10 other family members on August 15, 1975. 

The attacks on Bangladesh’s liberation history are an ominous sign for India. But this moment in Bangladesh was foretold 10 years ago, when Prime Minister Hasina won a contentious second term. The Bangladesh Nationalist Party had boycotted that election. The BNP's ally, the Jamaat-e-Islami, was banned. 

In the previous two years, the country had been convulsed with protests and street-fighting between pro-and anti-Hasina groups. After coming to power in 2008, she fast-tracked trials of Islamist collaborators in the 1971 rebellion against Pakistan. The quick trials and convictions, described as kangaroo courts by international human rights watchdogs, led to the executions of six Jamaat-e-Islami members and sharpened the political divide in the country. 

Hasina clawed in, but also dug her hole deeper. In 2019, when she sought a third consecutive term, the BNP decided to participate, but the Hasina government put party leader Khaleda Zia in jail on alleged charges of graft.  

From being hailed as a democrat and secular leader of Bangladesh, under whom Bangladesh scripted an economic turnaround, she had turned into just another elected authoritarian leader in the region, intolerant of criticism in media or by anyone else, jailing opponents and nurturing crony businessmen.

Last election and quota controversy

In this year’s election, once again boycotted by the BNP when its demand for the vote to be overseen by a caretaker government was rejected again, Hasina won on a turnout of 40 percent. Critics questioned even this low turnout. More egregiously, in order to give the vote a modicum of legitimacy, some members of Hasina’s Awami League, who had not been given tickets, were persuaded to contest as independent “opposition” candidates. As many as 66 such independents won. The Jatiya Party, an on-off ally of the BNP, contested and won just 11 seats. There was virtually no opposition in parliament.

In June, when the freshly re-anointed Hasina government looked set to bring back a previously shelved policy reservation, this time giving a larger share of seats in educational institutions and government jobs for descendants of freedom fighters, in other words families of the ruling Awami League, a dam of pent up resentment burst. Thousands of students hit the streets in protest. Hasina used force to clamp down, calling the students by the pejorative “razakar”, a term used for collaborators. By the time a court ruling slashed the quota offering Hasina a potential face saving way out, 200 protestors had been shot and killed.

Now the protestors had just one demand – for Hasina to quit. The BNP and Jamaat, which have the same demand, joined the protests. More use of force on Sunday killed a hundred more protestors as they embarked on a long march to Dhaka to press the demand for her resignation. As Dhaka burned, and it appeared imminent that her home would be stormed, Hasina was advised to resign and leave the country. According to the Bangladesh daily Prothom Alo, until the last minute Hasina was mounting pressure on the security forces to take tougher action. After a telephone call from her son advising her to step down at once, she took the advice. According to her son, Sajeeb Wajed Joy, who spoke from London to the BBC, she would take asylum in the UK and was not planning to return to Bangladesh or politics.

Thus ended the political life of Hasina, the daughter of Sheikh Mujibur Rehman, whose place in Bangladesh’s history was unquestioned. 

A common enemy and India Out campaign

India’s role in the 1971 liberation is intertwined with Mujib’s leadership of the political and armed rebellion against Pakistan. 

India is part of Hasina's family and political legacy. In recent years, Delhi's proximity to a leader who seemed to be out of touch with the mood on the street made Hasina even more unpopular, and India was hated for supporting her with eyes closed. In the last decade, it did not help that she got five star treatment in Delhi while Amit Shah slurred Bangladeshi people as “termites”, and over quiet visits and meetings, Adani tied up a power purchase deal with coal prices written into the agreement that were disadvantageous to Bangladesh. It was no coincidence that soon after her re-election this year, an “India Out” campaign took shape, a copycat of the identically named one in the Maldives.

Delhi's relationship with Hasina was cemented over a common enemy – Islamists, that both she and India suspected were being used by Pakistan to destabilise her government, and India’s border on both sides of Bangladesh – with West Bengal and in the Northeastern states to its east. 

In the five years of the Khaleda Zia government, the political dependence of her BNP on the pro-Pakistan Jamaat was a security nightmare for India. It created a fertile ground for extremist, radical elements. Northeast insurgent groups were given safe haven in Bangladesh. Anti-India sentiment grew. Hasina's return to power in 2009 after a decade was a relief for Delhi. From then on, Dhaka and Delhi have worked closely together on security issues.

Having long let go of its normative influence over the region, Delhi ignored what Hasina had become in the eyes of her own people, looking at Bangladesh only through the prism of India's interests, losing the people of Bangladesh in the process.

The paradox is this: whether in Bangladesh, Maldives, Myanmar or elsewhere in the region, a leader so unpopular at home that she has run out of political resources for her own continuance in power, can hardly safeguard another country’s interests, that too one as unpopular as India.

The road ahead for Delhi and Dhaka

Bangladesh’s army chief General Waker-uz-Zaman, regarded as close to Hasina, who came under serious pressure from within the army in recent days to disregard the PM’s orders and not use force against the protestors, has taken charge of the country after her departure and announced that an interim government will be formed after discussions with all parties. It is unclear who will head this interim set up. It could be the army chief himself. Khaleda Zia, who has been in house arrest for most of the last six years, has been ordered released. Her son Tarique Rehman is returning from self-exile in London. Banker and Nobel prize winner Muhammad Yunus, is also said to be returning to the country from travels abroad. The students have demanded that he should head the interim setup.

When Sheikh Hasina landed in Delhi at the Hindon Air Base on Monday afternoon, Pranab Mukherjee was the person she might have missed most. She looked up to him as a father figure. Had he been alive, he might have provided political counsel to the leader much before it came to this ignonimous end. Instead, at hand to receive her was National Security Adviser A K Doval. The news of India’s NSA with the fleeing leader of their country would have been a vindication of sorts to those in Bangladesh who wanted her out, reinforcing that India does not side with the people of Bangladesh. The images of Doval’s motorcade entering the Hindon Air Base captured the overly securitised relationship that India has with its neighbours. Her eventual destination might be the United Kingdom, where other members of her family live.

For now, Delhi will hope that the army chief, a Hasina loyalist, will keep anti-India sentiment in check. But prolonged military rule can only make Bangladesh more unstable. If and when elections are held, a wipeout of the Awami League looks certain in a likely landslide win for BNP, Jamaat and their allies.The arson attack on Mujib’s home and the vandalising of his statue is a sign that Bangladesh's history is about to to be scripted anew. For India, there are no happy endings. While security is one aspect, also at stake are connectivity and infrastructure projects in which India has invested billions of dollars in the last few years. While Hasina was no rejector of China, she was sensitive to Delhi’s red lines.

Delhi’s relations with Khaleda have always been difficult. Even so, serious attempts were made to woo the BNP. In 2011, Khaleda Zia met then vice-president Hamid Ansari while he was visiting Dhaka. India’s last formal, public outreach to the BNP was when Khaleda visited Delhi in 2012 at the invitation of then external affairs minister Pranab Mukherjee, who told her that as neighbours, the two countries must live “in a friendly atmosphere”. On her return to Dhaka, she described Hasina as a puppet of India. And when Mukherjee visited Bangladesh as the President in 2014, she dropped out of a planned meeting with him citing the protests and disruptions in Dhaka. It is not clear yet if Khaleda will assume the leadership of the BNP again, or keep the reins with her son.

The reported attacks on Hindu places of worship by triumphant mobs in Bangladesh are a sign of how treacherous the ground may become for India-Bangladesh ties in the post-Hasina era.

Beyond India, Hasina's departure will also have an impact on Myanmar, from where the Rohingya community has fled en masse to live in refugee camps in Bangladesh’s Cox’s Bazar.