It was an extraordinary spectacle. The roads to the Ganobhaban, were blocked by countless platoons of moving crowd. There was no respite in their march forward to reach the Prime Minister’s official palatial residence mirroring the ramparts of a fortress. It was a perfect imitation of a military parade stepping up to the fortuitous dais. The crowd was peaceful but lively as though tapping their footsteps to the fast beat of a rhythm tuned to the tenor of a revolutionary song. Opposite the crowd, the security forces, both police and military, not few in number but unused to public rage and solidarity on this millionaire scale, tried frantically to bar their ways to the Prime Minister’s hitherto formidable bastion. But still the crowd came from all directions and descended on the capital marching to their avowed destination. 

At some point, the crowd was some distance away from reaching the gates of Ganobhaban. In that milieu of radiant and revolutionary passion, the crowd’s sheer size and unrelenting conviction proved unstoppable. Then everything changed when reports of firing at the crowd by police spread in the air. Bullets struck the crowd but the crowd did not disperse. Unbowed by this lethal threat, the mobs grew even bolder. They were ready to turn the capital into a battleground of the cowardly armed, and the brave-hearted unarmed. The forward march by now had gathered momentum, and there was no way that they would ever fear death at the price of freedom. It seemed that the bullets possessed by police were numbered but the indomitable courage of the crowd was fathomless. The inner contours of the popular defiance to the state coercion had pulled it down to pieces. 

Something was in the making. The crowd changed its character, and turned into furious mobs. The features of the enraged mobs transformed into desperate rebels. They morphed into million revolutionaries beating the cauldron of a boiling anger. Their fury burst forth with a violent sentiment. The rebellious voice explicitly shouted to the régime: Enough is enough and no more. You must leave. We are coming to burst in on you. 

The heated tension of the probable bloodbath suddenly ended when the morally defenseless Prime Minister gave way to her doomed exit. Prodded by the three Services’ Chiefs and aided by her guardsmen, the Prime Minister fled to India in an air force plane leaving her acolytes to an uncertain but internecine future. Finding no leader to take instructions from, the terrified party men on receiving the news of the Prime Minister’s escape ran and hid from the attacks of the angry public across the country. It was a time to avenge the injustices perpetrated by the legislators and party henchmen upon the terrified public during the party’s rule under the shadows of authoritarian decree. For those who shared the public sentiment of ever-memorable vengeance, it was a glorious revolution in the history of Bangladesh worthy of being declared as the Second Liberation since 1971 when the country truly became independent after nine months of War of Liberation, thus breaking free from its erstwhile national identity called Pakistan. But how this putative liberation came about, one needs to go back to some seventeen years back.

The General Who Dishonored Democracy

General Moeen U Ahmed was the Army Chief when Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) left power for the Interim Caretaker Government to hold a neutral free and fair national elections in 2007. He was an over-ambitious army General whom BNP had nominated as the Army Commander surpassing many of his seniors hoping that he would be instrumental in manipulating the elections for them to victory. The irony of Bangladesh politics is that political parties, despite their puritanical democratic rituals, have always used the army as their base of support for winning the elections. On the other hand, the army top brass has enjoyed this confidence without realizing that by doing so, they were driving their institution to non-professional unscrupulous practice. 

In Bangladesh, the system of neutral Caretaker Government was in place in 2007. It was a crude principle to guarantee that free and fair elections were held after the sitting government resigned on completion of its fixed tenure of governance. However, the Caretaker Government was mandated to remain in office only for three months to complete parliamentary elections, and not to manage anything other than routine work. 

At one point, while in office, General Moeen, on receiving secretly the news of his unjust removal as the Chief of Army Staff by the Caretaker President Iajuddin Ahmed in connivance with the outgoing BNP backing, orchestrated an emergency with the help of a few disgruntled Generals. The scope was further suitably trussed up when the political parties, prior to elections, embarked on a melee of politics of annihilation resulting in the deaths of many in the streets. The disarmed President without any political support fearing an assault on his presidential honor and position had no choice but to declare emergency on 11 January 2007, a phenomenon widely known as 1/11 relativising to the phenomenon of 9/11 on global scale. 

The Chief Advisor of the Caretaker Government was Fakhruddin Ahmed, an economist, civil servant, Princeton University doctorate and former Governor of the Central Bank of Bangladesh, called in from the United States where he was residing with his family to take over the reins of administering the country. But Fakhruddin was a simply titular head. Behind the scene, General Moeen was the main driving force helping the Caretaker Government retain power after constitution’s stipulated three months duration. Moeen’s anti-corruption drive was widely criticized for its alleged motive of getting rid of two former Prime Ministers ——- Sheikh Hasina and Khaleda Zia – surreptitiously framed in the so-called minus 2 formula. But in the final attempt, it suffered the ignominy of a political coup. This once again proved that political establishment in Bangladesh owed its allegiance to the family legacy of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and General Ziaur Rahman. 

The brighter side of General Moeen’s work was the preparation of the Voter ID Cards for which he must be praised. The system has, at least, been able to instill in the minds of the people the value of individual’s accountability to the state as a citizen. In response to the demand of the major political parties, on 17 December 2008, the two-year-long state of emergency was lifted. Elections were held by the non-elected Caretaker Government on 29 December 2008. 

The voter turnout was 80 percent, the highest in the history of Bangladesh elections. This was the first-time elections using national ID cards with photographs to avoid fake voting with an UN-funded initiative created a digital electoral roll. The confident aspect of the elections was removal of 11 million false names from the voter lists. However, the lop-sided results produced a landslide victory for the Awami League-led grand alliance, winning 263 of the 300 directly elected seats. The main rival Bangladesh Nationalist Party received only 32 seats. 

In politics, absolute majority is too complacent an option for the public. The landslide victory of Awami League was to cast a spell of inordinate rule for the subsequent years in the history of Bangladesh. For the party which had regaled so much in obsessive narrative of exclusive claim to sacrifice during liberation period, the moment of absolutism had arrived. In a democratic polity, no matter how much a popular sentiment is regarded as part of due process of freedom of choice, brute majority will always widen the gap between the political apparatchiks and general mass. There is a natural instinct in human beings to enjoy excessive power as part of the activity of superlative textual narrative to solidify party ambitions. In that form, democracy resembles the authoritarian spirit of totalitarian manifesto. The axiomatic claim of “Knowledge is Power” is upended to “Power is Knowledge”. Awami League’s political realignment for the next fifteen years took a distinctly anachronistic path. Balance of Power is not only an apothegm in international relations but also a decree to be followed in domestic politics. 

The Banality of Totalitarianism

If for anything, Awami League’s second tenure will ever be remembered for two despairing national crises. The first ensconced the seeds of tragic consequences, and the second bred sprouting of democratic hopelessness. 

Immediately after Awami League took over power, the Bangladesh Rifles (BDR), a para-military force staged a coup on 25 and 26 February 2009. The event is also referred as the “Pilkhana Tragedy” after the name of the place in Dhaka where the headquarters of the BDR was located. The rebels killed 57 army officers including the Director General and 17 civilians. After the surrender of the mutineers when things cooled down, the Prime Minister held a meeting with the aggrieved army officers at Dhaka Cantonment. The atmosphere of the meeting was riotous. After the meeting, seven army officers were dismissed by General Moeen U Ahmed because of disrespectful conduct towards the Prime Minister. But “The Pilkhana Murder” has left a permanent scar of anger and intrigue in the military. 

The murder of so many army officers after independence was forbiddingly shocking, and has left an interminable mark of wound in the soul of army as an institution. Though the Government effected the inquiry against the BDR rebels in civil courts many of whom received death sentence, it was largely a decrepit display of justice to the wider public. Later officers were subjected to persecution by their own military seniors through intelligence agencies for raising voice against such brutality of the incident. Now after the revolution, there is a clarion call to demystify the true story of the conspiracy behind the BDR revolt.

To many extrapolations of the causality of the Pilkhana incident indicate to the political hands of the party-in-power. Some of the Awami politicians were reported to have established contact with the BDR personnel before the carnage. Many army officers, recently posted to BDR, were marked for their high-handedness of the politicians who were rounded and harassed for corruption during army backed Caretaker Government in 2007-2008. Egged on by BDR members’ angst against their own officers for discriminatory treatment to soldiers, these politicians saw the moment a ripe time to take revenge against army. Awami League as a political party has suffered from an irretrievable anti-military psychic disorder since 1975 when Sheikh Mujib and his family were murdered brutally in a political coup staged by some of its own members aided by few mid-level army officers. It is in circulation that there was also a foreign hand in the killing of BDR officers. India was angry about BDR’s actions against the killing of some of its Border Security Forces (BSF) members that happened in the past. 

Till today, the underlying truth of what happened in Pilkhana is not known, similar to Bangladesh’s other unsolved mysteries such as, who ordered the killing of Sheikh Hasina’s father, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman on 15 August 1975. Hasina’s nemesis, Khaleda Zia also lives with a mystery of the assassination of her husband. Ziaur Rahman. But in the hindsight, there is no denying the fact that the ultima ratio of the BDR incident was to denude the morale of the army, and push the military to become an institution of weaklings. In the void of professional pride, the institution was to be revived now with perks, privileges, bribery, and a Lucifer intelligence mind-set geared to serve the political masters. First time, in the history of Bangladesh, the military was cowed to the machinations of totalitarian politics. 

The second national crisis was constitutional devaluation. In 2011, the party-in-power Awami League abolished the system of Caretaker Governments by injecting a constitutional amendment. The 13th Amendment of the Constitution of Bangladesh introduced the Non-Party Caretaker Government (NCG) system in 1996. The purpose was to hold free and fair elections for the national parliament. This unique system of holding elections was brought into effect due to extreme distrustful animus prevailing between the ruling and the opposition parties with regard to the veracity of elections. Under the NCG system, three elections were successfully carried out in 1996, 2001 and 2008. The people were mostly satisfied with this system, as NCG performed its duties successfully. 

The story about the details of the abolition of NCG reveals a most disturbing alliance between Awami League and the then Chief Justice of Bangladesh. Earlier the Awami-dominated Parliament sent the case of NCG for judgement to the Supreme Court hoping a complete purging of the system. Awami League wanted to give their resolve a judicial sanctum. However, the problem started when the verdict of the Supreme Court’s Appellate Division judges secured a 4-3 majority in favor of the annulment of NCG with a caveat that the next two parliamentary elections could be held under an interim Caretaker Government. The Chief Justice had remarked about the judgement in the open court. Justice Khairul Haque retired soon after the verdict. 

Justice Khairul Haque submitted the written verdict sixteen months after his retirement. His written judgement annulled the NCG system, and did not mention of the next two interim NCG. To many it was a complete travesty of truth by the former Chief Justice, and was deemed to have been submitted on the advice and pressure of the ruling party. There was, no doubt, that Awami League had planned egregiously to destroy the backbone of the opposition through a politico-judicial collusion. 

However, the abolition of NCG brought Awami League and BNP face-to-face in confrontation. Politics was sparked to be ignited into incendiary engagement. “Politics of Annihilation” had begun, and with that politics in Bangladesh ushered an era of “State Terror”. 

BNP and other opposition parties boycotted the elections. There was a mayhem before and after the elections in January 2014. In the aftermath of the election, the government sustained the clampdown on the opposition. Police carried out raids and arrested opposition leaders. By 21 January 2015, the government had arrested 7,015 activists and leaders of opposition, and placed a bounty of 100,000 taka ($1,300) on the heads of other protest leaders. By 2015, the Awami League had made up its mind to subjugate politics to ensure its perpetual reign in power. It was a complement strategy to subjugate military after the BDR incident. 

Awami League had abused the annulment of NCG system to target the two rival opposition parties, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) and Jamaat-eIslami (JEI). By punishing the top leaders of JEI for 1971 war crimes, and being fully convinced of BNP’s helpless stance in failing to publicly denounce JEI as the petrified figure of Crimes Against Humanity and anti-liberation force, Awami League was now up for a narrative that divided the country along deadly lines. In order to purify national consciousness, Awami League choose to play with fire. For that it had to politicize all state institutions convinced that state machinery was more powerful than the power of the common men. 

The subjugation of state machinery and its use in the elections of 2018 and 2024 successfully by Awami League ossified its political principles into chicanery and crushing of the opposition. 

The Pathological Banality of 

Linguistic Nationalism

Politicians in Bangladesh have used language to rev up orgiastic hostility against the opposition to the point of megalomaniac torture. Enervating the tension of dialectical finesse, it ends up in raw display of insulting the others with spiteful venom of words. Mutual respect for political opponents with different ideology is stripped of its obligation to democratic decorum. Even worse, the verbal flamboyance is appropriated by the party-in-power for its control over the state institutions who would blatantly oppress those who used language contrary to the pre-defined meanings of the potentates. By doing so, Awami League inflicted a sense of scarring humiliation to the public who were struck by words’ intimidating stabbing at their dialectical exchange. 

Awami League choose the path to de-nationalize the opponent by applying the vilifying onslaught with the choice of words. For Awami politicians, nothing was more gratifying than to label others with some appellation of textual sarcasm. The idea of nationalism was structured with the pairing of “opposite-words”. Some of the key associative antonyms were: pro-liberation /anti-liberation, secular/nonsecular, Islamic/ non-Islamic, democratic/anti-democratic, friend/ foe (used in the context of external relations), patriot/anarchist, Bangladeshi/Bengali. The characteristic of these pairing is that they also produce concepts in subjective explanation about other’s role in politics which mystifies his nationalism. So, these conceptual oppositions are not neutral but antithetical. One of the two terms in the opposing pair is “privileged” which was appropriated by Awami League. It is this privileged position that became the citadel for the ruler to govern, and the text that offered him an authoritative language found its expression in de-constructing the “nationalism discourse” of those who opposed him. This is a major challenge in the politics of Bangladesh to build a logo of political culture that is sensible but not pathological. 

The most fatal word that Awami politicians glibly chucked at the opponents was razakar, a word that was coined to identify the Bengalis who opposed the independence of Bangladesh in 1971. After fifty years, Awami League forgot that the word razakar when applied to the children and grandchildren of the “suspect razakars” would be a matter of life and death to their identity as a Bangladeshi. It is this word, when uttered by the Prime Minister in abject derision to the students of the “Quota Reform Movement”, the response to her hauteur was bravely riposted in a language much stronger and self-inflicting yet possessing a unique rebellious mood: 

I am razakar! You are razakar! 

Who has said? Who has said? 

Dictator. Dictator. 

The days of Awami League were numbered. The ultimatum for Sheikh Hasina’s resignation and removal from the seat of power were just a matter of time. 

Yesterday, terrorist conjured up the image of rag-tag anti-government protestors, but today the “Rule of Terror” reminds us a top-down program of the Awami League regime of state violence against ordinary people. Yesterday, it was considered a radical view to seek moral political freedom, and the limits of political acceptability were imprisoned within the walls of rabid nationalism. If someone championed popular voice but was found shy of the ruler’s grace, he was under suspicion of the law-enforcing agencies. In fact, the state officials who worked for the government but did not speak up to denounce the opposition political parties, his patriotic credentials were at risk. The paranoia reached absurd levels. Some military officials were unlawfully accused of treason for merely having relatives who belonged to certain political parties. The “Reign of Terror”, like nightmare, devoured its own innocent children. Children born after 1971 on the soil of Bangladesh, to be dubbed as razakar for the lapses of their fore fathers, is the highest abuse that a society can be charged with committing a sin. 

The students of Bangladesh have fought against injustice. Their struggle on moral, intellectual and physical plane has proved that totalitarian power is absurd, and destroys a state. But in the end, it is the victory of ordinary people that paves the way for a charismatic figure to restore order. In their vision, he is a hero and populist icon. This time, it is Dr Muhammad Younus.