Bangladesh Turns Vandal Nation – OpEd
Since Feb 5, Bangladesh has plunged into absolute lawlessness with mobs of radical Islamists descending on residences of lawmakers , party officials and ministers of the ousted Awami League to demolish the buildings.
They vandalised and set on fire the Bangabandhu Memorial Museum in Dhaka, where Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, who led Bangladesh’s struggle for independence, lived until his assassination with much of his family in the 15 August 1975 coup.
Popular as ‘Bangabandhu ‘ (friend of Bengalis), Mujib’s legacy was synonymous with the spirit of the 1971 Liberation War. The large-hearted leader had told officials engaged in rehabilitation of tens of thousands of Bengali women raped by Pakistani soldiers that if none owned them up, he would be father to them and their permanent address would be 32, Dhanmondi.
This Museum has been vandalised once before immediately after the ouster of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina (Mujib’s one of two surviving children) on August 5 last year. But the fresh attack on Wednesday followed the announcement of a program of political agitation by Hasina, now in exile in India, that spanned the entire of February, a month of enormous emotional significance due to the 1952 Bengali language movement .
Bur Wednesday’s mob attack on the museum was no sporadic affair or an angry reaction to Hasina’s speech. Much before Hasina took to the social media, the mobilisation of the mobs had started and government-owned bulldozers had been commandeered by the mobs.
On the same day, houses of the extended Sheikh family were demolished by using bulldozers in Khulna and Barisal. Houses of six senior Awami League leaders like Liberation War heroes Tofail Ahmed and Amir Hussain Amu were vandalised and set on fire in southern Bangladesh. The violence continued on Thursday when similar mobs attacked houses of Awami League general secretary Obaidul Quader in Noakhali and former junior foreign minister Shariar Alam.
An AP report says 70 such attacks by mobs of Islamist radicals in 38 districts were reported in three days since Feb 5.
The mobs chanting ” Nara e Takbir” attacked universities and cultural centres in seven places across the country to destroy murals of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. Hasnat Abdullah, a key figure in the agitation that ousted Sheikh Hasina and one believed to be close to interim government chief Prof Yunus, justified these attacks as ” erasure of the tombs of fascism.” Hasnat had earlier threatened media if they gave space to Sheikh Hasina’s speech . ” Doing that is tantamount to facilitating her agenda,” Hasnat told a news conference. Islsmist radical leaders now say their next target is the grave of Mujibur Rahman in Tungipara.
The Yunus government did issue a “stern warning” to stop the attacks more than 48 hours after the mayhem had engulfed the country.
The day before these orchestrated attacks on Wednesday, Islamist radicals marched to Kasimpur prison under the leadership of Ataur Rahman Bikrompuri heading the “Free Jail Movement”. They gheraoed the jail warden and forced him to release a convicted Islamist terrorist Mohibullah, who started off in Harkatul Jihad Al Islami (HUJI) and came to head a new radical Islamist group Sharqiya Hindal. Bikrompuri has led similar successful marches before to free convicted Islamist radicals from prisons across the country. 700 radicals freed from jails are now at large .
Since the ouster of the Hasina government, the interim government headed by Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus has allowed such mobs a free run across the country. Some allege that the mobs have been systematically used to force the resignation of anyone considered close to the Hasina regime– from Supreme Court judges to senior bureaucrats to those heading educational institutions. The mobs, often armed with sharp weapons, have attacked police stations, Hindu and Buddhist temples, Sufi shrines and Christian churches, media offices and party offices of the ousted Awami League.
Such is the frequency of these mob attacks that commentators have started described Yunus-ruled Bangladesh as ‘Vandaldesh ‘ where mob justice, rather than court-administered justice, has become the order of the day.
The demoralized police and the cautious army has just stood by as spectators. Many see a calculated design in perpetuation of this mobocracy to sustain the interim government, for which there is no provision in Bangladesh Constitution.
Neither Yunus nor the Islamist groups like Jamaat-e-Islami want an early elections to the parliament because a free and fair poll would either help the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) ride to power and the Awami League to stage a comeback at least as a leading Opposition party, using the groundswell of popular disenchantment with the Yunus regime. Understandably, the BNP criticised the attack on the museum as “an attack on democracy.”
The pitch for reforms Yunus wants to bring about is seen by some as an excuse to delay the elections and by others as downright illegal because any fundamental change to the existing polity requires a popular mandate. Few have argued that while Yunus and his ‘students brigade’ lambasted Hasina for rigging elections, they have found a way to stay in power without having to face any elections.
While Hasina was blamed for using the state apparatus to silence opponents and detractors, Yunus and his cohorts are using the mobs to silence detractors and terrorise them into submission. One of his advisors, Asif Mahmud, has openly talked of plans to ban the Awami League, whose student wing Chatra League has already been banned. For Bangladeshis, many of whom enthusiastically joined the July-August agitations hoping to herald a new dawn, the revolution has degenerated into a reign of terror.
