Sheikh Hasina: From Refugee To Prime Minister To Fugitive In Half A Century – Analysis
The dramatic life of Bangladesh former Prime Minister’s continues to unfold, mirroring the roller-coaster ride of South Asia’s political dynasties since 1947
While the past invariably catches up in unexpected ways, and revolutions promising social-political liberation often devour its own heroes and children, the unfolding history of Bangladesh is yet another testimony of the traumas unleashed by the Partition of 1947 which divided the vast subcontinent into India, Pakistan and East Pakistan. Sheikh Hasina’s dramatic flight from Dhaka on 5 August 2024 will remain a defining though traumatic moment in south-east Asian politics when a once-loved and highly respected Prime Minister had to flee for her life as the opposition rose against her, with religious leaders, students and citizens taking to the streets against her dictatorial regime.
As Bangladesh’s longest-serving Prime Minister, who shaped the destiny of a new liberated country for twenty eventful years (from 1996 to 2001, and then 2009 to 2024), life and politics seem to have come a full circle for Sheikh Hasina. In 1975 after the assassination of her father ‘Bangabandhu’ Sheikh Mujibur Rehman, the President of Bangladesh, she had taken shelter in India from 1981 to 1986. Now almost four decades later, the bespectacled, dignified South Asian leader, is said to be seeking asylum not just in India, but UAE or Saudi Arabia among others.
The interim government of Bangladesh recently reaffirmed their resolve to bring the deposed Prime Minister from India and are ready to seek international intervention if necessary. Media quoted the Law Adviser Asif Nazrul at the Dhaka Secretariat stating that if New Delhi refuses to return Sheikh Hasina, it would constitute a violation of the extradition treaty between Bangladesh and India. Adding to her woes, the country’s International Crimes Tribunal (ICT) issued arrest warrants for Hasina and several former Cabinet ministers, advisers, and military and civil officials for ‘crimes against humanity and genocide’.
In many ways Sheikh Hasina’s existential plight since August 2024 mirrors the helpless agony of lakhs of refugees who were forced to migrate in the tumultuous years of 1946 to 1948, with waves of humanity continuing through till 1971 and then again in the new century with the homeless Rohingyas crossing Bangladesh borders. Be it the well-connected political elites or the masses of faceless subalterns, all are left equally aghast, surprised and grossly unprepared to face uncertain futures in alien lands. There is a harsh equality in adversity, a cruelty that makes few distinctions.
“Partition was the defining event of modern, independent India and Pakistan, and it is hardly an exaggeration to say that partition continues to be the defining event of modern India and Pakistan,” wrote GJ Larson in ‘India’s Agony Over Religion’, and Bangladesh can safely be added to his list since its formation in 1971. “Partition moreover was and is a profoundly religious event for both sides…and most of the agony over religion throughout the South Asian region to a large extent traceable to it. Partition is at the heart not only of the great regional conflicts… but it is also an important component factor in a whole series of religious-cum-political conflicts reaching down to the present time.”
When Prof Mushirul Hasan of Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, was delivering the presidential speech at 2001 Indian History Congress, he referred to Larson’s linkage between religion and regional political conflicts. He said the grand narrative of Partition needs to be told differently, beyond confines of space and time. Borders, refugees and diaspora are sources of conflict, but Prof Hasan highlighted, “there is even talk of the need for new languages in dealing with historical traumas of the past, of rethinking Partition necessitated by the shift away from high political histories.”
According to French scholar Jean-Luc Nancy, the gravest and most painful testimony of the modern world, the one that possibly involves all other testimonies to which this epoch must answer, is the testimony of the dissolution, the dislocation, or the conflagration of community. In short, tears and agonies of common citizenry looking up to political leaders for providing education, health, housing and employment with a degree of honour and respect. The irony is: whom does the leadership look up to when they are homeless, stateless? How do the powerful cope with being powerless?
In an apt summing up the Partition, Prof Mushirul Hasan said, “never before in South Asian history did so few people decide the fate of so many in northern India.” The lives and experiences of the people – who lived through the horror of those times, their identities and uncertainties created, reinforced by the Partition – continue to be invoked not just in history books but through literature and poetry, theatre and films. Dr Papiya Ghosh of Patna University in one of her essays, described the Partition as the largest single bilateral flow of people with about six to seven million Muslims moving the minority provinces of India to Pakistan; and nearly a million Hindus and Sikhs moving from Pakistan to India in 1947, though by 1951 the numbers had risen substantially. India and Pakistan kept their borders open till 1951. Dr Ghosh highlighted the trauma of Partition for almost 700,000 refugees who were Urdu-speaking Bihari Muslims and headed towards East Pakistan (later liberated as Bangladesh); these were the mujahirs as the refugees came to be called, a term which has continued till date.
Currently the political narrative in Bangladesh is centred around justice. The country’s Chief Adviser Muhammad Yunus stated his government is ensuring the security of all citizens, assuring justice in every killing. He earlier claimed about 1500 people, including students and workers, were killed while 19,931 others were wounded during protests against the Hasina government on the controversial job quota system.
When India expressed its deep concern on the arrest of Hindu monk Chinmoy Krishna Das in Bangladesh, it added a predictable religious dimension to the ongoing diplomatic relations. The External Affairs Ministry stated with deep concern the arrest and denial of bail to Shri Chinmoy Krishna Das who is spokesperson of Bangladesh Sammilit Sanatan Jagran Jote.
Bangladesh even with an overwhelming Muslim majority has Hindus, Buddhists, Christians, Chakmas, Meiti and several tribal communities; each of whom regard the country as their home and are proud of a composite culture defining this densely-populated land fed by rivers of the subcontinent. The country’s rich historical and cultural past cannot be overlooked; integrated as it was through the centuries with pan-India empires.
When Dr Papiya Ghosh was ‘Writing Ganga-Jamni: 1940’s and after’, she highlighted the nuanced understanding of a ‘pure and new’ nationalism which was emerging across the subcontinent: it was side-stepping the existing religious communities and grounding itself in the interests of individuals rather than religious communities.
“The term ganga-jamni is often used as an attribute of composite North Indian/Indo-Muslim culture: many Urdu writers used it to describe ‘everything that is mixed and syncretistic in a positive sense’. I have used it as a metaphor for mingled histories that were either contested, enlisted or invoked in the politics of the 1940s and after,” the professor explained. For historians it is an onerous task of analysing, enumerating religious communities composing the nation and forming its composite culture: an additive arithmetic of nation-making.
The current political struggles in Bangladesh, and Sheikh Hasina’s homeless status, are harking back to the what had been described as ‘the political accountancy of the Raj’, which was basically the colonial project of religious enumeration, reliant on the terminology of majority and minority.
Prof Hasan, in his 2001 presidential address quoted David Page’s ‘Prelude to Partition’, where the historian outlined the role played by the Imperial power in consolidating political interests around communal issues. “By treating the Muslims as a separate group, it divided them from other Indians. By granting them separate electorates, it institutionalized that division. This was one of the most crucial factors in the development of communal politics. Muslim politicians did not have to appeal to Muslims. This made it very difficult for a genuine nationalism to emerge,” he said.
In the 21st century, the three nations born out of the 20th century Partition – India, Pakistan and later Bangladesh – remain trapped in this majority-minority dynamic, even while addressing larger issues of national development, security and foreign affairs. Border issues, refugee crises were issues often swept under the carpet of nationalism and nationhood. These are the ironies of contemporary history and Sheikh Hasina, with her illustrious and multilayered political-personal legacies, is today part of the refugee crises which had been left unresolved, unsettled and unclear for a host of reasons.
“The Partition persists in myriad ways,” wrote Dr Papiya Ghosh when she was tracking the tides of Partition refugees in ‘Changing discourse of the Muhajirs’.” What adds to the irony is that at the subaltern level, where a significant majority of homeless-stateless migrants find themselves, the transborder migration continues till date: from Bangladesh into India, and vice versa. This is a non-religious migration involving communities and families; it undermines the South Asian state system spawned by the Partition, argued Dr Ghosh.
Adding more malice to the mingled histories of our times, the new US President Donald Trump representing one of the richest and influential countries in the world used degrading rhetoric against illegal immigrants in the United States. “No, they’re not humans, they’re not humans, they’re animals,'” said Trump during his election campaign.
Clearly across the continents – in the developed and developing world – questions of immigration, refugeehood, citizenship, and equally about rights in the homeland continue to pose more problems, generating greater discord, divisiveness and distrust in our globalized world.
