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Bangladesh students protest.
Credit: Reuters Photo
The political stalemate in Bangladesh has taken a dramatic turn. What began as a student agitation against the quota system for scarce government jobs for the descendants of freedom fighters culminated in regime change. There are salutary lessons here.
Democracy is not only about holding elections scrupulously at prescribed intervals, but they should be free, fair, and seen as so. Second, political alienation can turn into ulcers. In Bangladesh, too, the youth unemployment rate is very high, and what happened is a warning signal for India. Third, do not drive the Opposition into the corner. The Opposition should have the space to function. Finally, hubris led to authoritarianism, and the ruling elite became dictatorial. As Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina fled her country, the political opponent she had locked up, Khaleda Zia, will be freed. It’s a morality play. Ancient Greeks believed that hubris offended the gods.
There have been only a few instances of an army returning to the barracks voluntarily. What will happen next is anybody’s guess. The army chief himself has been in his job for less than two months.
On July 21, the Supreme Court of Bangladesh watered down the quota system, addressing the students’ main demand. The agitation should have ended at that point, but instead, it got repackaged as a struggle for democracy. Hopefully, Bangladesh will give urgent thought to holding fresh elections, and a level playing field will be made available for political parties. The good part is that 76-year-old Hasina, the monarch of all she surveyed, walked into the sunset without a fight as she saw the writing on the wall.
The Sri Lankan-style anti-climatic denouement seems to have repeated itself — this was how the Rajapaksa regime ended. Perhaps Anglo-American mediation made it possible in Dhaka. Army Chief General Waker-Uz-Zaman is a finished product of King’s College, London.
The speed with which the student agitation turned into an anti-government movement was impressive. This raises some troubling questions. There has been an eerie similarity to colour revolutions. From the American perspective, Bangladesh is a priority country for ‘democratisation’ and a lynchpin of US’ Indo-Pacific strategy. Washington has been exerting pressure on Hasina to bandwagon. Hasina’s stubborn refusal to join Quad was probably the clincher. With the failure of the colour revolution in Thailand, the stalemate in the insurrection in Myanmar, and Chinese consolidation in Sri Lanka and the Maldives — Bangladesh’s importance to the Western strategy in the region is second to none.
Interestingly enough, the White House was ready with a statement in real time explicitly welcoming the regime change in Dhaka and commending the army: “The United States has long called for respecting democratic rights in Bangladesh, and we urge that the interim government formation be democratic and inclusive. We commend the Army for the restraint they have shown today.”
The renowned American strategic thinker wrote the script of the geostrategy, the late Zbigniew Brzezinski, the liberal hawk who influenced the Democratic party’s foreign policy: “Ukraine, a new and important space on the Eurasian chessboard, is a geopolitical pivot because its very existence as an independent country helps to transform Russia. Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire ... if Moscow regains control over Ukraine, with its 52 million people, major resources, and access to the Black Sea, Russia again regains the wherewithal to become a powerful imperial state.”
If one interchanges ‘Ukraine’, ‘Russia’, and the ‘Black Sea’ with ‘Bangladesh’, ‘India’, and the ‘Bay of Bengal’, one gets a startling perspective through the fog. Simply put, external forces have a way of amplifying the demands of domestic groups, prying open space for new issues to echo these demands into the domestic arena. This happened in Bangladesh. Unless this modus operandi is understood, India loses the plot. We are at a sensitive global historical moment, and Western inclinations to intervene in regime politics of countries tend to be greater — Pakistan first, Bangladesh now.
Bangladesh is key to the security of India’s northeast. It is a hotbed of anti-Indian sentiments—especially in these halcyon days of Hindu nationalism. Its strategic location at the apex of the Bay of Bengal positions it as a hub of regional connectivity. India has no choice but to work hard for a friendly government in Dhaka. This is an inflection point. There is a pro-US tilt in many of Bangladesh’s vital state agencies.
(M K Bhadrakumar is a former diplomat)