Is he Dhaka’s Manmohan Singh?…Jawed Naqvi
WE may find a useful clue on Aug 15 to the direction the turbulence-stricken Bangladesh is heading in. Aug 15 marks Indias Independence Day, but it also became the day in 1975 when the founding father of Bangladesh, Sheikh Mujibur Rehman, was assassinated in a military coup. The Awami League government of Sheikh Hasina Wajed subsequently decreed it as the National Mourning Day of Bangladesh.
Now that she has been ousted from power and has taken refuge in India, it would be interesting to see if the usual black flag is hoisted and whether the national flag is kept at half-mast to remember the founder-president of Bangladesh, who was the deposed prime ministers father.
Mujibs family members present at home on the fateful morning were all killed, but Sheikh Hasina survived by not being in the country. Indira Gandhi gave her refuge and assigned her Bengali colleague, Pranab Mukherjee, to take care of her. Her fathers killing and her refuge in India were clearly an extension of the cat and mouse the contending superpowers played in third countries during the Cold War. India, Pakistan and Bangladesh are good examples.
The visuals of assaults on Mujibs towering images in Dhaka during the mass protests brought memories of the pulling down of Saddam Husseins statue in Iraq under the US armys watch. Which makes it tricky for the interim administration to tinker with the importance of the day the founder of the nation was murdered by antibodies among his own people.
Would it be easy to undermine Mujibs towering legacy for the makeshift government?
Would it be easy to undermine Mujibs towering legacy for the makeshift government? The interim leader named by the students and endorsed by the army is a genial economist who won the Nobel Prize for setting up a village bank in 1976, a year following Mujibs murder. It is said to have helped millions of women, mostly, come out of poverty with the help of tiny, unsecured loans. That the bank would get involved with the Ford Foundation was a curious development, say its critics.
There is already looming suspicion about the involvement of a foreign hand in Sheikh Hasinas ouster, even though she herself was the chief progenitor of the theory. Was Hasina masking her failure to read the runaway alienation and her unpopularity by blaming the ubiquitous foreign hand for precipitating the mass violence?
On several occasions as prime minister, she did refer to a white man who met her to convey US interests in Saint Martin, a small coral island off Coxs Bazaar peninsula in the Bay of Bengal. Had she heeded the wishes, she would be safely ensconced as the ruler in Dhaka, goes the claim.
According to her story, the US wants to set up a base on the eight-kilometre stretch abutting the strategic Strait of Malacca. And it would be a vital listening post also to China in the north. The idea could have carried weight at some point, but why would the US need a base on Saint Martins when they have no dearth of real estate in India as their observing post for China, and when the Indian navy could be co-opted to patrol the straits? Unless, of course, for obvious reasons, India is no longer deemed the trusted ally the US was looking for?
The flip side to the claim is, would a US base in the neighbourhood suit India, leave alone its close friends in Moscow? However, it was the foreign minister in the Vajpayee government who had reportedly clamoured for the US to use India as its base for the operations in Afghanistan. Pakistan won the trophy though.
On the one hand, it is not uncommon to see those that never had much to do with the creation of their nation, including those that were opposed to its creation, usurp power. The Jamaat-i-Islami in Pakistan, for example, opposed the creation of Pakistan and remained hostile towards its founding fathers. And yet it did not hesitate to grab power in insidious and indirect ways in the country whose very being it had opposed.
Ditto with the JI of Bangladesh, an offshoot of the Pakistani parent. It fought hard against the independence of Bangladesh, but then sought a share in power by aligning with the Awami League before switching sides to the rival BNP of Khaleda Zia. And look who is ruling India? They are the ideologues of a worldview that was opposed to the national movement. And, like the RSS celebrated Gandhis murder with sweets, according to Sardar Patel, the JI was thrilled with Mujibs death.
So, who are these students who are credited with bringing down Hasinas government? Do they have an ideology? Its difficult to think of students as being only committed to human rights. As Howard Zinn said astutely, its a fallacy that one can remain neutral on a moving train. Indias Akhil Bhartiya Vidyarthi Parishad is a students front of the RSS, like the SFI is for Indias largest communist party. They have been rivals, mostly, but were strongly bonded in bringing down Indira Gandhis rule in 1977. The RSS has been quietly courted by the US for being vocally anti-communist. Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Narendra Modi have been beneficiaries of the affection.
Something flipped in 1991. The Cold War ended, and Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated. Someone tapped Narasimha as prime minister. The obscure man was packing to leave politics and was not a member of any assembly or house of parliament. He tapped Manmohan Singh as finance minister, who, like the new Bangladesh leader Mohammed Yunus, was an economist.
The West has seldom courted an Indian finance minister as Manmohan Singh was lionised. When he became prime minister, Singh received George W. Bush, the man who was in bad odour everywhere, including his own country, telling him that Indians loved him. Yunus may be a variant of Manmohan Singh, but Bangladesh is not India.
Courtesy Dawn