Which Way Bangladesh? Liberal Or Hardline?

Dhaka has been rocked by a series of protests through the week leading up to the “Ides of March,” driven this time by women, supported by large numbers of students, professionals, and intellectuals.

What made the demonstrations unique was not only that the massive protests condemned the Yunus regime or demanded the ouster of ministers but that they focused on the rising tide of crime combined with an upsurge in moral and religious policing directed against women.

The women’s lib movement with political overtones is not only seen as a challenge by the military-backed interim government but also by political parties including the BNP, Jamaat-i-Islami, and the newly formed students’ party.

All of whom seem to fear that a leftist movement of the kind which had led to the Shahbag sit-in by young men and women in 2013 may build up, threatening their political base and shifting the loyalties of undecided voters ahead of a planned general election this winter.

The 2013 Shahbag movement, sparked by Islamist attacks on young liberal bloggers, had focused on forcing the Hasina government to hang convicted 1971 war criminals, many of whom were being let off with jail terms, and to take strong-arm measures against radical Islamists who were killing or maiming young bloggers.

The liberal Muslim-dominated country has long seen women at the forefront of its social, religious, and political life, with two women prime ministers dominating much of its political canvas for the last three decades.

The presence of the US $42 billion annual turnover garments sector, which draws nearly 60 per cent of its worker strength from women who do not seem to believe in either the hijab or diktats against women, has meant that women’s liberation has been celebrated in all strata of Bangladesh’s society.

However, ever since the August “revolt” that saw the ousting of the Sheikh Hasina-led government, a rising tide of Islamist control over the governance structure and society saw moral policing against women. Beating up women for being “immodestly dressed” or for smoking (common among university students and working-class women) or Islamists declaring certain markets off limits for women or that women could not go to work during the month of fasting has become routine.

Several women’s football matches had to be cancelled after protests by the hardliners, who are against women taking part in sports deemed to be men’s prerogative. Cases of molestation and rape have multiplied.

The most recent include the rape and murder of an eight-year-old and the rape of a 12-year-old girl and the murder of her father after a criminal complaint was filed on the incident. These have become focal points of anger among Bangladesh’s women.

The backlash from ordinary people is being supported by leftists, who had earlier supported the students’ July-August movement against the Hasina government. Among those who have spoken out are Lucky Akhter, the face of the Shahbag movement, and Imran Sarker, the self-exiled leader of the movement.

Leaders and celebrities aligned with the BNP, National Citizens’ Party, and Jamaat have united in voicing warnings that another “Shahbag movement should not be allowed” to build up, even as they have condemned the attacks on women.

Lucky, a plucky girl with Communist leanings who has again donned the leadership mantle, is in the eye of the storm with Islamist students demanding her arrest. Her detention, however, may be a tricky endeavour for the Yunus government, as she has the charisma among the country’s youth to galvanise more protests.

An attempt to organise an attack on the office of the Bangladesh Communist Party, of which Lucky is a member, by Islamist sympathiser and religious convert Pinaki Bhattacharya, who had earlier egged Islamists to attack and demolish Mujib’s house-turned-museum at Dhaka’s Dhanmondi, also failed.

Possibly the Islamists, despite their growing strength, feared the popular backlash that may come forth if a long-standing party that had played a strong role in the liberation of the country was openly attacked.

Prof. Mohammed Yunus, whose government and the new party he has helped form are believed to be pro-Islamists. Many among them are not only against Sheikh Hasina and Sheikh Mujib, her father, who led the liberation movement and founded Bangladesh, but even against what is often described as the “spirit of 1971” – the formation of a liberal, yet secular democratic Muslim-majority country.

Attacks on Sufi Mazhars (shrines) have continued unabated since the August revolt. Museums and sculptures commemorating the 1971 liberation war have been broken down, defaced, or have faced unexplained fires, while the police and army have remained silent spectators.

Mujib’s birthday on Monday was largely ignored by the state apparatus, while Yunus has chosen to fly out to Beijing on March 26, Bangladesh’s independence day. The normal march past by the combined troops of Bangladesh’s defence forces before the country’s president and prime minister, too, has been cancelled.

The only saving grace as far as India is concerned is that after the election of president Donald Trump and the subsequent ending of USAID funding to Bangladesh and a host of NGOs linked to many of those who are part of the Yunus government, the micro-finance banker-turned-head of state has started taking a more pro-India stand, including speaking of providing Cox’s Bazaar as a port for India’s northeast.

Nevertheless, as a neighbour which will be affected if Bangladesh changes its polity or if its societal values alter drastically, India needs to be concerned by what is happening across the border, regardless of the “deals” any government in Dhaka offers to it.

We need to recognise that what is at stake is the overall direction of Bangladesh’s polity. If the women and their liberal-minded supporters win this battle for their rights, then Dhaka can perhaps continue to be a liberal capital of a Sufi, tolerant Bangladesh.

If the hardline Islamists, who are so rabidly combatting Bangladesh’s women’s right to live as they wish, win, then the riverine South Asian nation will surely change for the worse into a far more rigid theocratic nation-state. One whose worldview will be more in alignment with many West Asian nations, which, too, have turned their women into second-class citizens at best and chattel at worst.

One need not underline the ideological conflicts and dangers such a changed Bangladesh can pose not only to India, its nearest neighbour, but to the world at large, given its huge diaspora spread from Europe to the Americas.

Luckily for the women hitting the streets of Dhaka, besides India, the “global policeman” United States seems to have woken up to this new danger. In an interview with a television channel in Delhi on Monday, Tulsi Gabbard, the US intelligence chief, while speaking on Bangladesh, said that the “global effort of different (Islamist) groups are rooted in the same ideology and objective, which is to rule or govern with an Islamist Caliphate,” and that the Trump administration “remains committed to defeating that ideology.”

Hopefully, Gabbard, will be able to throw in super-girl power to help the women of Bangladesh battling against hardline religious fundamentalists, who wish to turn back the clock and bottle them away from national sight.

The writer is former head of PTI’s eastern region network