The Feuding Ladies of Bangladesh

There was never any comradeship and their only encounters were at the battles fought during the frequent elections.

Chinese must be a tremendously accurate language. Their script consists of pictograms, which evolved slowly over aeons and are enriched by sampling all kinds of human experiences. Emotions are converted into pictures with considerable facility. Take, for instance, the Chinese pictogram for the word ‘trouble’. It is depicted as ‘two women under one roof’.

For over three decades, the constant fighting between Sheikh Hasina, daughter of the assassinated president Sheikh Mujibur Rehman, and Begum Khaleda Zia, a former prime minister and widow of another assassinated president, Zia ur Rehman, provided ringside entertainment to the Bangladeshis who poked the feuding ladies against each other.

There was never any comradeship between the two. Their only encounters were at the battles fought during the frequent elections. However, they did not allow their party workers to waste their time in idleness during the interim period.

Their encouraging words roused the workers to rain a deluge of brickbats upon each other with impetuous energy on the blood-reddened streets of Bangladesh. Thousands of them got wounded, often fatally, but they did not seem to mind it, and survivors always returned with gashed heads and streaming wounds to lunge at the opposition as fiercely as before.

The feuding ladies, always thirsty for revenge, have been combating each other with tremendous spirit for over 30 years. Nobody ever tried to calm them down. Nobody was adventurous enough to act as a bridge between them, trying to steady their temperatures.

Their bluster, impulsive outbursts, one-line putdowns and endless deviousness, all provided plenty of fodder to the media and kept newspaper subscriptions and television viewership high.

The public’s patience with the two never got noticeably thinner. They hoisted one lady to the seat of power. Within days of doing so, there was an astonishing change of mood. The perplexed, ritualised and anguished loser moved the Bengali hearts. They wailed with her in unison and shifted their support to her.

Taking further advantage of the change in public mood, the displaced leader whipped up a wave of public disgruntlement. Every time she called for an indefinite general strike, the obliging people walked out of their workplaces in droves, bringing the economy to a grinding halt. The wonderful turmoil cost the poor country a tremendous $50-100 million a day in lost output.

What did the ladies fight about? Strategies to remove poverty and control floods? Foreign policy? Corruption in public life? No! These items were not on their agenda.

Once, when I was in Dhaka, the cause of chaos was a row over the birthday of Begum Khaleda Zia. Sheikh Hasina’s government produced documents that showed Begum Zia had once stated a different day as her birthday. Begum Zia’s birthday falls, as she insisted, on 15 August.

The date coincided with the anniversary of the assassination of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman - officially declared a National Day of Mourning. Government supporters claimed that Begum Zia was being malicious by celebrating her birthday on a National Day of Mourning, thereby showing contempt for the father of the nation.

The row grew worse when the government decided, of all things, to remove a pontoon bridge over a small lake in Dhaka. The bridge led to the tomb of General Zia ur Rahman, the former military ruler of Bangladesh and also the late husband of Begum Zia. However much the government claimed the bridge was needed elsewhere, its removal was seen as an act of retaliation, designed to stop the supporters of her party, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, from visiting the tomb. There followed a season of protest rallies, crippling strikes and street battles.

The chaos caused the despairing president, Shahabuddin Ahmed, to say that the two parties quarreled needlessly. “If one party goes north, the other would head south with its eyes shut. If one made a mistake, the other would retaliate by making three mistakes,” said the president.

On yet another occasion, the level of acrimony between the two ladies was shown in Parliament when Sheikh Hasina said that the unrelenting campaign of strikes, which had brought the entire country to a halt for 25 full days in 1999, was disrupting school and university examinations. She noted that Begum Zia’s sons had not attended university and claimed that the opposition leader herself had been a notoriously poor student.

Perhaps, suggested the prime minister, Begum Zia wanted to deprive others of education. The accusation got Begum Zia galloping like Don Quixote, who was in full tilt against Hasina. Her Sancho Panza army cantered to her support, organising demonstrations and indefinite general strikes, bringing the country to its knees. Several people were killed, and hundreds injured in street protests.

With Sheikh Hasina ousted from the prime minister’s chair and thrown out of the country, and an ailing Khaleda Zia released from jail, their theatrical value for the public has greatly diminished. But no matter!

It is believed that the next election will be fought between Sheikh Hasina’s Washington-based son, Sajib Wajed Joy, and Khaleda Zia’s London-exiled son, Tareq Zia. They will continue the feudal tradition of South Asian political dynasties and make the entertainment-hungry masses bite the dust.

(Akhil Bakshi, an author and explorer, is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and Explorers Club USA, and Editor of ‘Indian Mountaineer’. He is also the founder of Bharatiya Yuva Shakti, an organisation that ensures good leadership at the village level. He tweets @AkhilBakshi1. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)