Sheikh Hasina Entered Politics as a Symbol of Hope. She Now Exits as an Autocrat

She is now seen as the exact opposite of the amiable symbol of people power I had met at Dhaka's Press Club in 1996.

It was 1996.

In the grassy park next to Dhaka's Sheraton Hotel where I was staying, a frail, old man approached me, looked around furtively, and whispered in Bengali, "Please do vote for the Boat."

The man asking me to stamp on the ballot paper for Sheikh Hasina's Awami League did not know I was not a local citizen but an Indian covering the landmark elections in Bangladesh that ended the controversial five-year rule by Prime Minister Khaleda Zia, the widow of a military dictator who had, for all practical purpose, served as an extension of the real military rule that preceded her reign.

And I did not know then that the lady he asked me to vote for as a stealthy representative of democratic rule in Bangladesh would flee her homeland in sheer ignominy 28 years later, slammed as a fascist dictator after 15 years of uninterrupted rule.

Hasina is now being seen as the exact opposite of the amiable symbol of people power I had met at Dhaka's Press Club. After all, Awami literally meant "that of the people".

In hindsight, perhaps, this is the chronicle of a disgrace foretold. It is not possible to be a secularly inclined middle-class social democrat in a land torn between Islamists on the one hand, American and Chinese geopolitical ambitions on the other, and a demographic explosion that can both create and shake up social and economic stability.

Pakistan, whose eastern wing was carved out as Bangladesh, never quite left the picture, and found its proxy in resurgent Islamists. As this is being written, Bangladesh has been thrown into turmoil, with the military in shaky command, bringing back memories of the pre-1996 era. But one should not be surprised.

A careful examination of events that followed the liberation of East Pakistan by the Indian army in December 1971, and the installation of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman as the first President of independent Bangladesh, would offer enough proof that the nation has been in a slow-motion civil war for a long time, despite its economic growth and democratic progress that put a fine veil over bitter differences and simmering ambitions.

After the 1996 elections, Khaleda Zia, the widow of General Ziaur Rahman of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, held a press conference in the hotel where I was staying, displaying a state of denial, refusing to accept the people's verdict. Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, Hasina's father and the founding father of Bangladesh was assassinated on India's Independence Day in 1975, a day of chilling significance as a proxy for the war India and Pakistan fought in 1971.

Between 1975 and 1991, Bangladesh was more or less constantly under various shades of military rule marked by several coups. General Ziaur Rahman survived as many as 21 assassination attempts before his assassination in 1981. A year after that, General HM Ershad seized power before Hasina and Khaleda together saw him out in a pro-democracy movement.

After the 1975 coup, Hasina had spent six years in exile at Pandara Road in New Delhi, a short walk from the trendy Khan Market, thanks to a government accommodation provided by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, her father's old friend. As Hasina and Khaleda indulged in a see-saw power struggle, everything seemed under control as their methods seemed reasonably democratic.

Things, however, changed after 2009.

As prime minister since 2009, Sheikh Hasina's mistake, perhaps, was to impose her strong will in a country that had significant social, religious, and economic divides. Her government established a war crimes tribunal in 1971 to investigate atrocities committed during the Liberation War of 1971.

Conflicts between Islamists and secularists and Islamist pushbacks followed. Between 2013 and 2016, a series of Islamist attacks targeted atheists, secularists, writers, and religious minorities including Ahmadis and Hindus.

On the other side, Sheikh Hasina's own tenure as prime minister was marked by allegations of election rigging by her party and charges of "democratic backsliding" in which opposition politicians, journalists, and dissidents have allegedly faced everything from harassment and disappearances to extrajudicial killings. She has been in the bad books of international agencies monitoring democratic progress for quite a while now.

It doesn't help that the country has had to deal with a surging population that fans unemployment and encourages youth protests. Bangladesh's has population more than doubled from 68 million around the time of its formation to 174 million at present.

No doubt, the country has made significant economic progress since Hasina's latest reign began in 2009 with an emphasis on labour-intensive industries and agriculture. Over the past decade, poverty has reduced by a third and human development indicators like literacy and life expectancy are up with only 13 percent of the population officially classified as poor in 2021, a steep fall from 80 percent in 1971. The country is a major global hub for garment exports and is said to be the world's second-largest textile exporter.

But the trigger for the latest round of student protests that led to Hasina's departure was her government's job quotas for descendants of the 1971 liberation fighters -- something unacceptable to a growing tribe of educated youths demanding better opportunities. Her rolling back on the issue seems to be a case of too little and too late as fresh violence and killings took things to a point of no return.

If there is one thing that dramatically symbolises Hasina's authoritarian behaviour, it is her confrontation with Nobel Peace laureate and Grameen Bank founder Muhammad Yunus, who is considered the father of micro-finance and a global leader in grassroots development. Days before the controversial general elections this year, Yunus was sentenced to six months in jail for violation of labour laws in an act of widely perceived as one of vindictiveness. Hasina even called Yunus a "bloodsucker".

The protests in Dhaka that led to Hasina's exit remind one of the French Revolution and Marie Antoinette, but Sheikh Hasina is no feudal queen. It is perhaps the pressures of staying on as a secular socialist and a dispenser of goodies for her party colleagues that brought her downfall. The Awami League's party symbol, the boat, has certainly sunk in the swirling waters of conflicts probably written into Bangladesh's political DNA. Her hubris only made matters worse.

(The writer is a senior journalist and commentator who has worked for Reuters, Economic Times, Business Standard, and Hindustan Times. He can be reached on Twitter @madversity. This is an opinion article and the views expressed are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)