When Bangladesh’s Nobel Prize-winning economist Muhammad Yunus was called back home to head its government as “chief adviser,” there were hopes that the nation would finally break out of the see-sawing despotism it has endured since independence in 1971.
Many of those serving in his new government were young and apparently idealistic students who had emerged from the movement that toppled long-serving Bangladeshi prime minister Sheikh Hasina. Perhaps a vibrant democracy would re-emerge in Bangladesh once the dust settled.
Those hopes did not survive a year. The Cabinet last week banned Hasina’s party, the Awami League, under the nation’s anti-terrorism laws. This is a depressing echo of how Hasina used to treat the opposition, though she never went as far as to shut down her main rivals in the Bangladesh Nationalist Party.
The ban is not a standalone event. It follows a series of attacks on Awami League members, as well as the misuse of Bangladesh’s judicial system against those associated with the party. While many linked to Hasina’s government might well have been connected to various crimes, most of the cases filed against Awami League members seem blatantly political in nature.
Human Rights Watch has said that sometimes “complainants were not even aware of who was being named as accused.”
Lawlessness took hold, and revenge killings were widespread after Hasina fled to India. The Awami League claims that from July to December last year 400 of its members were killed.
Yunus and his government should have stepped in to stop this long ago — no reasonable democracy can be built if one of the two main parties is the subject of persecution. Trying to imprison her political rivals was, after all, Hasina’s greatest mistake.
The Awami League might be deeply unpopular, but it nevertheless can claim to represent the beliefs of a large part of the nation. It has a long and storied history, and is older than the nation it helped found.
The party was the primary conduit for the nationalist impulses that eventually led to East Pakistan splitting away from the autocratic rule of West Pakistan’s generals and becoming Bangladesh. Banning the Awami League is like banning Bangladesh’s history.
It is certainly true that under Hasina, the organization felt like her personal property, or that of her family. (She is the daughter of its former leader and Bangladesh’s first prime minister, Sheik Mujibur Rahman.) That is not uncommon in the subcontinent, unfortunately. India’s own party of freedom, the Indian National Congress, has been led by members of the Nehru-Gandhi family for most of the past 80 years.
However, that is no reason to ban it, particularly given its role in Bangladesh’s formation and evolution.
This has only strengthened global worries that Yunus’ government is too dependent on Islamists determined to alter the character of the Bangladeshi state — particularly its commitment to religious freedom, a principle with which the Awami League was closely identified.
Even if those concerns are unfounded, we should worry about what this ban reveals about the approach of the new dispensation in Dhaka. The previous authorities were at least motivated by the fear of Islamism and extremism. It is hard to understand what drives Yunus’ government.
The restoration of real democracy does not seem to be the key. The best-case scenario was always that Yunus stayed on for a couple of years to restore Bangladesh’s institutions, and then a free and fair election would be held that allowed the Awami League to participate. It would be unlikely to win, but its residual support would likely ensure that any freshly elected government was held to account in parliament.
This looks all but impossible now. With the Awami League out of the way, and the largest Islamist party restored to full legal status, the worst-case scenario seems far more plausible. Internal turbulence, attacks on members of religious minorities and a confrontational foreign policy are a more likely outcome.
That would be a disaster for Bangladeshis, who have just begun to pull themselves out of grinding poverty.
The nation needs secure foreign markets for the garment exports that finance its development and the internal stability that calms investors. Without these, it would descend into a spiral of degrowth and destabilization of the sort that has consumed Pakistan.
Bangladeshis are rightly proud that their nation has done far better than Pakistan in the years since the two split, but now should fear they have chosen to follow that road to ruin.
Mihir Sharma is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A senior fellow at the Observer Research Foundation in New Delhi, he is author of Restart: The Last Chance for the Indian Economy. This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
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