Bangladeshis made history in July when a mass uprising, led by student protesters, toppled Sheikh Hasina and the Awami League’s government, which had become increasingly dictatorial over the course of 15 years in power. Before she fled to India on Aug. 5, Hasina oversaw the killing of thousands—at least 90 people were killed by the police on the day before her departure alone. Children were not spared.
The end of Hasina’s dictatorship has turned a new chapter in Bangladesh’s history. The country’s lone Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus, now heading an interim government, called it Bangladesh’s second liberation. But Bangladesh has to step carefully over the mess Hasina has left behind—both in domestic and foreign affairs.
And the mess is huge. Historically, Bangladesh’s politics has been a game of pass the parcel played between Hasina’s center-left Awami League and Khaleda Zia’s center-right Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), with the two regularly exchanging power for years—until Hasina broke the norms of democracy in 2011. That was the year she abolished the caretaker government system, where neutral civil society leaders headed an interim government to conduct the elections in a free and fair manner. Since then, the country has witnessed one rigged election after another. The BNP said about half of its 5 million members faced legal charges.
The democratic institutions that have been destroyed over the years can’t be rebuilt overnight. In his first speech to the nation, Yunus talked about bringing back the “lost glory of these [government] institutions.” The country effectively has no police force left. Hasina used members of the Border Guard Bangladesh, who were supposed to be posted at the border, against the protesters. Now they are facing widespread public anger too.
The damage is everywhere from administration to law enforcement to the military. Nothing has been spared. Hasina destroyed the country’s judiciary by handpicking judges. In 2017, the chief justice of Bangladesh’s Supreme Court, Surendra Kumar Sinha—a Hindu in a Muslim-majority country—was forced to resign and seek asylum in Canada after being threatened by the Directorate General of Forces Intelligence, the country’s military intelligence service.
The economy is in tatters, and corruption is rampant. Hasina herself has said that her manservant is worth $34 million and commutes via helicopter. According to Transparency International, around $3.1 billion is laundered from Bangladesh every year, which is more than 10 percent of the country’s total national reserves.
With the Awami League now hated by most of the public, the only political force left this political vacuum is the BNP. Zia, the party chairperson, is 79—and she is now gravely ill and was hospitalized multiple times since this summer. Tarique Rahman, her firstborn child and deputy, is 56. Rahman, often seen as his mother’s successor and the future head of state, has been living in a self-imposed exile in the U.K. for the last 16 years and the extent he is in touch with the country’s new reality is a question up for debate. He faces a slew of corruption charges—although these may not stand up in a fair trial as they were trumped up by Hasina.
After 15 years of autocracy, most of the remaining politicians are greying, while the median age in Bangladesh is a little over 25. The uprising that saw Hasina’s rule crumble was spearheaded by mostly by members of Generation Z. Their leadership of these supposedly apolitical groups in the July revolution has caught the politicians off guard, proof that Bangladeshi politicians are not capable of reading the pulse of the young.
Amid this chaos, the West needs to start playing a far more positive role. One of the reasons Hasina’s rule lasted so long was because the U.S. turned a blind eye to her misrule. Months before the one-sided elections in January, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken threatened to “restrict the issuance of visas for any Bangladeshi individual, believed to be responsible for, or complicit in, undermining the democratic election process in Bangladesh.” But after the polls, no punitive measures materialized. On the contrary, U.S. President Joe Biden wrote a letter to Hasina, expressing his government’s wish to “work together on regional and global security” and “commitment to supporting Bangladesh’s ambitious economic goals.”
U.S. complicity depends in part on its desire for India, a close ally to Bangladesh, to contain China in the Indo-Pacific. According to the Washington Post, last month Indian officials told their U.S. counterparts, “This is a core concern for us, and you can’t take us as a strategic partner unless we have the same kind of strategic consensus.”
India supported successive Awami League regimes due to its own security and strategic concerns. India’s landlocked northeastern states, also known as the Seven Sisters, are linked to the rest of the country through the narrow 60-kilometre-long Siliguri Corridor. This tiny passage, known as the Chicken Neck, separates Bangladesh from Nepal and Bhutan. The strategically important Tibetan Chumba Valley controlled by China is only 130 kilometers away.
The Seven Sisters are inhibited by 220 ethnic minorities and are home to active insurgent groups, especially in Assam, Manipur and Nagaland. India also has the world’s fifth-longest land border with Bangladesh. All this gives India a potent stake in Bangladesh—but instead of making new friends or giving Bangladesh’s democracy a chance, India placed its chips entirely on Hasina and the Awami League. Anti-Indian sentiment now runs high in Bangladesh—the Indian Cultural Center in the capital was torched within three hours of Hasina’s fall.
India has a long way to go to win the hearts and minds of ordinary Bangladeshis, and blaming Pakistan and its intelligence agency, the ISI, for every problem won’t help. India’s old narrative is dead, and New Delhi must realize this.
The U.S. must stop seeing Bangladesh through India’s eyes. Time and again U.S. policymakers have misread Bangladesh’s importance, looking at it as an extension of India instead of a state in itself. Bangladesh is potentially crucial to containing China in the Indo-Pacific. It has a young population who hold their ethno-religious identities close to their hearts but are pro-Western, too, with more than 13 million Bangladeshis living abroad.
Hasina herself was playing both sides, turning herself into China’s closest ally in South Asia. In July, Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Mao Ning described the relationship between Bangladesh and China as “good neighbors, good friends, and good partners.”
China dislodged India as Bangladesh’s top trading partner nine years ago. Bangladesh imports more goods from China than from any other country, and is in debt to China to the tune of $17.5 billion, which was mainly invested in white elephant infrastructure projects. After Hasina’s fall, China’s reaction, however, has been muted—hoping to build a relationship with whoever emerges afterwards.
The U.S. and the European Union have welcomed Yunus and his interim government. Mathew Miller, a State Department spokesperson, said last month the U.S. wants the interim government to “chart a democratic future for the people of Bangladesh.” The best way to do this is for the U.S. to offer support to U.N.-led efforts to support order and democracy in the country.
The interim government immediately needs to establish law and order. It can start by bringing the perpetrators of the July carnage to the book. A national office of missing persons should be established to look into all the incidents of enforced disappearances. It can seek technical support from the United Nations, which should lead an independent U.N.-led fact-finding program into the revolution and fall of the Hasina regime. Western nations should support the establishment of a new, fairer constitution that takes the range of Bangladeshi identities into account.
The presence of torture cells inside Dhaka cantonment and the alleged involvement of the Directorate General of Forces Intelligence tells us that a section of the armed forces were involved in crimes against humanity. Bangladesh has been a major contributor to U.N. peacekeeping—but that needs to stop until responsibility for these crimes has been established.
The ongoing civil war in Myanmar is also an existential threat to Bangladesh’s national security. With Bangladesh’s security forces in disarray, the U.S. should support Bangladesh by setting up a temporary base that will provide the Bangladesh Armed Forces and intelligence agencies with arms, training and other logistical support, while maintaining a firm emphasis on the political neutrality of the army and its support of human rights.
Bangladesh has survived a dire time to potentially chart a brighter future. Washington should see it not as an extension of Indian interests, but as an independent country that is capable of making its own decisions, an important ally, and a partner in the Indo-Pacific.
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