Leading by Force

By Sabria Chowdhury Balland | March 2020

‘A leader leads by example, not by force.’
- The Art of War by Sun Tzu, 5th. century BC

Sheikh Hasina has long ben accused of sacrificing her country’s interests and well-being to India. This is not only the viewpoint of her political critics but there is a widespread, general consensus among the majority of Bangladeshis. It is a well-known fact that anti-India sentiments run deep in a sizeable portion of Bangladesh’s population. Recently, the murder of Abrar Fahad, an engineering student at the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology by the ruling party’s student wing has triggered countrywide protests by students, academics and the public.

Unmistakably, Sheikh Hasina’s obvious allegiance to India over Bangladesh, be it in trade or water sharing or in any number of a myriad of other factors, has fuelled questions about her closeness to India.

It is extremely important to mention here that as an authoritarian leader, Sheikh Hasina, is in power due to her alliance with India and not because of the mandate of the people, but she has never cared for public opinion. India’s Citizenship Amendment Act seemsto have altered the ball game. The CAA, launched in 2019, amended 1955 law, by providing a path to citizenship to illegal migrants of Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Parsi and Christian minorities who have fled persecution from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan before December of 2014.

India’s ruling party, the BJP, being a xenophobic party whose fundamental doctrine is to obliterate the Muslims, has made sweeping derogatory statements and suggestions that Hindus in Bangladesh have been systematically and sufficiently tortured and now they seek refuge as illegal migrants in India. Such accusations are important for the BJP in order to justify its systematic and indiscriminate torture and killing of Muslims in India.

Sheikh Hasina and her Awami League party have caught on to the BJP’s tricks and stated that the Bangladesh government will look into the matter. Although their undisputed allegiance has been to India, the CAA has hit many sensitive nerves. Another point causing unease within the Awami League, a point vastly echoed among the Bangladeshis, is the possible exodus of mainly Muslim migrants fleeing persecution in India, particularly from the state of Assam. Bangladesh is still in a state of limbo having accepted nearly one million Rohingya refugees from Myanmar and cannot possibly envision taking any more refugees from India or anywhere else. Although India’s claims are that these are originally Bangladeshis who fled East Pakistan during the partition of India in 1947, yet another bone of contention has been created between the two countries. Bangladesh rightfully demands that India should provide proof of its claims, which, logistically, will be an extremely tedious task. This is not to say that illegal border crossings into Bangladesh are not taking place on a daily basis.

The CAA provided for the first time a picture of “trouble in paradise” between the two neighbouring countries when three Bangladeshi ministers postponed their official visits to India. Granted, in October 2019, Sheikh Hasina and Narinder Modi had signed seven “treaties” (a meaningless term when utilized for the Bangladesh-India relationship as these documents are treaties in name only, tilting heavily in favour of India), the CAA provides a break from the delusion for Hasina, who has begun to see clearly that all is not well in this political romance, something the people of Bangladesh has known for quite sometime.

Enter China. It has invested $38 billion in Bangladesh and has supplied the Bangladesh Navy with submarines. In competing with China's investment, India rapidly provided a $500 million line of credit in order for the Bangladesh Army to upgrade its defence systems and hardware, no doubt a means to further its control over Bangladesh's military complex.

Sheikh Hasina seems to come out as the winner in this chess game, being able to continue the rhetoric of how well the economy does under her rule, but the nation of Bangladesh is not a winner. Anti-India, anti-Sheikh Hasina and anti-Awami League sentiments are at an all time high and had it not been for the fear factor of a ruthless, dictatorial regime, better organization and leadership of all opposing groups, there would have been a revolution to oust the oppression and corruption a long time ago.

India was, is and will always be the priority over Bangladesh for Sheikh Hasina.

There has not been a peep out of Sheikh Hasina or her party members against the inhumane treatment of Muslims in India by the BJP. The status quo of their extreme power and control takes precedence over morality but that cannot be good news among the silent Bangladeshi public, approximately 91% of whom are Muslims.

Despite a temporary glitch in the Bangladesh-India romance and the appearance of a diplomatic thaw, the roots of the Awami League and Sheikh Hasina’s very position as the Prime Minister are profoundly embedded in India. India was, is and will always be the priority over Bangladesh for Sheikh Hasina. However, the CAA seemed to have left Hasina dumfounded, searching for her words when she declared publicly that she cannot understand “why India did this.” Moving forward, the BJP will hopefully be regarded with distrust by the Bangladesh leadership, if that is not too much to hope for.

Had there been leadership in Bangladesh which genuinely worked towards the good of its people, the strategic geopolitical positioning of Bangladesh could have been much better utilized internationally to benefit Bangladesh and not her neighbour, completely against the will of the majority of its people, who have been dragged into a political game of relinquishing sovereignty, a game they had never signed up for.

Unfortunately, the dream the freedom fighters of the liberation war in 1971 had has not yet attained fruition. To this day, Bangladesh is oppressed by an authoritarian regime, which has stripped individual freedoms of every kind, benefitting the top 1% Awami League cronies and a leader who leads by force, not by example.