On August 5, 2024, Bangladesh experienced what is now commonly known as its second independence, a phrase coined by the new Chief Advisor of its Interim Government, Nobel laureate Professor Muhammad Yunus.
The question is: how and why did the nation of approximately 174 million people need a second independence after 53 years of officially being independent?
The historical backdrop of the Sheikh Hasina administration:
Sheikh Hasina Wajid, the deposed Prime Minister of Bangladesh, and her party, the Awami League, had been in power since 2009. It is widely known that in the last four elections since 2009, she and her party had managed to continuously remain at the helm of power by systematic vote rigging. They knew it, the people of Bangladesh knew it, and the international community knew it.
Being completely backed by India, the West perhaps perceived her as the safest bet, being able to play the “liberal, secular, and business-friendly” card, far from any “Islamic terrorism,” which was the fabricated trend after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. This was, as we now know, the period of “seeing Bangladesh through the lens of India” period.
However, domestically, the everyday lives of Bangladeshis saw a rapid decline in civic space and any semblance of democracy. Hailed as the upcoming economic “Asian Tiger of South Asia,” Bangladesh fell deeper and deeper into a cycle of authoritarian rule.
A very accurate analogy of what Sheikh Hasina became would be with the 17th-century absolute monarch of France, Louis XIV, who famously said, “I am the state.”
Sheikh Hasina was the state. There was no institution and no faction of the government that was not directly controlled by her and for her and, by extension, her family and coterie, with the complete backing and support of India.
What Bangladeshis experienced was a reign of terror. They were completely stripped of their rights and their freedom of speech, freedom of expression, and freedom of assembly. The opposition parties were decimated, their leaders and supporters kidnapped and or killed, and any form of dissent, even in the form of social media posts, was punishable by the regime’s fabricated rules of subservience to the state, i.e., Sheikh Hasina. These punishments included being tracked by various intelligence agencies and being picked up in the middle of the night and taken to the many detention centers created all over the country to face extreme methods of torture and, at times, death.
The law enforcement and intelligence agencies became tools of the state, being trained and conditioned to dispassionately treat civil society as pawns who could be inhumanly tormented and disposed of if it serves their leader.
Sabria Chowdhury Balland, based in the United States, is the Executive Director of a US-based human rights organization. She can be reached at scballand@chrdbangladesh.org
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