A sculpture at the entrance of the Bengal Academy commemorating the dead in the Bengali movement in 1952.
On March 25, 1971, after a series of political crises, East Pakistanis (Bengaras), represented by sheikh mujibur rahman, the leader of the Bangladesh awami league, negotiated a showdown with the Government of Pakistan, which was dominated by West Pakistanis, to discuss more autonomy, in exchange for Pakistan's military repression.
Mujib
In the memory of The Bengalis, in the early hours of that day, the well-equipped Pakistani Army, which had secretly crossed thousands of kilometers, entered Dhaka. Operation Searchlight, code-named for the operation that began late at night, had crushed hastily fought Bengali police and paramilitary forces in the streets and arrested Mujib. The military then used tanks to tear down the "Shahid Minar" (Martyrs' Memorial Tower) built to commemorate the Bengali movement in 1952, and then soldiers searched the university building of the University of Dhaka, and in the dormitories and campus, students and professors who were not evacuated in time were shot directly...
Zia
East Pakistan was in chaos, and in the countryside, Bengalis formed guerrilla groups to attack the Pakistani army. Two days later, in the eastern city of Chittagong, Major Ziaur Rahman, who later became general and Bangladesh's second supreme leader, released a declaration of armed uprising in the name of "Father of the Nation" Mujib, declaring Bangladesh's independence. "On behalf of the great leader Mujib ... Calling on the world's major Powers and our neighbours to take effective measures to put an end to this military occupation ... Long live Bangladesh! ”
Zia's declaration, along with several other declarations broadcast by the Awami League a few days ago, marked the beginning of the War of Independence in East Pakistan. At the beginning, the Pakistani army was like a bamboo, and the Bengalis rushed to engage and retreated. In the second half of the year, the situation took a sharp turn. India intervened in the war, and this time the Pakistani army collapsed. By early 1972, Pakistan had been dismembered and East Pakistan's independence into Bangladesh had become a fact.
In 2018, nearly 50 years after Bangladesh gained independence, Sheikh hasina, Mujib's daughter, now Prime Minister, recalled in a public speech the founding of the country. She first praised the heroes who made sacrifices for that time, and then mentioned her father, who died in a 1975 coup d'état shortly after independence. In the mutiny launched by the young officers, Mujib and most of his family were shot dead. "I'm not afraid of death. I will inherit my father's unfinished legacy," Hasina said.
At this time, her words turned sharply, turning to the language offensive that she had spared no effort in all these years: denouncing Zia. "He was involved in the murder of my father! I really regret it, I regret not being able to put him on the bench, he died before that." Zia calmed the situation and became supreme leader after a 1975 coup d'état, which also died in a coup d'état in 1981.
Today, Zia's widow, Khaleda Zia, leads the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, which is currently the largest opposition party in Bangladesh. Hasina attacked Zia in order to use the "revolutionary past" to morally and completely bring down Kalida and her party.
The daughter of the Founding Father, the widow of the Founding Father's soldier, the history of Bangladesh, became the arena of the two female leaders.
Hasina (left) and Khaleda (right)
Just before and after Hasina's speech, university and secondary school students in Dhaka erupted in a massive street protest over a car accident in which a private bus crushed the students. They protested government inaction and demanded vigorous regulation of the chaotic transportation industry and a fight against rampant corruption. The street movement subsequently sparked more controversy as Hasina's government mobilized police to arrest some students and activists. Although the students were released "reunited with their families" ahead of Eid al-Adha on August 22, some activists remained in detention. Hasina's government has also come under much criticism: Is Hasina trying to align herself with Modi and Erdogan-style strongman rule?
Another concern for young activists and students is that neither Hasina nor Zia is the leader they want. Since 2008, Hasina has been firmly on the prime minister's throne, and the election at the end of this year seems to be her sure victory, why is Bangladesh's political space more and more losing the opportunity to choose?
On August 5, 2018, local time, Dhaka, Bangladesh, Bangladesh students protested against frequent traffic accidents and demanded that road safety be strengthened. Visual China Information
Political parties, families, memory politics
In Bangladesh, party politics under the parliamentary system has become a drama of family struggle between Hasina and Khaleda, a reincarnation of feuds.
The modern politics of Bangladesh has given birth to two "saints": the father of the nation, Mujib, and the general Zia, who have changed Bangladesh in completely different ways, and who have also been assassinated and "martyred", stained with enough sadness to infect the people. One left a daughter to achieve her ideals, and the other left a widow to shoulder a heavy responsibility.
In the propaganda of Hasina and the Awami League, the father of the country, Mujib, worked hard for the founding of the country and bowed to bangladesh for democratic and secular socialism. Zia, on the other hand, actually revoked the responsibility for the massacre of Bengali war criminals in the War of Independence, and even exonerated Mujib's murderer by presidential decree No. 50 of 1975 with an "exoneration law". Recently. Grassroots propaganda in the Awami League has sought to portray the Zia family as the ones who stole the fruits of the War of Independence, and has even spread rumors that Zia is a spy for Pakistani and Israeli Jews, saying that Israel sponsors him to foster radical Islamic extremism in Bangladesh.
Hasina gave a speech on her father's large poster
On the other hand, in the propaganda of Kalida Zia and her Bengal Nationalist Party, General Zia is a good leader who does not smile and concentrates on his work. He inspects the country and convenes cabinet meetings at any time to discuss national development. After 1975, he single-handedly promoted economic privatization and family planning, paving the way for the modernization of Bangladesh. Diplomatically, he changed his pro-Soviet and pro-India policy, turned to the United States, China, and established good relations with Arab countries. They say that although Mujib is the father of the country, his domestic and foreign affairs are in a mess, and his daughter Hasina is close to India, which can be regarded as India's spy in Bangladesh. There are also more inflammatory claims circulating from the Nationalist Party that Hasina's daughter-in-law is an American Jew, behind which there is a Jewish conspiracy to control the world.
These praises for one's own family and stigmatization of each other's families have been playing out between the two parties since the 1990s. In 2009, when Hasina led the Awami League back to power in a general election by an overwhelming margin, Khaleda refused to recognize Hasina's government. The two men's hostile relationship was appealed to the historical scars of nation-building and put into more ruthless political action. Hasina set up a special court to try "war criminals" from the 1971 war and hold them accountable for the massacre of Bengalis. Many of these people are politicians in the Kalida camp or leaders of the conservative Islamist party allied with the Kalida. Some of them cooperated with the Pakistani military in 1971, while others opposed independence at the time. Many of them were sentenced to death by court after 2013.
Bangladesh's elites have been trying to avoid such party politics. The 1990s elections introduced a "caretaker government" model, with a neutral caretaker government taking over power before each election, avoiding vicious bipartisan competition. By 2006, the military, who could not stand partisan politics, controlled power and wanted to use two years to reform politics so that the two parties would no longer look at the faces of the two wives and act instead, and transform into a more professional and "normal" party. However, none of these methods worked well, and party politics remained the same in the hands of the two ladies.
It can be said that the political culture of Bangladesh is completely a family-based benefactor-attendant system. Although family politics is very common in South Asia — the Nehru-Gandhi family of the Indian National Congress Party, the Bhutto family in Pakistan, the Sharif family, and the Bandaranaike family in Sri Lanka are all examples — it is truly unique for a daughter, a widow, to hold aloft the portrait of her deceased father and husband, to attack the other side, and to hate each other for thirty years.
So, what makes the familialization of the political sphere so thorough in Bangladesh? What dominates people's imagination of history?
Disappearing classes
In South Asia, nation-states are all about the elite at the top. India had the colonial elite of Kolkata and the upper castes of Uttar Pradesh; Pakistan had North Indian Muslim intellectuals and merchants who spoke urdu; and Sri Lanka had a Westernized elite aristocracy. But in Bangladesh, this group is much weaker in comparison. The weakness of this group provided space for the leaders of Chrisma after the founding of the country.
Before the founding of Bangladesh, the land was ruled by British proxies —Hindu Chemindar landowners, and then, after the partition of India and Pakistan, bureaucrats and soldiers of West Pakistan—North Indian Muslims who spoke Urdu, or Punjabis from the west. Bengalis were excluded from the upper echelons of East Pakistan. Even, at the beginning of the founding of Bangladesh, many important national posts could not find suitable people to hold positions.
At the beginning of the country, there was not a mature enough upper class, and there was enough heterogeneity and pluralism within it, which meant that it was a very small and monolithic circle that participated in the competition for political power in Bangladesh. After the founding of the country, this circle included Mujib's family and subordinates, Zia's family and subordinates, senior military officers, and technocrats. As a natural consequence, the circle relies heavily on existing leaders for power, and qualified challengers are often absent.
On the other hand, bangladesh as a whole lacks class mobilization from the bottom up.
During the founding of Bangladesh, the question of class was on the surface. The nationalist movement in Bangladesh, mobilized by language and Bengali identity, against the rule of the West Pakistani elite – class struggles at the bottom and at the top – is isomorphic to the nationalist movement. The predecessor of the Awami League, the "Muslim People's League", was founded by abdul hamid khan bhashani, the famous "red mullah". Influenced by Sufism, Pashani emphasized standing with the bottom and having a huge influence among the peasants. He was a close friend of Mujib, and despite being a mullah, he supported the construction of a secular socialist republic in the service of the lower classes. Within the Awami League, the radical left is so strong that it pushes Mujib to make a series of moves to curry favor with the left: to write "democracy, nationalism, socialism and secularism" into the Constitution, to nationalize reforms, to build industry... Pashani continued his radical left-wing line after the founding of the state. He formed a left-wing opposition coalition in late 1972 to criticize Mujib's "not left enough" policy from the perspective of peasants and workers.
When the Zia regime came to power, the situation changed dramatically. Zia pushed for economic liberalization by suppressing officers and soldiers in the army with radical left-leaning tendencies, while also suppressing the left politically at home (the crackdown on the radical left began before Mujib's death). As a soldier, Zia believed in governing the country with discipline and top-down control, and his preference for U.S. foreign policy made him avoid the influence of left-wing politics in the Soviet Union and India.
It is worth noting that relying solely on economic liberalization reforms and political repression cannot completely prevent class mobilization from re-emerging and growing. Another peculiarity of Bangladesh is that the economic model it developed after the 1980s relies on a large number of international NGOs to carry international aid to the grass-roots level of Bangladeshi society, providing a large number of services (poverty alleviation, education, medical care, community building) in the absence of the government; on the other hand, relying on a large number of Bangladeshi laborers engaged in manual labor overseas, bringing back a large amount of foreign exchange - at its peak, the amount of remittances is equivalent to one-tenth of Bangladesh's GDP The third is the formation of a large number of small private enterprises in the country. These three qualities make Bangladeshi workers dependent on external links on the one hand, and either scattered in different private factories or scattered overseas, relying on local relations rather than horizontal connection organizations of peers and peers.
Compared with other countries in South Asia, Bangladesh has few national social groups in politics. In India, on the other hand, caste politics is constantly being classied; in Pakistan, there has been a lot of political rivalry between Sindhi and Punjabis. In Bangladesh, politicians, on the other hand, lack a bottom-up "basic set" of solid votes – for decades, the two parties of Hasina and Khaleda have often won sharply against each other.
In this case, it is not surprising that the history of the state has been reduced to the history of the family, and that political mobilization has been transferred to the mobilization of family memory.
Dhaka, Martyrs' Memorial Tower
Unfinished identity politics
Symbolized by Mujib and Zia, the political conflict in Bangladesh is also a clash of two nationalist discourses. To this day, the term "constituent body" of the nation-state remains dangling – is it bangali or Bangladeshi?
In 1905, the Bengali literary hero Tagore wrote "My Golden Bengal" (amar shonar bangla) – "... On the fields where the cattle are grazed / on the docks where the rivers meet / on the country roads shaded by trees / with the clear birdsong / In front of the piles of rice my life flows / How rejoicing, shepherds and farmers / You are all my brothers". For Tagore, the summer fields with abundant rainfall, the sunshine in winter, the trees, rice fields, and jute fields in the fields, which are directly connected to the land, and the intention and language based on life experience, are all symbols of Bengal identity.
However, although post-independence Bangladesh adopted Tagore's poem as its national anthem, the country's ruling elite still faced a huge embarrassment: Tagore was an Indian. In India, next to Bangladesh, is the state of West Bengal, whose capital is located in Kolkata. Its population is comparable to that of Bangladesh, both sides speak Bengali and use Bengali, the only difference being that the Bengalis over there are predominantly Hindus and the Bangladeshi side are predominantly Muslim. To make matters worse, a succession of historically ranked Bengal cultural figures, including Tagore, are almost all Hindus and West Bengals.
The history behind this is the social change brought about by British rule in Bangladesh: the British cultivated the Hindu elite as the rulers of Bengal, while the Muslim majority acted as peasants. This division of classes and religions contributed to the partition of East and West Bengal before India's independence. It also makes the Bengali identity of Indian nationalists like Tagore less like the World of Bengali Muslims. In the early 20th century, india's quest for independence, Muslims in Bangladesh preferred the Muslim League's Plan for Pakistan's Nation-Building. At that time, Muslim identity transcended Bengali identity.
In the East Pakistan independence movement, Mujib chose to reclaim the cultural heritage of Tagore and West Bengal. This is, of course, a political necessity – Pakistan includes punjabs, sindh, Baloch, Bangladesh and many other ethnic groups, and the "Muslim reservation in India" is the core ideology that unites the country. That is to say, as long as a Bengali person considers himself a Muslim first, then he should have a Pakistani identity first. Thus, one of the central ideas of the Bangladeshi nationalist movement is secularist nationalism – fiercely surpassing Muslim status as "Bengali" to deny the legitimacy of Pakistani rule, "first Bengali, then Muslim". The vigorous anti-Urdu and bengali movements of the 1950s against the Persian-Arabic script of Bengali were also marked by Bangladeshi nationalism.
But after all, the nation-state cannot be external to great power politics, and the existence of Pakistan has spawned secular nationalism in Bangladesh, but India has reconfirmed the link between Muslim identity and nationalism: If Bangladeshi independence means that the national identity of Bengalis is higher than that of Muslims, then why should Bangladesh become an independent nation-state, rather than merging into India and becoming another state outside West Bengal? East Bengal? Being dominated by India is equally frightening. For Bengali nationalists, this problem must be solved if Bangladesh is to maintain its status as an independent sovereign state.
Mujib was unable to solve this problem in office. His relationship with India is so good that the issue has made many more anxious. And his death, according to speculation, is also related to the identity of some soldiers.
Zia, who came to power later, took a compromise approach. He tried to invent a new nationalist language, replacing the original Bangali with "Bangladeshi" (Bangladeshi). The identity of "Bangladeshis" mixes language and religion without unilaterally emphasizing either of them. During his tenure, "in the name of the Allah of mercy and mercy" was written into the Constitution of Bangladesh, while the "secular republic" remained enshrined in the constitution.
This new identity is in fact equivalent to "stepping on two boats", relying as much as possible on the junta's high pressure to achieve a balance of identity. But it faces constant challenges from both sides: Muslim militant groups influenced by Middle Eastern countries such as Saudi Arabia want Bangladesh to be more Islamized, while secular intellectuals and the middle class continue to express discontent.
It may seem as if Zia has come up with a way to unite the country, but it is he who has institutionalized the dilemma of identity, and the paradox of the Bengali identity problem is that "I am not who" is always important. As long as the Indian state of West Bengal exists, bangladeshi identity politics will always have to answer "Why am I not a Bengali in India?" And as long as Pakistan exists, Bangladesh needs to respond to "why am I not Pakistani as a South Asian Muslim?" This identity is forever in an "unfinished" state.
The "King's Garden" campaign in 2013 demanded the death penalty for Mulla
End
In the post-Cold War era, the two-party system is highly respected, and the peaceful rotation of political parties and the stable political establishment of elites are the ideal state that electoral politics in many countries is trying to achieve, and Bangladesh is no exception. But the rotation of the two parties of the Mujib and Zia families has made the two-party system more and more like the "Mahabharata system" – the feud between the two families overwhelms everything. Behind this is the young nation-state of Bangladesh, limited and involved in social structure, historical identity and colonial baggage.
From the 1980s to today, under a special development model, Bangladesh's GDP figures have risen despite political turmoil. The growing urban middle class is embracing the values of globalization, with the former gradually overpowering the latter in the identity struggle between Bengalis and Bangladeshis. It is also in this way that Hasina's government has become more and more stable since 2009. When Hasina denounced Zia's political ideals in her father's name, the urban middle class also stepped up to support her. In 2013, a youth-led social movement erupted in Dhaka's Shahbagh, demanding that the government execute abdul quader mollah, a jammat-e-islam politician convicted of war crimes in 1971 and an ally of the Zia camp. Hasina's government also sensed the needs of the new class. While mobilizing historical narratives and perpetuating family politics and memory politics, she is also providing a much-needed sense of security for the middle class through anti-drug and anti-terrorism projects. But the middle class is also increasingly dissatisfied with politics that appeal to historical narratives, family identities, and the image of strongman leaders. Students who protested on the streets of Dhaka in August may be changing the political landscape of Bangladesh.