Politics in Bangladesh seems poised to take a definitive shape. In the coming weeks and months, one can expect a rising crescendo of demands for political parties to claim centre ground, given that the interim administration headed by Muhammad Yunus has so far stayed away from giving the nation a roadmap to elections and hence democracy.
A broad hint of how politics will return to its normal course comes through the announcement by the Awami League that it will launch a nine-day programme beginning on the first day of February.
The party plans to call a hartal (general strike) and blockades to protest the rising prices of essential items, the slide in law and order and the killings of its leaders and workers since it was forced from power in August last year.
The party also plans to demand that all ‘false and baseless cases’ against former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina be withdrawn. It also means to register its protest against the persecution of religious minorities as well as adivasis.
The agitation planned by the Awami League is the earliest indication of the party’s attempt to re-enter the political arena in Bangladesh.
To what degree the agitation will succeed depends on how effectively the senior party leadership, most of whom have gone into hiding or have made their way to safety abroad, are able to put their plans into implementation mode.
In these past six months, reports have been rife about the murder of grassroots workers and leaders of the party at the hands of extremists who have commandeered politics since August.
Moreover, the homes of many party members and supporters have been torched, with the result that the party is today in a state similar to what it was in back in 1971, when the Pakistan occupation army went after it in force and had many of its leading lights and activists killed.
Opinion on the future of the Awami League remains divided.
But, of course, there is the fear among its rivals and also those in the interim regime who would not want to see it return that if it reinvents and reasserts itself and is able to muster public opinion in its favour, politics will take a dramatic new course.
There is little gainsaying that anywhere between 34 and 40 percent of the Bangladesh electorate remain supporters of the party.
And if the past is any guide, the party has always gained new adherents when it has been subjected to repression.
Its followers have always seen the Awami League as the instrument for a reassertion of the principles, which went into the struggle for Bangladesh’s freedom in 1971.
And today, with those ideals under organised and systematic assault, the need for the party to make a return to open politics is being keenly felt by people who have not taken kindly to the mob assaults on the history of the country.
But there is too, at this point, an obvious requirement for the party to reshape itself on the basis of a focused study of what went wrong in its fifteen years in power.
The three general elections held on its watch — in 2014, 2018 and 2024 — have come under justifiable criticism.
A rejuvenated Awami League will need to reassure itself that a return to open politics will rest on how clinically it looks at the issue.
There are also the allegations of massive corruption resorted to by Awami League politicians, including the hybrid elements among them, civil servants and businessmen which calls for a thorough re-evaluation of policy by the party leadership.
Sheikh Hasina has in these past many weeks been addressing party loyalists around the globe on audio and video, drawing attention to the repression let loose on the party in Bangladesh.
Her speeches have broken hardly any new ground when the expectation was that she would sketch a new strategy for the Awami League to regain the ground it lost in August.
Politics in Bangladesh has always been vibrant with the Awami League involved in it, either as the party of government or as the leading opposition in parliament.
In 1971, when the Pakistani military machine launched its genocide in occupied Bangladesh and Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was arrested and flown secretly to Pakistan, a second tier of leadership was around to carry the movement for independence forward.
Party leaders such as Tajuddin Ahmad, Syed Nazrul Islam, M. Mansoor Ali, and A.H.M. Quamruzzaman organised resistance against Pakistan through what would come to be known as the Mujibnagar government.
A similar leadership to guide the party out of the straitjacket it is in does not exist today.
While a number of former ministers, lawmakers and other party officials have made it to safer shores — in India, Britain and the United States — they have remained careful not to appear in public.
Within Bangladesh, a good number of functionaries of the former government are in police custody on various charges, with little indication of when their trials will begin. The Awami League is in a state of political emasculation.
These are dark times for the Awami League. Whether Sheikh Hasina is prepared or is in a position to recast the leadership line-up in a party that is engaged in a battle for survival is a question which as yet has had no answer.
It is certainly in a state of persecution, but given its reputation as the party which led the armed struggle for Bangladesh’s freedom, it has millions of activists who need to be informed by the party leadership of the future course of the organisation.
The protests planned for early February will surely instill hope in party supporters as well as workers, but whether the interim government in Dhaka will refrain from doing anything aimed at keeping the Awami League at bay calls for keen observation.
Muhammad Yunus has in these past six months had conversations with the BNP, the Jamaat and other political parties, but there has so far been no hint of any linking up by his regime with the Awami League.
It would be a mistake for the interim regime to think that politics in Bangladesh can proceed on a normal course without the Awami League in the picture.
The indispensability of the Awami League in any negotiations about the future can be denied at great risk to the future of the country.
Yunus and his administration and also their student supporters, some of whom have lately been changing their tunes about Bangladesh’s history by speaking favourably of the War of Liberation, the history which they have in the past six months consistently sought to undermine, will need to reflect on the situation.
Politics minus the Awami League will be a no-win proposition for Bangladesh.
Even as parties like the BNP are demanding a roadmap to elections, even as the reform commissions set up by the regime have submitted their reports to the Chief Advisor, even as moves are afoot to portray the members of Bangabandhu’s family as participants in economic crimes, the imperative cannot be ignored.
It is that without the Awami League on the political landscape, it is a vacuum, indeed a wasteland Bangladesh will be plodding through.
For Sheikh Hasina and the party leadership, it is important that clear directives go out to grassroots workers of the Awami League about the future.
A purge in the party, of the corrupt and the inefficient at every level, is called for. The party needs to reinvent itself, indeed inform itself that at this parlous moment in its history it cannot but return to the ideals which enabled it to become the largest and most influential national political organisation in the 1960s and 1970s.
ALSO READ: Bangladesh: The slow retreat of secularism
Liberal and secular politics is what the Awami League has embodied for generations. Its links with Bangladesh’s people have historically been deep and meaningful.
It has abjured elitism and given short shrift to politics without a mass base. This tradition must be revived by its leadership if the People’s Republic of Bangladesh is to go back to its roots and reclaim its heritage.
