Early this evening, most Awami League ministers and Members of Parliament who fled Bangladesh in the wake of the August 5 flight to Delhi of the then Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, met at a rooftop of a five star hotel in Kolkata.
The gathering of Awami League leaders was called following the Mohammad Yunus-led Advisory Council took a unanimous decision to impose a ban on all activities of the party, including its online presence, till such time that judicial proceedings against alleged war crimes by the party leaders concluded.
On the agenda before the Awami League leaders was to draw up a strategy to meet this latest challenge to the party’s existence in Bangladesh, by the Yunus-led interim authority which seeks to prevent the Hasina-led organisation from contesting elections, if and when they are held.
Several ideas were thrown up, including a proposal to return to Bangladesh to take on the “danger” head-on.
There was unanimity on one issue: that “all decisions of the illegal government are illegal”. These are strong words, but most Awami League leaders – many took shelter in Kolkata after the August 5 ouster of Sheikh Hasina and the ensuing deadly violence – had little or no clue on the most effective strategy to take on the Yunus dispensation.
A couple of weeks ago, however, the Awami League issued a statement against the domestic International Crimes Tribunal hurriedly convened after August 2024 to try Hasina, other party leaders and police officers for allegedly being involved in the killing of demonstrators in July 2024.
The ICT, however, did not take into cognizance the killings that took place between August 4 and 6, 2024, which indicated that it would be partisan in its approach to mete out justice. The May 10 decision comes seven months after the Awami League’s students’ wing, Chhatra League, was proscribed (in October 2024) with the interim authority describing it a terrorist outfit.
Describing the Yunus-led interim regime as “unconstitutional and illegitimate”, the AL statement branded the ICT as one constituted by “anti-liberation forces” that “disregarded the principles of rule of law” and undertook an “egregiously farcical and illegal judicial process”.
Even as both sides continue to hurl accusations and counter-accusations at each other, Dhaka-based political analysts such as Nazmul Ahsan Kalimullah said that the interim authority’s decision to impose this “conditional ban and temporary ban” on the Awami League was a “means to delay holding elections”, which political parties such as the BNP has been demanding.
Whatever might be the Yunus-led interim authority’s motivation to ban the Awami League, it has exposed itself in the past to follow an agenda aimed at actually delaying conducting a truly free and fair parliamentary election. The students-led National Citizens Party appears to be losing steam and there are signs of ever-widening fault lines and contradictions.
The ban on the Awami League also demonstrates the Yunus regime’s intention to dismiss Indian insistence on “inclusive elections” outlined in a statement following the surprise meeting between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Bangladesh Chief Adviser Mohammad Yunus on the sidelines of the fourth BIMSTEC Summit in Thailand on April 4.
A senior Awami League leader, now living in Kolkata, said there are signs that the Yunus regime, acting on the advice of its “foreign handlers”, could use the wide-ranging provisions of the May 10 proscription order against the BNP.
Following an amendment to the existing law, the ICT was given sweeping powers to punish any political party, its affiliated organisations or supporters’ groups.
The Awami League leaders holed up in Kolkata and a few other locations in India will now have to take a hard decision – to remain ensconced in the safety of their temporary homes in Kolkata or risk everything, brazen it out and cross the borders to take on the Yunus regime, sundry fundamentalist Islamist outfits and disparate students groups vying to pull pieces of a brittle state.
