When the Pakistan army launched its genocide in Bangladesh in March 1971 and took Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman into custody, a second tier of Awami League leaders was around to take charge of the party.
Tajuddin Ahmad, Syed Nazrul Islam and others shouldered the onerous responsibility of building resistance against the Pakistani forces and their local collaborators and eventually freed, with the moral and military support of the Indian government, the country.
In effect, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman had left behind a leadership well-placed and prepared, intellectually and politically, to wage the oncoming war for national liberation. That leadership succeeded impressively in achieving its goals through its sagacity and policies.
In the period following the assassinations of Bangabandhu in August 1975 and the four national leaders in November of the same year, the Awami League found itself in deep trouble.
But it did not collapse for the good reason that senior political figures of the party, notably Zohra Tajuddin, Mizanur Rahman Chowdhury and Dewan Farid Gazi, took it upon themselves to keep the party in good shape even though they headed different factions of it.
When Sheikh Hasina, elected chief of the Awami League through the unanimous agreement of party leaders and workers in 1981, returned home from exile in Delhi in May and took charge of the organisation, the various factions of the Awami League came together and were reunited as the single forum for the articulation of national aspirations it had historically been earlier.
The point ought not to be missed. In both 1971 and in the aftermath of 1975, the Awami League demonstrated its resilience, indeed its return to centre stage owing to the presence of a dedicated band of leaders ready and willing to go out on a limb to resurrect it and restore it to a place it deserved to be in Bangladesh’s history.
In 1971, the Yahya Khan junta outlawed the party. The consequence was the fall of Pakistan in its eastern province.
Post-1975, successive military regimes in Bangladesh and their right-wing followers sought to keep the Awami League at bay, indeed to badmouth it in many ways before the nation. They did not succeed.
Fast forward to August 2024, when after a long period of fifteen years in power, the Awami League simply and suddenly collapsed in the face of growing civil disorder. The military had Sheikh Hasina fly to India, where she has been since, as mobs vandalised the prime ministerial residence and torched the historic home of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman.
Not a single instance of resistance could be mounted by the Awami League or its student and youth followers to the disorder that has plagued the country in the last nine months.
Meanwhile, the Awami League and its student wing, the Chhatra League, have been decreed, in a questionable manner, out of existence by the regime currently holding power in Bangladesh. Overall, grassroots Awami League leaders and activists across the country have come under assault, have been killed, and have been in hiding.
In these nine months, the Awami League has been unable to confront its rivals and reclaim its place in the national political landscape. The absence of the party, indeed the failure of its leadership to mount any challenge to the forces opposing it both in the administration and in the political field, has had grievous consequences.
Thousands of citizens — politicians, journalists, theatre activists, movie artistes, civil servants, academics, party supporters and others — have been carted off to prison, with very large numbers of them slapped, improbably and arbitrarily, with charges of involvement in the murder of individuals across the country. Those detained have had little or no access to legal representation. Many of them have come under physical assault on their way to court.
The Awami League has been unable to raise its voice against this absence of the rule of law, for in an atmosphere of all-round intimidation it has lacked the leadership that could have turned the tables on its enemies and thereby inform the nation that it is around to play its role in reversing the situation which persists in the country today.
The disappointment comes through the fact that while a number of senior party politicians, including former ministers and lawmakers, have made their way surreptitiously to India, Britain and other countries, none of them has so far demonstrated the readiness to provide the country with the sort of leadership which is so necessary at this time.
Former ministers and members of parliament have been spotted at social gatherings in Britain.
In India, those who have found their way into exile have shown no inclination toward offering the nation a plan on what the Awami League means to do to restore democratic politics back in Bangladesh.
The kind of leadership which kept the lamps burning in 1971 and post-1975 has been missing post-2024. Admittedly, the Awami League is passing through the worst time in its history.
With a regime intent on preventing the party from engaging in political parties, with young supporters of the current regime demanding that judges ordering the release of Awami League activists on bail be identified, with the media cowed into silence owing to fear of mobs, indeed with those holding on to power determined to reverse the course of national history, the Awami League knows it is caught in a straitjacket.
And yet for Bangladesh, for the between 35% and 40% of the electorate that generally vote for the Awami League, the inability of the party leadership to come forth with a ray of hope for the nation has been profoundly upsetting.
The bigger issue, though, is one of whether the leadership so necessary for the party to reinvent itself and to reconfigure the fortunes of the Bangladesh state is at all there.
In exile in Delhi, Sheikh Hasina has not so far been willing to inform people that she is prepared to delegate responsibility to party politicians to undertake a campaign, however covert or overt, to reactivate the Awami League in Bangladesh.
The responsibility lies with Sheikh Hasina. In these nine months since the fall of her government, she has appeared unwilling to loosen her grip on the party, in fact, to provide her supporters with a sense of direction for the future. But should one be surprised?
In the fifteen years in which she exercised power in Bangladesh, Sheikh Hasina was unable to preside over a collegial system of government, to a point where ministers and lawmakers were reduced to being sycophants forever willing to go along with her decisions, no questions asked.
There is little question that under the watch of the Awami League under Sheikh Hasina, elections turned into controversial exercises.
Parliament was flooded with the presence of businessmen-turned-lawmakers, leading to a situation where debate in the house on vital national issues was non-existent. Corruption went unchecked.
The Awami League and Sheikh Hasina need to go for a rethink if the party is to be restored to relevance.
For a party that led the movement for Bangladesh’s independence from Pakistan to be unable to convince Bengalis that it has a well-defined set of policies or programmes for national rejuvenation on offer at this present time is regrettable.
Despite the travails and victimisation it is being subjected to, the hard truth is that the absence of the Awami League, certainly its silence, in national politics undercuts all efforts toward a restoration of legitimate and constitutional government in Bangladesh.
Without the Awami League, the centre cannot hold. Without its leadership and organisational structure, politics will be rendered meaningless and without form. Which is why it is crucial for Sheikh Hasina and for her colleagues to shape a strategy that will revive the party in line with its historically democratic heritage.
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At the same time, the strategy must ensure that the values underpinned by the 1971 War of Liberation, values currently under organised assault in Bangladesh, are restored to a pre-August 2024 situation. Bangladesh’s people have in the Awami League a vehicle to uphold national self-esteem. The Awami League must not let them down.
