The Awami League, the party instrumental in leading Bangladesh to freedom from Pakistani colonial rule, is once again prey to assaults by those who have historically been uncomfortable with its role in Bengali life.
The current interim administration in Dhaka, bowing to demands by its young supporters, last week effectively decreed a ban on the Awami League. It raises the key question of how a party which effectively enjoys the support of at least 40% of the electorate — political observers, of course, suggest that in light of the outlawing of it the party’s popularity has gone up — can be prevented from participating in Bangladesh’s politics.
The irony is that while parties such as the Jamaat-e-Islami, which openly collaborated with the Pakistan army in 1971 in the genocide of Bengalis, today have free rein in politics, the Awami League as an organization resting on its dedication to Bengali nationalism is now unable to operate in the very country it led to independence fifty four years ago.
But let there be the historical point stressed here. This is not the first time that the Awami League has come under assault. Indeed, since 1954, when the elected provincial government of East Bengal — where the party played a leading role — was dismissed by the Karachi-based central government of Pakistan, the Awami League has regularly been a thorn in the side for basically all unconstitutional and extra-constitutional regimes in both Pakistan and Bangladesh.
The regime of Field Marshal Mohammad Ayub Khan, through instituting the so-called Agartala Conspiracy Case in late 1967 and implicating Awami League leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman as the principal accused in the case, clearly intended to run the party to ground. The effort failed when a determined mass movement forced the regime to capitulate and free Mujib and all other accused in the case. It was at that point that Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was anointed as Bangabandhu by a grateful Bengali nation.
But that was no hint that the Awami League had a clear, uninterrupted path to the future. Its landslide victory in Pakistan’s very first general election in December 1970 ought to have propelled it to power in Islamabad. But a combine of politicians in western Pakistan and the ubiquitous army not only prevented Bangabandhu and his party from assuming power but effectively undercut the democratic aspirations of the people not only of East Bengal but of the rest of Pakistan. General Yahya Khan, Pakistan’s second military ruler, decreed a ban on the Awami League on 26 March 1971.
Yahya’s move was self-defeating, for the Awami League was to organize a guerrilla war against the Pakistan military junta, which would surrender before a joint command of Bangladesh’s Mukti Bahini and the Indian army in December 1971.
The point is self-explanatory. Every time the Awami League has been under assault from martial law or unconstitutional regimes, it has bounced back through the dedication of its leaders, workers and nationwide supporters. By now decreeing a ban on the Awami League, the Yunus regime has not only muddied the political waters in Bangladesh but has also effectively tied itself in knots. The question is one of how elections can now be organized, if at all, under this regime. Obviously, the mobs will continue to go after the Awami League, as they have since August last year. But given the lessons of the past, that is no guarantee that the Awami League will not make a turnaround and create real difficulties not only for the regime but for all rightists who have commandeered the country.
The moment is appropriate to go into a study of the history of the Awami League.
On 23 June 1949, history took a definitive and decisive new turn in what was at the time the eastern province of Pakistan. There were some courageous men — Moulana Abdul Hamid Khan Bhashani, Yar Mohammad, Shamsul Haque, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and, of course, Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy — whose names are today engraved in the Bengali consciousness.
These men, acutely aware of the growing authoritarianism of the ruling Muslim League, thought it necessary to break loose of the organisation which had spearheaded the struggle for Pakistan and come forth with the Awami Muslim League. The goal was democracy. The objective was to reassure the people of Pakistan, in both wings of the country, that they had a political alternative to fall back on in their yearning for pluralistic politics.
Today, at this remove in time, it is necessary to remind ourselves that the place of the Awami League in Bangladesh’s history has been an enviable one. In the beginning, there were the men who felt early on in Pakistan that the Muslim League was swiftly turning into a feudal, self-serving organisation. And thus was the Awami Muslim League forged into shape, a party of Muslim League dissidents who believed that the genesis of Pakistan, its objective of democracy, were under threat at the hands of Mohammad Ali Jinnah’s mediocre but grasping successors.
But the Awami Muslim League did not or would not replace the Muslim League, in that strictly communal sense of the meaning. The spur that pushed it into staking out a new path along the forked road of politics was the growing intensity of the language movement in East Bengal. February 1952 was to be a watershed. By the middle of the decade, the party would reach out to all classes and all denominations of citizens, as the Awami League. There was boldness in a jettisoning of the term ‘Muslim’ from its name. Pakistan, after all, was a Muslim state, implicit in whose philosophy was the second-class nature of its Hindus, Christians, Buddhists, indigenous populations and others.
The Awami League was much sinned against in the decade-long period of Field Marshal Mohammad Ayub Khan between October 1958 and March 1969. Banned under martial law, it would re-emerge in 1962 but only as part of an alliance of opposition political parties. Placed under arrest and then freed, a shaken Suhrawardy left the country to die in Beirut in 1963.
Earlier, a leading figure of the party, Shamsul Haque, went missing along the way, figuratively speaking. He would die sad and forlorn. Meanwhile, power in the party clearly was beginning to pass into the hands of a radical group of young leaders headed by Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. In early 1964, Mujib revived the Awami League and moved it out of the opposition National Democratic Front (NDF). It had rediscovered the need to go it alone in national politics.
A defining moment for the Awami League came in February 1966, when Sheikh Mujibur Rahman placed a Six-Point plan of regional autonomy for Pakistan’s federating provinces at a conference of opposition leaders in Lahore. It left the remnants of the old party leadership, personified by the likes of Nawabzada Nasrullah Khan, horrified. It created consternation among the other opposition parties. And it pushed President Ayub Khan into threatening to employ the language of weapons against the party.
Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Pakistan’s foreign minister, challenged Mujib to a public debate at Dhaka’s Paltan Maidan over the Six Points. The cerebral Tajuddin Ahmad, general secretary of the Awami League, took up the challenge. In the event, an intimidated Bhutto failed to turn up. But that did not stop the regime from going ahead with its plan of trying to eliminate the Awami League. Mujib, along with his young associates, was once again in prison by May 1966. That did not prevent Mizanur Rahman Chowdhury and Amena Begum, two young leaders of the party, from organising an unprecedented general strike in support of the Six Points throughout East Pakistan on 7 June 1966.
By January 1968, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman would be dubbed the principal accused in the so-called Agartala Conspiracy Case instituted by the regime against him and thirty-four Bengali civilian and military personnel. His party was under relentless assault. Increasingly subjected to brutality, the party struggled to hold on despite being pushed to the ropes. It took the blows patiently. A year later, it was marching back to life in refreshing freedom as popular support replenished its energy. A free Mujib, once the conspiracy case had been withdrawn by a beleaguered Ayub regime, emerged in his new avatar as Bangabandhu. He travelled to Rawalpindi for a round table conference, a leader on the march, the de facto spokesperson of his Bengalis.
Bengali support for Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and his party came through the electoral triumph of December 1970. The vested politico-military combine in West Pakistan repudiated the election results, seized Bangabandhu and carted him off to solitary confinement and secret trial before a military tribunal in Mianwali. A year later, the Pakistan army having murdered three million Bengalis and Bengali constitutional politics having graduated to armed guerrilla warfare, Bangladesh emerged as a sovereign People’s Republic.
Disaster struck between 15 August and 3 November 1975. Bangabandhu, most of his family and the four leaders of the Mujibnagar government were gunned down in a military coup diabolically led by the rightwing Awami League’s KhondokarMoshtaque Ahmed.
In the darkness between August 1975 and May 1981, it was back to a struggle by the Awami League to reclaim the high ground of politics. Mizanur Rahman Chowdhury and Dewan Farid Gazi held their factions together. And then it was Zohra Tajuddin who bravely fought on, until Sheikh Hasina took charge in 1981. She took the party back to power twenty-one years after 1975. And Hasina has been there since, as the longest surviving leader of the party, even as she has remained in exile in India since August 2024.
Ayub Khan gave the Awami League a hard time. Yahya Khan proscribed it. Ziaur Rahman and Hussein Muhammad Ershad went as far as they could to keep the party from re-emerging into light. This new move by the regime currently lording it over in Bangladesh will be unable, in the light of history, to finish off the party.
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For the Awami League leadership, which has been unable so far to organize any move to reclaim the ground it lost nine months ago, the truth could not be clearer: the party must survive better, through returning to its old reputation — that of an inclusive organisation reaching out to all citizens of Bangladesh, of a body of dedicated men and women ready to reassert its principled faith in democracy based on secularism and socialism reinforced by Bengali nationalism.
