Situation 1: In 1971, the Pakistani army carried out a genocide in its eastern wing. The death toll was in the thousands. That campaign of death lasted a few months. At that time, the Indian army crossed the border and, with generous support from Bengali freedom fighters, crushed the Pakistan army.
Situation 2: Fifty-three years later, today, Bangladesh’s police and security forces have shot to kill hundreds of unarmed students. This grisly mass murder was perpetrated by the Awami League regime that had lost its legitimacy to govern in 2014.
Today, the Indian establishment’s cynical silence constitutes antithetical evidence of its covert support to a ‘government’ that seeks to crush its own people, just as the Pakistanis sought to.
Now, which is a greater crime?
Bangladesh’s history is soaked in blood. And today, Bangladesh is inundated by blood. Why? Because a maniacal woman, the daughter of the putative founder of Bangladesh, wants to remain in power for two reasons: first, to use state power to crush all opposition and to avoid judicial prosecution against innumerable instances of human rights abuses and corruption indulged in by government officials, entrepreneurs and security agencies.
The second reason to cling on to power is a consequence of external duress. In this case, by a small section of the Indian political and security establishment which uses the China bogey, but it really is all about total control over the Awami League regime.
Allow me to digress a bit. The maniacal woman referred to above is Sheikh Hasina who, in the backdrop of her father’s assassination, was taken in and reared by India’s security establishment. That protection and relevant ‘education’ was deemed sufficient enough for her to be ‘fielded’ into Bangladesh’s volatile politics of the early 1990s.
Sheikh Hasina’s real advent to untrammeled power took off in 2009 following the 2008 general elections, held in the backdrop of a brief army rule popularly known as ‘1/11’.
Since then, she has held absolute power, crushing all political opposition by mostly resorting to killings and enforced disappearances. This did not happen without the direct involvement of the Indian security establishment, including the Research and Analysis Wing – mostly vain, corrupt, incompetent and inefficient and therefore open to external influences – which routinely backed a progressively decrepit Awami League.
Over time, as the Awami League government’s repression continued, the patron state, India, sought to ward of external pressure. For the Bangladeshi people, the consequences were disastrous: they lost their right to vote, to free expression of speech, personal security and economic well-being.
Hasina, however, found cynically novel ways to play the Indians against the Chinese who nurtured grandiose plans to encircle India. She succeeded for a while, until now: her visit to New Delhi in the third week of June when she signed onto certain agreements, has had the desired impact, especially in the light of her failed China visit between July 8 and 10.
In the meantime, the students’ agitation against quotas broke out, followed by independent Bangladesh’s worst massacre undertaken by Hasina’s police-military establishment. The state turned against the nation with unspeakable crimes, reminiscent of the 1971 Pakistan army massacre.
The international community, especially the so-called West, has cut a sorry figure. The United States has been found out in more ways than one in Bangladesh’s context: its earlier rhetoric – to hit hard against regimes that violate human rights – has been exposed for what it is: mere platitudes. New Delhi has its own designs and was successful in the last one year to ‘turn’ the Americans. Silence and inaction in preventing the mass killings will taint New Delhi too.
The Awami League regime’s mass killings are being documented by Bangladeshis at home and abroad. This grisly compendium will be useful for any future prosecution of politicians, policemen, intelligence officials and even army soldiers who took part in the appalling and gratuitous acts of killing. One of these police officers who took a leading role in the terror-killings is Detective Branch chief Mohammad Harun-ur Rashid notorious for past acts of “enforced disappearances” and custodial deaths. There is not much difference between Rashid’s death squads and the Nazi Einsatzgruppen who killed mercilessly across Poland and Russia in the wake of the Wehrmacht’s invasion in 1941-42.
However, irrespective of such efforts, the evidence is there for all to see. Awami League ministers have been fielded by Hasina to justify the killings. Police and Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) officers have stepped out to explain and rationalise their murderous actions as ways to suppress so-called “BNP-Jamaat” rioters.
There is now a deliberate move on the part of the Awami League to hold the BNP and Jamaat-e-Islami responsible for the violence and the security forces’ action as defensive in nature. This does not wash away the taint of mass murder.
And now, even as curfew continues, policemen have fanned out, moving from apartment to apartment looking for Dhaka University students. Many have already been picked up and taken to undisclosed locations. Thousands of cases have been lodged against students from different universities and educational institutions.
Evidence has also surfaced of rows and rows of freshly dug graves across Dhaka and Bangladesh’s towns provincial towns. One such site is along a dirt track at Raier Bazar west of Dhanmondi, an upscale Dhaka neighbourhood. Here, 36 graves were dug. A video clip shows men busy with shovels and other tools. These graves may already have been filled and covered. The evidence of the carnage may have been buried, but these will certainly surface sooner rather later.
Raier Bazar is a site that is not unknown to Bangladeshis: in the 1971 Pakistan army’s mass murder, the bodies of Bengali intellectuals were dumped in the open. There was no burial then.
(The writer is a New Delhi-based senior journalist)
