On July 14, as Bangladesh’s students-led movement gathered pace and direction, a senior Awami League leader received a WhatsApp message from a US State Department deputy director after a gap of nearly four months.
Once pleasantries were exchanged, the US official asked the Awami League leader a pointed question: “What will be the ultimate fallout of the students’ agitation?” This was followed by a second question: “What would follow in the event the Awami League government took deadly action against the protesting students and whether the Sheikh Hasina government give any concessions as was done in 2018?”
The State Department official’s questions were “very precise”, the Awami League leader told Northeast News. The questions struck him as “very significant” and indicated that the American intelligence and foreign affairs establishments were aware of the outcome of the students’ movement and the consequent widespread deadly violence that ultimately led to the downfall of the Sheikh Hasina government.
The Awami League leader, whose identity is not being revealed for security reasons, alerted a section of the party leadership, including some key officials in the Prime Minister’s Office, that the goal of the students was to overthrow the Hasina regime at all costs. He got in touch with a former Indian high commissioner to Bangladesh and a former foreign secretary and conveyed his “impressions” of the US administration’s moves and objectives.
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Describing the Jamaat-e-Islami as the American security establishment’s “deep-state proxy”, Bangladeshi sources said that the US objective was to “catapult the Jamaat-e-Islami”, with the students’ movement acting as the major push force.
While the Indian establishment was “obviously” not kept in the loop by the Americans, the rapid pace that the movement gathered on the ground was “like a precision-guided mission” which New Delhi realised much too late.
“Indian decision makers did not see the writing on the wall as they continued to support a besieged Awami League political-security apparatus,” the Awami League leader said, adding that they “did not realise that the students would zero in on the beleaguered Hasina regime so fast”.
Analysing the chain of events from September 2023 until the Awami League’s debacle, Bangladeshi sources said that the US did not want to see Bangladesh through Indian eyes any longer.
Since the autumn of last year, the US State Department and the security apparatus aimed to effect strategic geopolitical policy shifts on the Indo-Pacific in general and Myanmar in particular, sources said, adding that such an eventuality may now impact India “greatly”.
The various moves to speed up the process aimed at a regime change accelerated after the January 7 election when US embassy officials in Dhaka met clandestinely with a Dhaka University professor who was positioned to helm the students’ movement in a big way. This professor is now a leading member of the Mohammad Yunus-led interim government.
Among the very few Awami League leaders too “see the writing on the wall” was the then Education Minister Mohibul Hassan Chowdhury who “sought reconciliation with the Americans”, party sources said.
The others in the higher echelons of the party structure either did not counsel Hasina on these lines, in the belief that a crackdown would work, or simply remained silent. Many of these Awami League ministers have either fled the country or have gone underground in Bangladesh.
