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POLITICS-BANGLADESH: A Tale of Two Ladies

Farid Ahmed

DHAKA, Nov 20 2006 (IPS) - Politics in Bangladesh, the world’s third largest Muslim nation, revolves around two ladies who, for the past 15 years, have refused to even speak with each other.

Both Begum Khaleda Zia, who stepped down from office as prime minister in October on completion of a five-year term, and her political rival Sheikh Hasina Wajed, entered Bangladesh’s turbulent and often bloody politics through a route familiar in Asia – public sympathy following putsches that eliminated powerful male relatives.

And now, in the run up to general elections set for January, the ‘Battle of the Begums (ladies)’, is turning red hot once again.

It is easy to believe that the rivalry is the result of personal feuds, but analysts say it is aligned with a larger political struggle and that the two have no choice but to maintain a relationship of vitriolic hatred.

Wajed and Zia, head the two most important political parties, the Awami League and the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) respectively, have served either as prime minister or as opposition leader since 1991, following the ouster of the military dictator H.M. Ershad and the reintroduction of popular democracy.

While Hasina Wajed inherited the leadership of the Awami League from her father Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, Khaleda Zia heads the party created by her husband Ziaur Rahman – a military general turned politician.

Over the years, the rivalry has resulted in hundreds of deaths, in anything from street fights to vigilante killings. The latest violence, raging for the past three weeks, has been over the formation of a neutral, interim caretaker government that would be responsible for conducting the elections.

While Hasina Wajed and her party have acquiesced to the self-appointment of President Iajuddin Ahmed as head of the caretaker government, they want him to prove his neutrality by sacking chief elections commissioner M. A. Aziz and his three deputies on Monday.

“We’ll not join the polls unless Aziz and his deputies are removed,” Hasina Wajed warned after branding the poll body chief and his deputies as biased in favour of the BNP.

Countered Khaleda Zia: “We’ll not join the polls and initiate streets agitation if Aziz and the other commissioners are removedà It’ll be unconstitutional.”

“This is not mere a personal rivalry between two ladies. Rather, the whole country has become the hapless victim of a crude power struggle, devoid of democratic principles – these are two rival political camps that are incidentally led by two women. Things would not have been different, if the two parties were led by two men,” Nurul Kabir, editor of the English language daily ‘New Age’, told IPS.

“Since the two political camps are crudely fighting each other without any set rules of the game, the fate of their struggle (on the recent issues) would eventually be decided on the streets,” Kabir, a respected political analyst, said. “As regards a pro-people solution to the crises, it would depend on a comprehensive reform of the whole political system, which still seems a far cry,” he added.

The people saw the two leaders and their parties cooperate and even share the political platform only once – when they joined hands to lead a popular movement against the Ershad regime.

At other times, they accuse each other of distorting the country’s history by defacing the persons from whom they had inherited their political legacies and also of distorting democracy in a country that came into being only in 1971.

The two women have often hurled bitter personal insults at each other with many of their followers taking up the cue – with added acrimony and frequent violence.

On Sunday, Tarique Rahman, the eldest son of Khaleda Zia, filed a defamation suit in a Dhaka court against Sheikh Hasina for derogatory remarks against him.

“The former prime minister’s son has become angry as he has been unmaskedà I also demand a probe into how Tarique Rahman became a millionaire,” said Abdul Jalil, the general secretary of Awami League.

Wajed’s father Mujibur Rahman organised the country’s war of independence which resulted in the birth of Bangladesh,seceeding from Pakistan.

Popularly known as ‘Bangabandhu’ (the friend of Bengal), Mujibur Rahman along with most of his family members were assassinated in a military coup in August 1975. Hasina Wajed and a sister survived because they were in Germany at that time.

Hasina Wajed believes, and has said so on many occasions, that Khaleda Zia’s husband was involved in the killing of her father, although he was never indicted in a court of law.

Ziaur Rehman became president in 1977 but was himself assassinated in a military coup in 1981.

The hostility goes to such extent that Khaleda Zia celebrates her birthday when Hasina Wajed observes the death anniversary of her father and other family members on Aug. 15.

“We never heard of Khaleda Zia’s birthday falling on Aug. 15 until 90s,” said Shahidul Alam, a school teacher in Dhaka. “It was reported in the media that her marriage and school certificates show different dates of her birth. This she did only when Awami League came to power and officially started observing Aug. 15 as national mourning day,” he said.

“The feud didn’t spare the school children even,” Alam added. “When Khaleda Zia first came to power in 1991, the government changed the school text books to portray Ziaur Rahman as the hero of the war of independence. When the Awami League returned to power in 1996, it rewrote the books to describe Sheikh Mujibur Rahman as the man who proclaimed the country’s independence and led the war of liberation,” he said.

After Zia returned to power in 2001, it was her turn to get the text books rewritten. The BNP maintains that it was her husband who announced the proclamation of independence over radio, initiating the war, although the Awami League version says that Ziaur Rahman, then a major in the army, only read out the proclamation on behalf of Mujibur Rahman who was then in the custody of the Pakistan army. “When both Mujibur Rahman and Ziaur Rahman were alive, they never debated the issue,” said a retired general of the Bangladesh army M Sakhawat Hussain.

Portraits of Mujibur Rahman, were removed from government offices after his assassination in 1975 but reappeared in 1996 under a law making it mandatory to display them in all government offices. Also currency notes with his picture on them were back in circulation.

When Zia returned to power, she revoked the law and the bank notes were gradually withdrawn.

The BNP introduced a national holiday on Nov. 7 as ‘National Revolution and Solidarity Day’, an uprising of people and soldiers that paved the way for Ziaur Rahman to come to power in 1977. Hasina Wajed cancelled the holiday when she became premier.

“The two ladies could not sit together even on questions of national security in the last 15 years,” said Sakhawat, who is widely quoted on national defence and security issues, told IPS.

Sakhawat believes that Islamists have taken advantage of the rivalry between the two ladies and their political formations to make inroads into the country. “I don’t say the ladies are radicals or extremistsà but neither of them could ignore Islam as means of making political gains in Muslim-majority Bangladesh,” he said.

According to Sakhawat, Islamist radicals grew because, while in power, neither political party helped with proper investigations and ignored intelligence reports which warned of rising extremism.

Indeed the BNP has been in power over the last five years with the support of Islamist parties and many say this made Khaleda Zia turn a blind eye to violent militancy which was said to have international connections.

As soon as the elections were declared, a sizeable faction of the BNP broke away to form the Liberal Democratic Party, accusing the parent of turning into an Islamic fundamentalist party and also indulging in corruption.

Bangladesh drew international attention, in August 2005, when Islamists carried out a series of near-simultaneous bombings across the country in a demonstration of their newfound power and influence.

With international pressure growing, the government cracked down on the Jamayetul Mujahideen Bangladesh group, arresting its top leaders and bringing them to trial resulting in some of them being awarded the death sentence.

But typically, the two leaders have been blaming each other for the rise in fundamentalism and violent militancy in this densely populated country of 145 million people, who rate among the world’s poorest.