Whither regime change in Bangladesh?
August 13, 2024
Anti-government protestors display Bangladesh’s national flag as they storm Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s palace in Dhaka on August 5, 2024
[KM ASAD/AFP via Getty Images]
LONG READ
by Junaid S. Ahmad
Recent events in Bangladesh have been momentous. The developments have sparked a stimulating debate about whether what has transpired is a popular and organic uprising, or if it is a Western-backed regime change engineered from outside.
Serious, robust and nuanced analyses have been rendered of the domestic causes of the popular uprising of, especially, young Bangladeshis, so it’s not necessary to rehash those here. What is at least as important, though, is to address the more contentious aspects of the disputed narrative(s).
The overthrown Prime Minister, Sheikh Hasina, suffered the same fate as many leaders whose popularity and legitimacy declined drastically. To rationalise her rule forever, Hasina banked on the fact that she is the daughter of the country’s heroic liberation leader, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. That may have worked at the beginning of her rule, but it certainly did not over the past few years.
Nevertheless, even if there was a loss of mass support in Bangladesh itself, was Hasina’s ouster propelled by veteran connoisseurs of Western-backed regime changes?
The paramount distinction helpful to understand the developments in Bangladesh is that between a foreign/domestic elite-engineered removal of a leader/political dispensation, against a bona fide mass movement which can be hijacked, disarmed and paralysed by powerful external and internal forces.
There are obviously numerous examples of the former.
Straightforward Washington-backed attempts at regime change via “colour revolutions” and local proxies happened in Ukraine in 2014, in Venezuela for over two decades and in Pakistan in 2022. In Caracas, such full-on Western efforts have, time and again, failed, at least so far. The desire to remove the “Chavista” movement, first with Chavez and latterly Maduro, has been rebuffed repeatedly by the popular defence of the socialist project in the country. No Washington-supported domestic elite or proxy forces have been able to deliver a definitive end to what many Venezuelans consider to be the country’s revolutionary process.
Pakistan in April 2022 was also different to Bangladesh in August 2024. The only similarity was the successful removal of the Prime Minister, Imran Khan. However, the dissimilarity is far more significant. In the ouster of Pakistan’s very popular cricketer-turned-politician, the US foreign policy establishment and Islamabad’s generals were the chief architects. The most astonishing aspect of the episode in response to the regime change was the historic mass uprising across Pakistan where, even though prime ministers have been deposed periodically, there has never been anything remotely like the nationwide demonstrations in defence of Khan. Past prime ministers and their political mafias, with the exception of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto in the 1970s, were seen as offering no meaningful alternative to military rule. In fact, the military was mostly able to gain more legitimacy because the majority of Pakistanis regarded the officers and soldiers as far less corrupt and more professional than the political class.
Hence, senior officers in Islamabad, as well as Western capitals, were caught off guard by the mass and sustained defiance of their political shenanigans. Although not everyone in the protests were blind and uncritical supporters of Khan, they endured for over a year. They seemed unstoppable. And in most societies, they probably would be.
However, Pakistan has one of the most formidable militaries in the world, which is deployed scandalously and primarily to subjugate and terrorise the country’s own citizens. Being both mortified in front of its Western patrons and humiliated domestically by people power, the Pakistani military high command unleashed a reign of terror, including murder, torture and forced disappearances in May 2023. And the obstinate former prime minister faced the full wrath of the generals: Khan was jailed in a supermax-security prison far more wretched than those reserved for the worst terrorists. Even though Khan’s party, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf (the “Movement for Justice”), miraculously won the most parliamentary seats in February’s deeply-flawed elections — aka “general’s selections” — the fearless momentum of the popular revolt was stalled, at least temporarily.
In Bangladesh, the absence of pro-Hasina demonstrations after her removal had nothing to do with military repression of such sentiment. Over the past few months, the generals were anticipating that there would be significant divisions within the population on the matter of the prime minister’s popularity, or lack thereof. Such fault lines were simply not there.
We can see the manifestation of this outcome in the way that influential capitals have responded to Hasina’s pleas for asylum. She was barely able to cross the border to India, where she is not a welcome former head of state, but an uncomfortable refugee with nowhere to go. Even the ruling Indian elite, to which Hasina had rendered her undying loyalty, is uncomfortable with her presence in the country. If New Delhi can view one of their favoured rulers as a liability, everyone can.
India’s political elite has good reason to be unconcerned about Hasina at this point. There is widespread anger in India at the failure of the government to predict developments in its neighbour to the east; it was incapable of protecting Indian students and workers now stuck in Bangladesh and fearful of the situation after Hasina’s ouster.
Images circulating on social media show Indian intelligence personnel, omnipresent in various Bangladeshi ministries, especially in the security apparatus, fleeing for their lives.
Criticism of the government in New Delhi has become so fierce that it has had to issue one awkward statement after another in order to try to appease the public.
The “usual suspects” who seem to be the last refuge of oppressive and despised leaders on the run – Abu Dhabi, Riyadh, London, Washington – do not want anything to do with Hasina. That’s not because such “safe havens” have any principled objections to giving asylum to despots and puppets. The US, for example, has behaved more sympathetically to some of its proxy clients in Latin America. In 2023, for example, America’s preferred option to govern the stubbornly anti-imperialist Venezuelans, Juan Guaidó, was granted the right to go back to his patrons and call it quits. Of course, new imperial surrogates continue to be buttressed in Venezuela and elsewhere.
It is also essential to note that Bangladesh is not a small country, and it has some degree of popular democracy. It is not a petro-monarchy with a relatively small population, making its autocrats’ ability to flee and be forgotten about much less challenging.
Moreover, comparing Hasina’s plight with that of Imran Khan post-ouster is instructive. Hasina has nowhere to run, while Khan would have been welcomed in many countries around the world, especially in Euro-America. Pakistan’s generals had made the case to their foreign backers that the only prospect of effacing Khan from political life was to offer him asylum anywhere he so desired. This desperate offer, which became public almost instantaneously, was offered repeatedly to him, but he doggedly refused such a deal — in contrast to virtually every other former prime minister, again with the possible exception of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto — and then confronted the anger of a ruling elite that sought vengeance for his intransigency.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s recent behaviour demonstrates how, despite being a close ally of the United States, he and the ruling elite in New Delhi resent being seen as merely Washington’s “frontline state against China”. Modi had the distinct albeit dubious honour of being Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s close compadre. When Israel begin its genocide in Gaza last October, Modi scrambled to defend Tel Aviv even as the occupation state was increasingly being shunned by much of the world, particularly the Global South.
What has since become patently obvious is that the Indian leader has distanced himself from his friend. Modi is no longer taking Netanyahu’s calls.
OPINION: Is waving a Palestinian flag a crime in India?
Similarly, there has been much made about Modi’s literal and figurative embrace of Russian President Putin. This trajectory of the world’s most populous democracy has irritated Washington.
However, the idea that the Indian ruling elite is once again, as in its Nehruvian Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) phase, seizing the mantle of leader and defender of the Global South is a bit of a stretch. The political establishment in New Delhi is primarily making a strategic calculation. The winds are moving incontrovertibly from an acutely enervated West to a dynamic and assertive East and Global South, and India’s political incumbents see the writing on the wall. The manoeuvring is fundamentally tactical, not principled.
Turning back to Imran Khan, it is vital to recall the “threat” that he ostensibly posed to Washington in particular.
Much more than any economic impediment to the smooth operations of Western and domestic capital, Khan was seen as a geo-political menace. This is the understanding that was lost by the liberal and progressive Pakistani intelligentsia, which assumed that it was only revolutionary socialists who were the West’s targets for regime change.
It seems that someone like Saddam Hussein, who faced direct Western aggression for regime change, was himself clueless about his progressive and left-wing credentials. In the left-wing terminology of the 20th century, Khan could perhaps best be described as a “bourgeois nationalist”, although it is probably more complicated than that.
Nevertheless, from 2001, Khan opposed the “Afghan-Pak” theatre of the “War on Terror” for reasons that many in the world shared: it would be immoral because of the predictable human toll it would take; and it would be counterproductive because it would fuel more militancy. The US national security state never really forgave Khan for effectively being right about this: there would be no military solution in Afghanistan.
However, he repeated his position when prime minister: Pakistan, he insisted, would be friends with all countries in peace, not in war. And to make it crystal clear, he stated specifically that there is no reason why Pakistan cannot have a perfectly amicable relationship with the US. Washington, though, rarely tolerates neutrality, and Khan was accused of “aggressive neutrality” with regards to the beginning of the Russian “Special Military Operation” in Ukraine. That kind of neutrality may be a right of a more self-assured country like India, but not for Washington’s client military-civilian ruling elites in Islamabad.
Sheikh Hasina, on the other hand, was never seen as a threat to domestic elite actors, including the military, or powerful external forces.
Ask the multinational corporations how they have fared in Bangladesh over many years. It would be a surprise if, other than a particularly rapacious one, any Western corporation would answer anything other than, “Splendidly!” Whether or not Hasina could be described as “neoliberal” or just an old-fashioned facilitator of predatory “liberal” corporate capitalism, is largely irrelevant. Anyone claiming that she was a socialist, or a social democratic, or even a Keynesian figure should perhaps first consult 90 per cent of the Bangladeshi population.
It is also a phantom assertion that the phenomenon of both Hasina’s time in power and downfall were the result of an intense geopolitical power play between Washington and Beijing, as some analysts are trying to frame it. For the most part, she had kept both nations content with their economic activity in Bangladesh. It is an entirely separate matter of how, periodically, she manoeuvred herself politically in the charade of being on one side or the other.
The rather uncomplicated story here, as in many other contexts from one corner of the globe to the other, is that Hasina’s standing morphed from being a reliable asset to an incredible liability. The latter status comes either by betraying one’s domestic and external supporters, or simply because one’s unpopularity has climbed to a level that cannot be suppressed. There is a long list of Western-backed dictators to demonstrate this, such as Marcos in the Philippines or Noriega in Panama.
Clearly, Hasina’s case falls into this category. The Bangladeshi military top brass recognised that Hasina had overstayed her welcome, and forced her to resign. Her standing had deteriorated so precipitously that her own recently appointed army Chief of Staff, General Waker-Uz-Zaman, commanded her to resign and flee immediately. The general made it clear that he would not be able to protect her against an inflamed Bangladeshi population.
Although the mass opposition to Hasina came from civil society forces of varying ideologies, it was clear that the bulk of the population became her enemy, not her friend.
The ideological actors who have received a great deal of attention are the “political Islamists”, a reference primarily to Jamaat-e-Islami. The party played a hideous role in the 1970-71 war of liberation from what was then West Pakistan. It collaborated with West Pakistani generals in suppressing the legitimately aggrieved East Pakistanis (now Bangladeshis) ruthlessly. Indeed, the majority of its leaders were held accountable immediately after Bangladesh’s independence.
Nevertheless, Hasina found it politically opportune to raise the spectre of the treasonous pro-Pakistan Islamists within the country incessantly, in order to bolster her image fraudulently as a patriot and nationalist. In reality, the power and popularity of Jamaat-e-Islami had declined drastically, arguably only rising steadily as a result of Hasina’s merciless attacks on the group. The most vivid demonstration of how powerless the Islamists had become lay in Hasina’s decision to execute various octogenarians from the party. Despite the fact that a plethora of mainstream Western intellectuals and human rights groups — which mostly did not agree with the party’s ideology — found it inhumane to start these executions, she went ahead anyway. Within Bangladesh, although the majority of the population disagreed with these callous killings, the protests were muted.
Moreover, the idea that members of Jamaat-e-Islami are agents of Islamabad is fantastical.
It is a ridiculous allegation, not because it isn’t necessarily false, but because the idea that Pakistan’s ruling elite could accomplish any major external “victory” today is absurd. Islamabad can barely – if at all – deal with the incredible issues its old proxies in Kabul pose, never mind anything more than 2,200 kilometres away. Pakistan is thoroughly “defanged”, not in terms of its nuclear weapons programme (which would be a nice idea the world over), but in its total and entirely willing subordination to the foreign backers of its military and civilian elites. Just ask Pakistan’s perennial enemy, India, about the threat that it poses today. New Delhi’s political establishment will laugh at such a question.
Of course, Pakistan’s generals are happy to hear allegations that Islamabad was involved in Hasina’s removal. Such claims boost their image of being powerful and influential in world affairs, and hide the reality that they have reduced Pakistan to the status of a banana republic.
Perhaps the most useful recent example of the debate over whether an uprising is popular and has widespread support on the one hand, or is primarily regime change by foreign agents on the other, can be seen in Syria. As soon as anti-Assad regime protests erupted in 2011, these arguments emerged instantaneously. That same year, everyone correctly perceived popular Arab Spring upheavals in countries such as Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen and Bahrain as being organic with widespread popular support. The “NATO liberation” war for regime change in Libya began to alter that impression. The principal reason for regime change in Tripoli was the massive Western military intervention. Of course, that didn’t necessarily suggest that Muammar Gaddafi was loved by all Libyans.
If Libya compelled analysts to question the nature of anti-government protests — whether they are primarily an internal phenomenon or externally driven — then the demonstrations in Syria became fair game for much closer scrutiny. Many Syrians took great offence at basically being considered as little more than the cronies of foreign powers. And other Syrians were outraged that the perception that the “moderate rebels” offered no decent alternative to regime of Bashar Al-Assad necessarily translated into the former being implicated as Assadists.
A few years later, however, even those who argued vociferously that what had begun in Syria in 2011 was a “people’s revolution”, now became rather reticent and, if hard pressed, would concede that the initial anti-Assad protests had morphed into a proxy war fuelled by outside powers. The debate about the character of the Syrian “revolt” had definitively ended.
In Bangladesh now, it is critical to note how the pacification and co-optation of the popular uprising has already been set in motion, symbolised by the appointment of Nobel Peace Laureate Dr Muhammad Yunus, the neo-liberal of “microcredit” fame, as the transitional leader of the country. However, it is also imperative to acknowledge that Yunus is personally not considered to be one of the more viciously despised puppets installed by foreign and domestic elites, a fact that even sections of the global Left will concede. It is absurd to claim that he is akin to Western-backed clowns such as Juan Guaido and Ahmed Chalabi in Venezuela and Iraq respectively.
And that is precisely what makes him so attractive to the powerful.
The claim that Yunus is especially supported by the US foreign policy establishment in order to take a stab at its close ally, India, may contain a great deal of truth. He has not been beloved of Indian elites who resented his ceaseless denunciations of Hasina’s increasingly undemocratic turn. He has insisted on a healthier political environment permitting all opposition forces to be heard and to contest in free and fair elections. There was nothing inherently anti-Indian in what Yunus said, but Washington knows that his elevation to the highest offices of power will send a stern message to New Delhi: get back in line as a US ally that serves American geopolitical objectives.
So far, there is no mass protest against Yunus’s appointment. Again, that’s what probably makes him a good choice.
I am reminded of the audacious imperial comment by America’s former UN ambassador and national security adviser, John Bolton, that undertaking coups requires “brilliant” minds, the kind of superior intellect that, presumably, he thinks he possesses. Although his neo-colonial bravado is truly heinous, Bolton may have a point in highlighting the sadistically evil “brains” required to carry out effective regime change, even though his own putative cognitive prowess failed in Venezuela.
The change of regime in Bangladesh does not appear to have required any foreign “brains” behind it as such, but this is now certainly front and centre in the minds of state apparatchiks of the so-called Great Powers.
We will have to wait and see the direction that the Bangladeshi uprising will take or be taken. The champions of the ouster of Sheikh Hasina have no illusions about the possibilities of a “counter-revolution” engineered by outside agencies and from within Bangladesh. This is conveyed repeatedly in the ubiquitous commentary expressing both trepidation and calls for prayers that the removal of Hasina from power ushers in a much more desirable political and economic dispensation. It seems like siding with this yearning is more ethical than immediately invoking the tired “nothing is going to change” cliché employed by habitual cynics always keen on discrediting any movement for social change that is barely in its incipient phase. Those legitimate fears, prayers and yearnings should be vocalised persistently and emphatically in this pivotal period in Bangladesh’s history.
by Junaid S. Ahmad
Recent events in Bangladesh have been momentous. The developments have sparked a stimulating debate about whether what has transpired is a popular and organic uprising, or if it is a Western-backed regime change engineered from outside.
Serious, robust and nuanced analyses have been rendered of the domestic causes of the popular uprising of, especially, young Bangladeshis, so it’s not necessary to rehash those here. What is at least as important, though, is to address the more contentious aspects of the disputed narrative(s).
The overthrown Prime Minister, Sheikh Hasina, suffered the same fate as many leaders whose popularity and legitimacy declined drastically. To rationalise her rule forever, Hasina banked on the fact that she is the daughter of the country’s heroic liberation leader, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. That may have worked at the beginning of her rule, but it certainly did not over the past few years.
Nevertheless, even if there was a loss of mass support in Bangladesh itself, was Hasina’s ouster propelled by veteran connoisseurs of Western-backed regime changes?
The paramount distinction helpful to understand the developments in Bangladesh is that between a foreign/domestic elite-engineered removal of a leader/political dispensation, against a bona fide mass movement which can be hijacked, disarmed and paralysed by powerful external and internal forces.
There are obviously numerous examples of the former.
Straightforward Washington-backed attempts at regime change via “colour revolutions” and local proxies happened in Ukraine in 2014, in Venezuela for over two decades and in Pakistan in 2022. In Caracas, such full-on Western efforts have, time and again, failed, at least so far. The desire to remove the “Chavista” movement, first with Chavez and latterly Maduro, has been rebuffed repeatedly by the popular defence of the socialist project in the country. No Washington-supported domestic elite or proxy forces have been able to deliver a definitive end to what many Venezuelans consider to be the country’s revolutionary process.
Pakistan in April 2022 was also different to Bangladesh in August 2024. The only similarity was the successful removal of the Prime Minister, Imran Khan. However, the dissimilarity is far more significant. In the ouster of Pakistan’s very popular cricketer-turned-politician, the US foreign policy establishment and Islamabad’s generals were the chief architects. The most astonishing aspect of the episode in response to the regime change was the historic mass uprising across Pakistan where, even though prime ministers have been deposed periodically, there has never been anything remotely like the nationwide demonstrations in defence of Khan. Past prime ministers and their political mafias, with the exception of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto in the 1970s, were seen as offering no meaningful alternative to military rule. In fact, the military was mostly able to gain more legitimacy because the majority of Pakistanis regarded the officers and soldiers as far less corrupt and more professional than the political class.
Hence, senior officers in Islamabad, as well as Western capitals, were caught off guard by the mass and sustained defiance of their political shenanigans. Although not everyone in the protests were blind and uncritical supporters of Khan, they endured for over a year. They seemed unstoppable. And in most societies, they probably would be.
However, Pakistan has one of the most formidable militaries in the world, which is deployed scandalously and primarily to subjugate and terrorise the country’s own citizens. Being both mortified in front of its Western patrons and humiliated domestically by people power, the Pakistani military high command unleashed a reign of terror, including murder, torture and forced disappearances in May 2023. And the obstinate former prime minister faced the full wrath of the generals: Khan was jailed in a supermax-security prison far more wretched than those reserved for the worst terrorists. Even though Khan’s party, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf (the “Movement for Justice”), miraculously won the most parliamentary seats in February’s deeply-flawed elections — aka “general’s selections” — the fearless momentum of the popular revolt was stalled, at least temporarily.
In Bangladesh, the absence of pro-Hasina demonstrations after her removal had nothing to do with military repression of such sentiment. Over the past few months, the generals were anticipating that there would be significant divisions within the population on the matter of the prime minister’s popularity, or lack thereof. Such fault lines were simply not there.
We can see the manifestation of this outcome in the way that influential capitals have responded to Hasina’s pleas for asylum. She was barely able to cross the border to India, where she is not a welcome former head of state, but an uncomfortable refugee with nowhere to go. Even the ruling Indian elite, to which Hasina had rendered her undying loyalty, is uncomfortable with her presence in the country. If New Delhi can view one of their favoured rulers as a liability, everyone can.
India’s political elite has good reason to be unconcerned about Hasina at this point. There is widespread anger in India at the failure of the government to predict developments in its neighbour to the east; it was incapable of protecting Indian students and workers now stuck in Bangladesh and fearful of the situation after Hasina’s ouster.
Images circulating on social media show Indian intelligence personnel, omnipresent in various Bangladeshi ministries, especially in the security apparatus, fleeing for their lives.
Criticism of the government in New Delhi has become so fierce that it has had to issue one awkward statement after another in order to try to appease the public.
The “usual suspects” who seem to be the last refuge of oppressive and despised leaders on the run – Abu Dhabi, Riyadh, London, Washington – do not want anything to do with Hasina. That’s not because such “safe havens” have any principled objections to giving asylum to despots and puppets. The US, for example, has behaved more sympathetically to some of its proxy clients in Latin America. In 2023, for example, America’s preferred option to govern the stubbornly anti-imperialist Venezuelans, Juan Guaidó, was granted the right to go back to his patrons and call it quits. Of course, new imperial surrogates continue to be buttressed in Venezuela and elsewhere.
It is also essential to note that Bangladesh is not a small country, and it has some degree of popular democracy. It is not a petro-monarchy with a relatively small population, making its autocrats’ ability to flee and be forgotten about much less challenging.
Moreover, comparing Hasina’s plight with that of Imran Khan post-ouster is instructive. Hasina has nowhere to run, while Khan would have been welcomed in many countries around the world, especially in Euro-America. Pakistan’s generals had made the case to their foreign backers that the only prospect of effacing Khan from political life was to offer him asylum anywhere he so desired. This desperate offer, which became public almost instantaneously, was offered repeatedly to him, but he doggedly refused such a deal — in contrast to virtually every other former prime minister, again with the possible exception of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto — and then confronted the anger of a ruling elite that sought vengeance for his intransigency.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s recent behaviour demonstrates how, despite being a close ally of the United States, he and the ruling elite in New Delhi resent being seen as merely Washington’s “frontline state against China”. Modi had the distinct albeit dubious honour of being Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s close compadre. When Israel begin its genocide in Gaza last October, Modi scrambled to defend Tel Aviv even as the occupation state was increasingly being shunned by much of the world, particularly the Global South.
What has since become patently obvious is that the Indian leader has distanced himself from his friend. Modi is no longer taking Netanyahu’s calls.
OPINION: Is waving a Palestinian flag a crime in India?
Similarly, there has been much made about Modi’s literal and figurative embrace of Russian President Putin. This trajectory of the world’s most populous democracy has irritated Washington.
However, the idea that the Indian ruling elite is once again, as in its Nehruvian Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) phase, seizing the mantle of leader and defender of the Global South is a bit of a stretch. The political establishment in New Delhi is primarily making a strategic calculation. The winds are moving incontrovertibly from an acutely enervated West to a dynamic and assertive East and Global South, and India’s political incumbents see the writing on the wall. The manoeuvring is fundamentally tactical, not principled.
Turning back to Imran Khan, it is vital to recall the “threat” that he ostensibly posed to Washington in particular.
Much more than any economic impediment to the smooth operations of Western and domestic capital, Khan was seen as a geo-political menace. This is the understanding that was lost by the liberal and progressive Pakistani intelligentsia, which assumed that it was only revolutionary socialists who were the West’s targets for regime change.
It seems that someone like Saddam Hussein, who faced direct Western aggression for regime change, was himself clueless about his progressive and left-wing credentials. In the left-wing terminology of the 20th century, Khan could perhaps best be described as a “bourgeois nationalist”, although it is probably more complicated than that.
Nevertheless, from 2001, Khan opposed the “Afghan-Pak” theatre of the “War on Terror” for reasons that many in the world shared: it would be immoral because of the predictable human toll it would take; and it would be counterproductive because it would fuel more militancy. The US national security state never really forgave Khan for effectively being right about this: there would be no military solution in Afghanistan.
However, he repeated his position when prime minister: Pakistan, he insisted, would be friends with all countries in peace, not in war. And to make it crystal clear, he stated specifically that there is no reason why Pakistan cannot have a perfectly amicable relationship with the US. Washington, though, rarely tolerates neutrality, and Khan was accused of “aggressive neutrality” with regards to the beginning of the Russian “Special Military Operation” in Ukraine. That kind of neutrality may be a right of a more self-assured country like India, but not for Washington’s client military-civilian ruling elites in Islamabad.
Sheikh Hasina, on the other hand, was never seen as a threat to domestic elite actors, including the military, or powerful external forces.
Ask the multinational corporations how they have fared in Bangladesh over many years. It would be a surprise if, other than a particularly rapacious one, any Western corporation would answer anything other than, “Splendidly!” Whether or not Hasina could be described as “neoliberal” or just an old-fashioned facilitator of predatory “liberal” corporate capitalism, is largely irrelevant. Anyone claiming that she was a socialist, or a social democratic, or even a Keynesian figure should perhaps first consult 90 per cent of the Bangladeshi population.
It is also a phantom assertion that the phenomenon of both Hasina’s time in power and downfall were the result of an intense geopolitical power play between Washington and Beijing, as some analysts are trying to frame it. For the most part, she had kept both nations content with their economic activity in Bangladesh. It is an entirely separate matter of how, periodically, she manoeuvred herself politically in the charade of being on one side or the other.
The rather uncomplicated story here, as in many other contexts from one corner of the globe to the other, is that Hasina’s standing morphed from being a reliable asset to an incredible liability. The latter status comes either by betraying one’s domestic and external supporters, or simply because one’s unpopularity has climbed to a level that cannot be suppressed. There is a long list of Western-backed dictators to demonstrate this, such as Marcos in the Philippines or Noriega in Panama.
Clearly, Hasina’s case falls into this category. The Bangladeshi military top brass recognised that Hasina had overstayed her welcome, and forced her to resign. Her standing had deteriorated so precipitously that her own recently appointed army Chief of Staff, General Waker-Uz-Zaman, commanded her to resign and flee immediately. The general made it clear that he would not be able to protect her against an inflamed Bangladeshi population.
Although the mass opposition to Hasina came from civil society forces of varying ideologies, it was clear that the bulk of the population became her enemy, not her friend.
The ideological actors who have received a great deal of attention are the “political Islamists”, a reference primarily to Jamaat-e-Islami. The party played a hideous role in the 1970-71 war of liberation from what was then West Pakistan. It collaborated with West Pakistani generals in suppressing the legitimately aggrieved East Pakistanis (now Bangladeshis) ruthlessly. Indeed, the majority of its leaders were held accountable immediately after Bangladesh’s independence.
Nevertheless, Hasina found it politically opportune to raise the spectre of the treasonous pro-Pakistan Islamists within the country incessantly, in order to bolster her image fraudulently as a patriot and nationalist. In reality, the power and popularity of Jamaat-e-Islami had declined drastically, arguably only rising steadily as a result of Hasina’s merciless attacks on the group. The most vivid demonstration of how powerless the Islamists had become lay in Hasina’s decision to execute various octogenarians from the party. Despite the fact that a plethora of mainstream Western intellectuals and human rights groups — which mostly did not agree with the party’s ideology — found it inhumane to start these executions, she went ahead anyway. Within Bangladesh, although the majority of the population disagreed with these callous killings, the protests were muted.
Moreover, the idea that members of Jamaat-e-Islami are agents of Islamabad is fantastical.
It is a ridiculous allegation, not because it isn’t necessarily false, but because the idea that Pakistan’s ruling elite could accomplish any major external “victory” today is absurd. Islamabad can barely – if at all – deal with the incredible issues its old proxies in Kabul pose, never mind anything more than 2,200 kilometres away. Pakistan is thoroughly “defanged”, not in terms of its nuclear weapons programme (which would be a nice idea the world over), but in its total and entirely willing subordination to the foreign backers of its military and civilian elites. Just ask Pakistan’s perennial enemy, India, about the threat that it poses today. New Delhi’s political establishment will laugh at such a question.
Of course, Pakistan’s generals are happy to hear allegations that Islamabad was involved in Hasina’s removal. Such claims boost their image of being powerful and influential in world affairs, and hide the reality that they have reduced Pakistan to the status of a banana republic.
Perhaps the most useful recent example of the debate over whether an uprising is popular and has widespread support on the one hand, or is primarily regime change by foreign agents on the other, can be seen in Syria. As soon as anti-Assad regime protests erupted in 2011, these arguments emerged instantaneously. That same year, everyone correctly perceived popular Arab Spring upheavals in countries such as Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen and Bahrain as being organic with widespread popular support. The “NATO liberation” war for regime change in Libya began to alter that impression. The principal reason for regime change in Tripoli was the massive Western military intervention. Of course, that didn’t necessarily suggest that Muammar Gaddafi was loved by all Libyans.
If Libya compelled analysts to question the nature of anti-government protests — whether they are primarily an internal phenomenon or externally driven — then the demonstrations in Syria became fair game for much closer scrutiny. Many Syrians took great offence at basically being considered as little more than the cronies of foreign powers. And other Syrians were outraged that the perception that the “moderate rebels” offered no decent alternative to regime of Bashar Al-Assad necessarily translated into the former being implicated as Assadists.
A few years later, however, even those who argued vociferously that what had begun in Syria in 2011 was a “people’s revolution”, now became rather reticent and, if hard pressed, would concede that the initial anti-Assad protests had morphed into a proxy war fuelled by outside powers. The debate about the character of the Syrian “revolt” had definitively ended.
In Bangladesh now, it is critical to note how the pacification and co-optation of the popular uprising has already been set in motion, symbolised by the appointment of Nobel Peace Laureate Dr Muhammad Yunus, the neo-liberal of “microcredit” fame, as the transitional leader of the country. However, it is also imperative to acknowledge that Yunus is personally not considered to be one of the more viciously despised puppets installed by foreign and domestic elites, a fact that even sections of the global Left will concede. It is absurd to claim that he is akin to Western-backed clowns such as Juan Guaido and Ahmed Chalabi in Venezuela and Iraq respectively.
And that is precisely what makes him so attractive to the powerful.
The claim that Yunus is especially supported by the US foreign policy establishment in order to take a stab at its close ally, India, may contain a great deal of truth. He has not been beloved of Indian elites who resented his ceaseless denunciations of Hasina’s increasingly undemocratic turn. He has insisted on a healthier political environment permitting all opposition forces to be heard and to contest in free and fair elections. There was nothing inherently anti-Indian in what Yunus said, but Washington knows that his elevation to the highest offices of power will send a stern message to New Delhi: get back in line as a US ally that serves American geopolitical objectives.
So far, there is no mass protest against Yunus’s appointment. Again, that’s what probably makes him a good choice.
I am reminded of the audacious imperial comment by America’s former UN ambassador and national security adviser, John Bolton, that undertaking coups requires “brilliant” minds, the kind of superior intellect that, presumably, he thinks he possesses. Although his neo-colonial bravado is truly heinous, Bolton may have a point in highlighting the sadistically evil “brains” required to carry out effective regime change, even though his own putative cognitive prowess failed in Venezuela.
The change of regime in Bangladesh does not appear to have required any foreign “brains” behind it as such, but this is now certainly front and centre in the minds of state apparatchiks of the so-called Great Powers.
We will have to wait and see the direction that the Bangladeshi uprising will take or be taken. The champions of the ouster of Sheikh Hasina have no illusions about the possibilities of a “counter-revolution” engineered by outside agencies and from within Bangladesh. This is conveyed repeatedly in the ubiquitous commentary expressing both trepidation and calls for prayers that the removal of Hasina from power ushers in a much more desirable political and economic dispensation. It seems like siding with this yearning is more ethical than immediately invoking the tired “nothing is going to change” cliché employed by habitual cynics always keen on discrediting any movement for social change that is barely in its incipient phase. Those legitimate fears, prayers and yearnings should be vocalised persistently and emphatically in this pivotal period in Bangladesh’s history.
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