Breaking the Binary: Arguing for a Third Alternative in Bangladesh
By Subir Bhaumik
The Chinese strategic calculus
Since 2010, Chinese influence is growing in Bangladesh. That was the time when
Beijing decided to back Bangladesh’s ruling Awami League and infiltrate the
country’s civil and military decision-making architecture at various levels. Beijing had – and still has – strong strategic compulsions to turn Bangladesh into a client state like Myanmar and Cambodia. Doing so will:
• ensure land-to-sea access to Indian Ocean bypassing the Malacca strait chokepoint. Geographically, the GangaPadma-Brahmaputra delta hosts
the shortest land route to access the sea lanes from mainland China. The British did the same calculations when they set up Kolkata (then part of undivided
Bengal) as their transshipment point to support East India Company’s opium trade with China.
• reduce India’s influence in Bangladesh which peaks when Awami League is
in power.
• use Myanmar and Bangladesh as staging points to promote separatist
elements in India’s Northeast to weaken India’s grip on the frontier region
• create a composite Chinese influence bloc (Myanmar, Northeast India,
Bangladesh) that can undermine both Indian and Western influences in
South Asia.
The Chinese strategy has been to make Awami League more dependent on Beijing and less dependent on India for political survival, and in the process turn Bangladesh into a one-party state under Awami League. In Chinese understanding, Shiekh Hasina can be engaged because she is intrinsically anti-US as she believes her father Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was killed in a coup masterminded by the US.
The Chinese are not comfortable dealing with multiple actors because they want
predictable, stable and favorable political climate to protect and promote their large infrastructure investments in Bangladesh. Moreover, they perceive a pro-US tilt in the BNP-Jamaat-e-Islami combine, rendering it an unreliable ally despite its antiIndia credentials.
Change of guard in Awami League
The Awami League in its current avatar is way different from the one that led
Bangladesh’s liberation struggle in 1971. To achieve greater control over Awami
League, the Chinese, since 2014, have systematically pushed Bangladeshi
businessmen who have trading interests with China into securing party positions
and nominations to run for public office. On one hand, China backed Hasina’s stay in power in a controversial election; on the other, it supported senior Awami
League leaders and Hasina’s family members with funds to enlist police and civil
bureaucracy’s help to rig the elections. Gradually, businessmen with dubious
antecedents moved into key positions in the party and government, squeezing out traditional, middle class, secular, pro-Indian leaders wedded to the spirit of the 1971 Liberation War .
As the countdown for the January 2024 general election begins, Bangladesh’s
descent into a one-party, one-family, one-syndicate-driven polity seems a
distressing reality. The need to act decisively to protect and preserve liberal
democracy in Bangladesh, threatened by an increasingly authoritarian Hasina
regime, has never been more pressing.
Message from Dhaka
In Bangladesh politics, the choice gets narrowed down to voting either the Awami League or the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP)-Jamaat-e-Islami (Jamaat) combine. Experiments with military-backed or civilian third alternatives, or with a presidential form of government between 1975 and 1991 and later did not yield desired results in terms of the country’s internal stability or prosperity. This has strengthened Bangladesh’s narrative of political binary: it is either Awami League led by Sheikh Hasina, or it is BNP-Jamaat combine led by Begum Khaleda Zia.
So long as Sheikh Hasina maintained her pro-liberation liberal democratic posture, making this choice was less difficult for the people of Bangladesh and their wellwishers. But Hasina’s – and Awami League’s – metamorphosis from a liberation’s child to a diva serenaded by China-backed oligarchs is a regional and global concern. In Bangladesh’s forthcoming elections, the country, its immediate
neighbors, and the world face a Hobson’s choice: it is either Hasina’s pro-Chinese
Awami League, or it is the Islamist and fundamentalist coalition of BNP-Jamaat.
To enlist pre- and post-election Indian support, Awami League – as it has done
earlier – has been raising the bogey of a free run for Islamic fundamentalists in
case a BNP-Jamaat combine came to power. During its visit to New Delhi early
August, 2023, a five-member Awami League delegation, led by Bangladesh
Agriculture Minister Mohammad Abdur Razzaque, met senior BJP leaders and
Indian ministers and reiterated that re-election of Awami League was essential to
ensure stability in the South Asia region. Bangladeshi talking points were:
• the return of BNP-Jamaat will bolster Islamic fundamentalist forces
• Bangladesh is aware of Indian sensitivities about China. China is a
development partner and not a strategic partner
• Bangladesh has not forgotten the role China and the US played in 1971 against Bangladesh’s liberation struggle.
There are two messages hidden in the Bangladeshi reiteration – that the present
Awami League would like to remain disengaged from the US side but not from the Chinese; and that the delegation chose its interlocutors carefully – Indian Foreign Minister Jaishankar and Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal – who are known to be close and credible to the US side to deliver this message to Washington.
Need to break Bangladesh’s political binary
A prominent section within the Indian strategic community believe time has
come to disregard the message from Bangladesh. First, the menace of Islamic
fundamentalism is on the decline worldwide, the place being filled up, instead, by grey conflict issues for which South Asia, including Bangladesh, is not prepared. Second, the Awami League is unequivocal about its disengagement with the US, but not so with China, who they willingly accept as “development partners.” Bangladesh, like many other South Asian and Indian Ocean Rim countries, will not be in a position manage the tipping point when China transitions from “development partner” to a “strategic partner.” This is because Awami League has already transitioned from being a Liberation War political force into an oligarchdriven power broker.
Bangladesh faces a scenario similar to other Muslim-dominated countries – like
those of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, Saddam Hussein in Iraq and Najibullah in
Afghanistan – where authoritarian regimes are replaced up by highly regimented and organized radical Islamist groups or parties, gaining legitimacy through elections. Since they win the elections through means fair and foul, the people get governments run by Mohammad Morsi-led Islamist Brotherhood or the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Bangladesh’s political binary – of supporting either Hasina or Khaleda – needs to
be broken to prevent such a scenario being repeated. Hasina’s winning the
elections will mean China’s arrival at Kolkata’s doorsteps. Khaleda’s return to
power will mean resurrection of Islamist terror groups like the JMB, HUJI and
Ansarullah Bangla who operated with impunity in Bangladesh and even carried out cross-border attacks like the one on American Center in Kolkata in 2002. Both
scenarios are detrimental to India’s national security. The US perspective is articulated by President Biden in the US National Security Strategy where he says: “We will not leave our future vulnerable to the whims of those who do not share our vision for a world that is free, open, prosperous, and secure.” To ensure US and Indian national security, as well as South Asia’s regional
security, Bangladesh’s Hasina-Khaleda binary must end.
Injection of the Third Force: Power to Bengali People
The US and India cannot afford to go against the mainstream Bengali Nationalist
opinion in Bangladesh if it intends to check Chinese influence. The US made the
mistake of backing Pakistan’s genocide in 1971 and by backing the mastermind of
the 1975 coup, or in trying to foist Nobel laureate Mohammad Yunus through a
military-backed caretaker. And the Bengali nationalist sentiment in Bangladesh is currently against Hasina.
Indian Prime Minister Modi and Bangladeshi Prime Minister Hasina have
developed a fair level of bonhomie and synergy in approach in governance and
policy making. Having won popular mandates, both have chosen to work through trusted oligarchs with vested interests, adopting policies and enacting laws that favor these interests, in the process, turning authoritarian by dismantling and neutering democratic institutions and cracking down on opposition parties and dissenting voices.
Working through oligarchs result in short-term economic benefits for crony
capitalists at the cost of the larger economy and people. Both India and Bangladesh are showing signs of income inequality, distress, shrinkage of domestic markets and dismal human development indicators even as they report satisfactory growth numbers. Over time, such stresses erode the popular mandate which, in the first place, bring such leaders to power. Both India and Bangladesh are showing these signs in the run up to their respective general elections.
China’s current effort to take Hasina and her corrupt ruling clique under its wings through funding and promising diplomatic support in UN system (use of veto etc.) to prop up the regime (like Myanmar’s military junta) can only be countered by a liberal secular nationalist platform. There is considerable level of dissatisfaction across all levels of Awami League against the pro-Chinese ruling coterie fronted by Beximco honcho Salman Rahman. This dissatisfaction is looking for a platform to vent itself out. Such a formation will split Awami League and isolate Hasina.
The road ahead
What US and India can do is to help create and sustain a pro-liberation secular
Bengali nationalist platform like Moncho Ekattor (Platform 1971) to rally all proliberational elements in political parties, including Awami League, the civil society space and the cultural milieu which shape Bangladesh’s political discourse as a legacy of the Bengali-language culture movement and its role in independence.
This platform can provide the much needed rallying point for pro-1971 Awami
Leaguers fed up with the dictatorial party leadership and similar elements in other parties, and provide an alternative to both a corrupt Awami League and an Islamist BNP-Jamaat combine. The proposed Ekattor Mancha can be mounted as a cultural revolution (to borrow from Mao Zhe Dong’s nomenclature and hence blunt any direct Chinese onslaught), adapt and deploy the tools of Bharat Jodo Yatra for engagement with people and keep the face of the movement faceless for the time being, at least till the momentum for a third alternative picks up.
From this platform, 300 candidates of high social and political standing and
wedded to the Spirit of 1971 can be funded (through NGOs working on gender
issues, human trafficking, child and maternal health, cultural initiatives etc.) and
encouraged to contest the parliament elections which can be made free and fair by bringing international pressure (UN observers etc.) and provide a government free of both Chinese and fundamentalist machinations. If and when elected, this will be a Zelensky-type authentic nationalist government.
For the US, this will act as a bulwark (along with India) against any Chinese rollover into the Bay of Bengal. India can feel safe if Hasina is replaced not by an antiIndia Islamist coalition but by a more pro-India secular nationalist dispensation. Lastly, the Western pitch for democracy in Bangladesh and its strategic objectives of combating China can also be achieved. Once the platform is launched, it will take two months to turn it into a mass movement and another two months to get it ready for electoral contest (as independents or dissidents). Once Hasina is ousted, a new pro-liberation party like the Indian Aam Aadmi party can be formed to return Bangladesh to its path of economic prosperity. Along with a strong anti-corruption plank, the platform can also uphold secularism by demanding and pushing for return to the 1972 Constitution to ensure minority and gender protection.
This third force, a logical extension of the Minus Two (oust Hasina and Zia)
strategy through political, rather than extra-constitutional means (like the militarybacked caretaker arrangement), can lead Bangladesh within the contours of a politics anchored in the values that inspired the creation of Bangladesh.
(Note: A Chinese roll-over into Bay of Bengal can also happen through Myanmar’s Arakan coast via the China-Myanmar Economic Corridor (CMEC – the eastern counterpart of CPEC in Pakistan) connecting Yunnan Province in China to the seaport city of Kyaukpyu in Rakhine State, via Mandalay. To prevent this, it is important to support groups like the Arakan Army and Chin National Army (the military wing of the Chin National Front) and make them capable of enforcing a no-fly zone over the Rakhine state and deny Myanmar forces the advantage of air operations.)
The author is a veteran journalist and author of many books on South Asia. Views are personal and International Affairs Review neither endorses nor is responsible for them,
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