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Shameful exit of ‘Lady Hasinabeth’ 

Published : Friday, 9 August, 2024 at 12:00 AM  Count : 1112
Shahriar Feroze
Taking a flash-back of the dramatic events to have unfolded and forced Ms Sheikh Hasina to resign and unexpectedly flee the country, and that too in less than an hour amid countrywide carnage and chaos suddenly reminded this writer of that epic saying from Shakespeare's Lady Macbeth.  

"To beguile the time, / Look like the time. Bear welcome in your eye, / Your hand, your tongue. Look like th' innocent flower, / But be the serpent under't."

The questions, however, a serpent or not why and what went so horribly wrong for Ms Hasina in the past two months that she had to embrace such a humiliating political fate? Was she truly a serpent hiding underneath the facade of a politician beguiling time, and her people? How had she become so perilously disconnected from our youngsters, failing to read their sentiments?

However, reflecting back to June 5, the day a High Court ruling cancelled a previous notification on Government Job Quota, Dhaka University students took to the streets demonstrating peaceful protests. The protests largely remained peaceful for over a month. Gradually, students of other public universities joined in. 

While the movement was gathering nationwide momentum, the former PM went to a state visit to China. She manifestly returned home empty handed and even a day earlier planned in her schedule. Situation got even worse while responding to quota related questions at the media press conference.   

By 10 July she practically turned university students as her ideological opponents and the rest is another dark chapter which do not require any further explanation.

Next to that, Ms Hasina began to commit one after another blunder through a range of aggressive and provocative statements, apply brute police force to suppress the protesters, crush political dissent, deploy and attack protestors with Awami League's Gestapo-like youth organisation, insult the students' community as anti-liberation collaborators, and at one point she painted the movement with colours of radicalism and extremism. Subsequently, hundreds were shot dead, thousands were admitted at hospitals with critical bullet injuries, and thousands of student demonstrators were incarcerated based on false charges, and needless to mention public and private properties worth millions of dollars were burnt to ashes.

Questions automatically arise - weren't it possible to avoid or avert countrywide mayhem, carnage, destruction of public properties? Why could she miserably fail to deal with the students? And, a crucial question that many would not want to ask at hindsight - whether she had been intentionally and continuously misled, misguided and misinformed on ground realities by her close & cosy coterie of advisors. 

The former prime minister was often regarded as an astute, shrewd, calculative politician and diplomat both at home and abroad - whether one approves of it or not - she has undeniably proved her positive and sinister capabilities in the last 15 years or so. If not, why had we as a people chose to endure and tolerate her regime?

Let's imagine this scenario, the beleaguered PM sat with all movement co-coordinators in private, even after the bloodbath of 19 July, took practical stock of ground realities, refrained from targeting and arresting students by unleashing beastly police and goon force. Publicly address the nation by condoling and condemning losses of lives and property. In addition, assure the students of sincere and prompt investigation into the killings and get it started.

She took some of the actions but on the wrong time. She had addressed the nation by delivering robotic and empty speeches, badly failing to win people's confidence.

I often asked many around me, who drafted her unrealistic scripts full of political polemics, impractical reading of the crisis, excessive emotions and devoid of any true message.

It is perhaps during their last days when all authoritarian rulers deliberately start to deny reality and prioritise power over everything. 

To cut a long story short - she could have got regularly engaged with the student coordinators through one-to-one dialogues, de-escalate the fomenting movement. Tackle the entire crisis in a sincere and politically pragmatic manner. All said and done - she perhaps would have been sleeping in her comfy Ganabhaban bed tonight, and not in some foreign air force base. 

What she did instead was simply unthinkable, announce nationwide curfew with help of the army by intensifying all-belligerent force. 

Once more, she was literally enacting another epic quote on dictatorial rule -  Dictators fall when they're over-confident; they stay in power when they're paranoid.  
   
As for the unprecedented and avoidable bloodshed, Ms Hasina's message has been fairly simple which echoed another epic quote from Lady Macbeth - Things without all remedy should be without regard , what's done is done.


The events reported on her last hour before fleeing the country, paints the image that of a self-centred manipulator, it is perhaps she loved to excessively repeat and re-live her post 1975 traumatic years. Whether in private or public, she could never come out of it. 

It was horrific that even in that dying hour in power she was reportedly agitated and shooting from the hip in front of the police and chiefs of three forces, blaming and ordering them to practice yet more brute force against her people.   

She had surely been in a state of paranoid triggered by her over-confidence, extreme state of denial, vanity, and hubris for sure and some may be surprised to read, her intense distrust for her party and people, strictly a personal remark.

Over the past 15 years in power, I have often admired Sheikh Hasina for her proven dictatorial decision making abilities, whether it had been a development project or manoeuvring and balancing diplomatic ties. She performed fairly well on combating militancy and extremism to initiating ambitious energy and infrastructural projects to lead Bangladesh in global climate change forums. 

An aspiring PHD student can well produce a masterpiece thesis on all the techniques she had applied to wipe-out BNP and banning Jamaat from Bangladesh's political spectrum. 

Her downfall also merits the question - why had she converted a student led movement to a deadly political opposition challenging her rule? What went so despondently wrong in the last couple of months that she was reduced from the rank of a state guest to a mere political refugee in India? Why mobs had to burn and banish almost everything linked to her father and family?

Understandably, pent-up anger against her rule was in the rise among people. All, people needed was a spark through a platform to turn their anger in a massive combined explosion. Quota Protest Movement offered it.

However, Rise and fall of Sheikh Hasina should find an exclusive place in history of dictators, focusing on how a democratically elected dictator managed to retain power through a degree of 'Bangla manipulation' in Bangladesh state and politics. 

Look for yourself, all evidences lay stark naked out there - judiciary, bureaucracy, diplomacy, Law Enforcement Agencies , Election Commission , Anti-Corruption Commission to economy, academia , banks to journalism to art and culture, sports to religion, she had practiced wild and unrestrained authority to politicize , corrupt and in the process destroy all state-institutions.

Her 15 years of rule was a marked attempt to sickly indoctrinate a nation by spoon-feeding an egotistic petty value for clinging to power - do whatever you like I am blind , but never challenge my authority to rule.   

Now that she is gone and easier to place all blames on her shoulders, all fingers except 1 is straight and sprightly pointed at us - why did we allow her to blossom and reign in on us in such dangerous manner? Why had we permitted her to institutionalise corruption in our system?

The simple answer - far too many people had also illegitimately benefitted during the time of her rule. The numbers of beneficiaries are such alarmingly high that fearing merciless backlash, swarms of them are resigning from their respective posts.

Last but never the least - her shameful exit has now placed her own party at a precarious state in domestic politics. Awami League now exists without a leadership at the helm. It now appears in the likes of an empty exclusive club without a president with all members to have ditched it. 

As for Ms Hasina, she has fast turned into a political liability for her biggest ally India. Expectedly, she will find political asylum in some country across the globe, but her self-destructive device has caused unimaginable damage to a nation.

The writer is editorial chief, The Daily Observer



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