Contemporary Bangladesh has no dearth of communalist crooks and thugs. The most vicious of them all who evokes instant hatred and horror at the very mention of his name is Salauddin Qader Chaudhury. A Bangladesh Nationalist Party MP and Adviser on parliamentary affairs to the incumbent Prime Minister Begum Khaleda Zia, for the people of Bangladesh this man is evil personified, stalking a large swathe of Chittagong district and doing or undoing whatever pleases him or whatever he perceives as serving his personal interest and political agenda.
Salauddin defies all canons and constraints of law and morality. His steady rise in parliamentary politics rests squarely on the skillful exercise of his devious electioneering controls and his ability to manipulate and intimidate voters and the administration alike. No politician or political party has dared to challenge his ever-expanding terror networks and arm-twisting terror tactics.
Like their father late Fazlul Qader Chaudhury, Salauddin and his equally redoubtable sibling Gias Qader are wholly and irrevocably sold out to Pakistan. The blood-curdling horrors that the father-and-sons trio had perpetrated in conjunction with the marauding Pakistani army during the liberation war in 1971 are forever etched in the public mind.
The Bangladesh Liberation War Documents and a report by the people's commission appointed by the Committee for Elimination of the Killers and Collaborators of 1971 describe in horrifying details some of the brutalities Salauddin had gratuitously committed against freedom fighters in Chittagong district. These include the gruesome killing of 71-year-old principal Nutan Chandra Singha, and assassination of Farooq, a student leader and Dayalhari Biswas, another college student.
Soon after the liberation of Bangladesh, Salauddin and his father were arrested when they were about to flee to Pakistan with a maund of gold. Following a brief detention, they were let off under the general amnesty declared by the Sheikh Mujib government. Salauddin has thrived ever since on numerous heinous crimes. Killing and maiming of political opponents are his favourite pastimes.
The assassination of Gnyanajyoti Bhikshu of the Raujan Buddhist monastery by the Aziz Bahini, Saluddin's private army of terrorists, last year is one of the most horrendous crimes against religious minorities in Bangladesh in recent times. Salauddin sheltered the main assassin Aziz in his own house and arranged his safe escape to the Middle East.
Salauddin Qader Chaudhury lets go no pretext to spit venom against India to arouse communal passions against religious minorities. He is invariably involved in every act of Hindu-cleansing in Raujan upazilla and Chittagong metropolitan areas.
It's an open secret that Salauddin has made a huge fortune through his close links with the criminal underworld and smuggling networks operating in the Chittagong port and coastal belt. Despite his pathological hatred for India, in 1991, he made a frantic bid for the GSA of the Indian Airlines and Air India. His failure to clinch that lucrative deal only sharpened his enmity towards India.
Originally a diehard Muslim Leaguer, Salauddin served as a Cabinet minister in the late Eighties in the Cabinet of Gen. Ershad. He joined the BNP just before the parliamentary election in 2001. His machinations ensured the defeat of the BNP candidate and freedom fighter Col. (Retd.) Oli Ahmed to the unofficial Jamaat candidate Shajahan Chaudhury. Despite this treachery, Begum Zia appointed him her adviser on parliamentary affairs solely for the purpose of using his unending mischief potential against the Awami League. Salauddin has been doing this task most effectively, making it impossible for the opposition Awami League to function in the Parliament.
Despite this un-edifying profile of the man, the BNP-Jamaat government has nominated Salauddin as its candidate for the post of Secretary General of the Organisation of Islamic Countries. This has triggered an avalanche of protests throughout the country. For his part, Salauddin has launched a fierce counter-offensive against his detractors. He has filed two defamation cases against the editors of two respected dailies of Dhaka for publishing criticisms of his nomination.
The Bangladesh intelligentsia has no doubt at all that the Khaleda government has nominated this war criminal for the OIC assignment at the instance of Islamabad in the hope that, should he scrape through, it would enormously increase the leverage of the Pakistan-Bangladesh axis in the Islamic world that can be used, among other things, to discomfit and disturb India.
It is for the OIC member states to decide if a man of Salauddin's character and credentials should become the Organisation's chief executive. India has no locus standi in the matter, but two developments in this context merit comments.
Last month, Salauddin devoted his 50-minute budget speech in the parliament entirely to calumniating the Awami League, calling the opposition leader Sheikh Hasina as bua (housemaid). What is worse, comparing Sheikh Mujib with the Ulfa leader Anup Chetia, he asserted in the presence of Prime Minister Begum Zia: "Chetia continued to speak for the independence of his country from the prison in Bangladesh, but during his detention in Pakistan Sheikh Mujib had said that he did not want independence and preferred an undivided Pakistan", adding: "Unlike Chetia, Mujib did not have the courage for independence." By eulogising Anup Chetia the aspirant for the post of OIC General Secretary unwittingly called the bluff in Dhaka's insistent disclaimer that it has nothing to do with the cross-border terrorism in north-east India.
In another significant development, Tareq Rehman, Begum Zia's son and heir-apparent, has "conveyed" to an Indian diplomat in Dhaka that the real reason for nominating Salauddin Qader Chaudhury for the OIC assignment is to "ease him out of the country" and "that's all to India' s advantage." The diplomat readily fell for the dope and approvingly reported his "intelligence coup" to New Delhi. A less naïve officer, with a touch of professionalism, in his place would have seen through the game and advised his headquarters that by nominating Salauddin for the top OIC job the BNP-Jamaat dispensation had only exposed its true colours. He would have pointed out how his predecessor, under a spell of the same Young Turk, and, in league with his boss back home, had messed up India's time-tested policy priorities in Bangladesh, causing irreparable damage to Indo-Bangla relations.
Clearly, a small coterie of researchers and analysts continue to dupe a clueless government into complacency about Dhaka's ever sharpening anti-India agenda. Is there no way to hold them to account?
(The writer is former Additional
Secretary, Research and Analysis Wing, Cabinet Secretariat, retired Director
General, Indo-Tibetan Border Police and former National Security Adviser,
Government of Mauritius)