Author: Hiranmay Karlekar
Publication: The Pioneer
Date: September 14, 2006
Several developments during the last three weeks indicate that Bangladesh's present coalition Government, led by the Bangladesh Nationalist Party but dominated by the Jamaat-e-Islami Bangladesh (JeIB), is bent upon winning the forthcoming general election in the country by fair means or foul. These also indicate that the process of the country's talibanisation will take a quantum leap if its effort succeeds. The implications of all this for India, which is increasingly at the receiving end of Bangladesh-sponsored terrorism, need hardly be overemphasised.
The first of these developments occurred on August 21, exactly two years after the infamous grenade attack on the Awami League's rally in Dhaka, which left 21 dead and over 200 wounded, and which clearly had the aim of wiping out the entire top leadership of the Awami League. Sheikh Hasina escaped by a whisker. On August 21, 2006, Prime Minister Khaleda Zia announced her Government's decision to treat Dawra degrees of quomi madarsas as being equivalent to master's degrees in Islamic studies or Arabic literature of the mainstream education system.
Begum Zia, who was addressing a conference of Islamic thinkers and teachers of quomi madarsas, said that she had asked for the constitution of a committee to frame the necessary rules and make the required institutional changes to implement the decision. That her statement, which was clearly aimed at wooing Islamist elements with the forthcoming election in mind, had served its purpose was clear from the reaction of the Islami Oikya Jote (IOJ) chairman, Mufti Fazlul Huq Amini MP, whose name has featured is on the advisory board of the Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami Bangladesh (HUJIB), and who was present at the gathering. He called it a "historic announcement" and expressed his happiness over it. He expressed the hope that BNP and the four-party alliance would "again come to power with a big margin of vote".
Begum Zia's statement, however, indicated not only an attempt to win the votes of Bangladesh's growing fundamentalist Islamist segment, but also her determination to press ahead with her Government's efforts to talibanise Bangladesh reflected, among other things, in the rapid growth of madarsas under official patronage since her Government which includes the JeIB and the IOJ as coalition partners, came to power in 2001. According to a report by Rejaul Karim Byron and Shameed Mahmud in The Daily Star (Internet edition) of August 4, 2005, Bangladesh Economic Review statistics revealed that the number of general educational institutions which received Government funds increased by 9.74 per cent, and the number of madarsas by 22.22 per cent, from 2001 to 2005. On the other hand, during the first four years of the Awami League rule stretching from 1996 to 2001, the number of general educational institutions rose by 28 per cent and that of madarsas by 17 per cent.
The quomi or private madarsas, over which the Government has no control, and which mostly receive their funds from West Asia, have been the main suppliers of recruits to Islamist terrorist organisations like the HUJIB, Jama'atul Mujaheedin Bangladesh (JMB) and Jagrata Muslim Janata Bangladesh (JMJB). The Daily Star report quoted Abdul Jabbar, secretary general of Bangladesh Quomi Madarsa Education Board, a private body, as saying that they have a list of about 15,000 such institutions besides not enlisted with the board.
Significantly, the decision on the Dawra degree of these madarsas comes at a time when fundamentalist Islamist organisations have redoubled their violent offensive against opposition leaders, intellectuals and secular bodies. On August 24, three days after her announcement, leaders of the Islami Chhatra Shibir (ICS), the violent student wing of the JeIB, at Rajshahi University campus, threatened the noted scholar and writer, Prof Hasan Azizul Huq, with death for his speech on education and secularism at a seminar on August 21. At a campus rally, they branded him as a nastik (atheist) and an enemy of Islam and declared that would have to die like Prof Humayun Azad (a celebrated scholar and writer who was stabbed by Islamist fundamentalist on February 27, 2004, and died in August that year) or flee the country like Taslima Nasreen.
The threat deserves special attention in the context of the murder of two distinguished academics of Rajshahi University, Professor Mohammad Yunus and Prof S Taher Ahmed in which leaders of the ICS have featured as accused. Prof Yunus, who was killed on December 24 while on his morning walk, and Prof Ahmed, whose body was found on February 3, 2006, were murdered close to the holding of election to the Rajshahi University Teachers Association.
While ICS leaders are killing and intimidating writers and intellectuals, the police are targeting Opposition leaders. On September 6, they singled out Mr Saber Hossain Chowdhury, Ms Sheikh Hasina's political secretary, for a brutal assault while foiling, with savage force, the 14-party Opposition alliance's attempt to besiege the Bangladesh Election Commission's secretariat in Dhaka. Mr Hossain was kicked and beaten repeatedly with sticks until he fell unconscious. With his kidney, gall bladder and lungs damaged, he was removed to Gleneagles Hospital at Singapore where doctors said he might have suffered critical head injuries. On September 12, the police singled out former Home Minister Mohammad Nasim and Awami League MP Asaduzzaman Noor for similar brutal beating.
Since there could be no doubt about their identity, it was widely alleged that police had sought, at the instance of their political bosses, to kill the three leaders. What seems to have lent credence to such an allegation is the total nature of the Government's offensive, which has also targeted Proshika, an NGO serving lakhs of rural poor. A nation-wide crackdown on September 10, involving the arrest of over a hundred of its personnel, completely paralysed its operations. The unofficially whispered defence was that Proshika was preparing to send a large number of people to Dhaka to participate in the Opposition alliance's programme of besieging the Prime Minister's Office
In an editorial on September 12, The Daily Star said that the crackdown "not only demonstrates a highhanded attitude of the administration it would also send a very wrong signal to the NGOs and the outside world in general". Worse, the crackdown on the Proshika and attacks on other NGOs, the bete noir of the Islamist fundamentalists, because of their role in women's upliftment and spreading liberal values, indicate that Bangladesh's existence as a moderate Islamic country will be at stake if the BNP and its allies return to power. It is time India gave serious thought to devising a strategy for coping with such an eventuality which will seriously affect its own security.