For those who joined the 2024 unrest to herald a new dawn, the outcome seems to have thrown Muslim-majority Bangladesh from a frying pan into a raging fire
On February 5, a mob of Islamist radicals from the Hizb-ut-Tahrir and the Islami Chatra Shibir vandalised and set on fire the Bangabandhu Memorial Museum at Dhanmondi in Dhaka. This is where Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, who led Bangladesh's struggle for independence, lived until he was assassinated with much of his family in a murderous coup on August 15, 1975.
Popular as 'Bangabandhu ' (friend of Bengalis), Mujib's legacy was synonymous with the spirit of the 1971 Liberation War. The large-hearted leader had told officials engaged in rehabilitating the tens of thousands of Bengali women raped by Pakistani soldiers that if none owned them up, he would be a father to them and their permanent address would be 32, Dhanmondi.
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Fresh attack
This museum had been vandalised on August 5 last year, immediately after the ouster of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina (one of two surviving children of Mujib). But the fresh attack on Wednesday followed the announcement of a programme of political agitation by Hasina, now in exile in India, during February, a month of enormous emotional significance due to the 1952 Bengali language movement.
Bur there is no way the attack at Dhanmondi can be mistaken as a sporadic affair or an angry reaction to Hasina's speech.
On the same day, houses of the extended Sheikh family were demolished using bulldozers in Khulna and Barisal. The houses of six senior Awami League leaders like Liberation War heroes Tofail Ahmed and Amir Hussain Amu were vandalised and torched in southern Bangladesh.
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Continued violence
The violence continued on Thursday, when mobs attacked the houses of Awami League general secretary Obaidul Quader and former junior foreign minister Shariar Alam.
If that was not enough, mobs chanting Nara-e-Takbir (an Urdu song often sung in praise of Allah) attacked universities and cultural centres in seven places across the country to destroy murals of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. Hasnat Abdullah, a key figure in the agitation that ousted Sheikh Hasina and believed to be close to interim government chief and Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus, justified these attacks as meant to erase “tombs of fascism".
Hasnat had earlier threatened the media, saying if it gave space to Sheikh Hasina's speech, it would amount to facilitating her agenda.
Free Jail Movement
The day before these orchestrated attacks, Islamist radicals marched to the Kasimpur prison under the leadership of Ataur Rahman Bikrompuri, heading a so-called Free Jail Movement.
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They gheraoed the jail warden and forced him to release a convicted Islamist terrorist, Mohibullah. Bikrompuri has led similar successful marches before to free convicted Islamists from prisons.
Since the ouster of the Hasina government, the interim government has allowed such mobs a free run across the country. Some allege that they have been systematically used to force the resignation of anyone considered close to the Hasina regime — from Supreme Court judges to senior bureaucrats to those heading educational institutions.
Mobs on the streets
The mobs, often armed with sharp weapons, have attacked police stations, Hindu and Buddhist temples, Sufi shrines and Christian churches, media offices and party offices of the ousted Awami League.
Such is the frequency of these attacks that commentators have started describing Yunus-ruled Bangladesh as 'Vandaldesh', where mob justice has become the order of the day.
The demoralised police and the cautious army have stood by as spectators. Many see a calculated design in perpetuating this mobocracy to sustain the interim government, for which there is no provision anyway in the Bangladesh constitution.
No election in sight
Neither Yunus nor the Islamist groups like the Jamaat-e-Islami want an early election to parliament. They fear that a free and fair election would help the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) to ride to power and the Awami League to stage a comeback, at least as a leading opposition party, using the groundswell of popular disenchantment with the regime.
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The pitch for reforms Yunus wants to bring about is seen by some as an excuse to delay the elections and by others as downright illegal because any fundamental change to the existing polity requires a popular mandate. While Yunus and his 'students brigade' lambasted Hasina for rigging elections, they have found a way to stay in power without having to face any election.
Frying pan to fire
Hasina was blamed for using the state apparatus to silence opponents and detractors. Yunus and his cohorts are using the mobs to silence detractors and terrorise them into submission.
For Bangladeshis who joined the 2024 unrest hoping to herald a new dawn, the outcome has thrown the overwhelmingly Muslim country from a frying pan into a raging fire.,,
Under Hasina, at least there was a government in place. Now there seems to be none.
