Bangabandhu and BAKSAL in Perspective

18 August 2024

Although the whole Bengali nation was directly assaulted by the marauding
Pakistani army junta, the killers and collaborators found a new lease of
life because of Awami League’s serious flaw in governing a newly emerged
country. The enemies of Bangladesh liberation got a propaganda victory by
saying, “Oh, those were the good old days of Pakistani raj.” The process of national amnesia of Bangladeshis started. And when on August 15, 1975, the
Pakistani evil force succeeded in toppling a government of its disliking,
hardly anybody noticed the sinister design, though.

The blueprint of 1975’s tragedy did not start on a single day. While Bangabandhu was overconfident about his safety and security, he was
presumably not fully aware that his tilting toward the Soviet bloc resulted in a
renewed alignment of the Pakistani-Saudi-US Axis. Pakistanis and Saudis were
hostile to the nascent republic during all these years of Awami League rule.
It was hardly surprising that quite a few Bangladeshi Jamat-i-Islami 
leaders, hounded for their heinous war criminal roles during the war of
liberation would find sanctuary in both of these countries.

Even after the liberation of Bangladesh, the US did not detach itself from the
Nixon doctrine of the 1971 period. Soviet leader Brezhnev’s continuous harping
of “Asian Collective Security” was a real challenge to US policymakers.
Thus, the old bedfellows of 1971 reconnected among themselves with a mission
to nip in the bud the prospect of encountering another Fidel Castro in South
Asia. It goes without saying that the "Fidel Castro" was nobody but Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman.

Although the architects of BAKSAL or the Bangladesh Krishak Sramik Awami League
 dreamed of redefining the political landscape of Bangladesh in the socialistic
model, one important thing they totally ignored. True implementation of socialism may achieve some results with a dedicated cadre who could take the
bold steps of coming out of a petty-bourgeois mindset.

Awami Leaguers at the grassroots level had a middle-class affinity.
Traditional Awami League politics taught them anything but socialistic
values. Moreover, during the two years after liberation, many of the party
workers in rural areas to urban centers got the taste of “easy money” with
corrupt practices. It was not realistic to expect to reach a socialistic
goal with such misguided party cadres.

Nonetheless, the formation of BAKSAL antagonized a number of political forces in
Bangladesh. They were as follows:

1. A coterie of the Awami League right-wingers who were sympathetic to the US-Pakistan Axis during the war of liberation. Many of them indeed believed in multiparty democracy. But the way BAKSAL was formed made them
apprehensive of the rising tide of Soviet lobby in Awami League itself.
Among these factions, a fringe group was determined to reverse the process
even if that needed to eliminate the Bangabandhu from the picture.

2. True democrats in Bangladesh were devastated by the suspension of
all political activities and the formation of a single-party entity. They
believed in democratic pluralism but as champions of morality, they could not
think of supporting bloody toppling of the new political formation or siding
with the Pakistani lobby. Their ultimate motto was to wait and see.

3. A group of Bangladeshi army officials who did not abandon the old values
of Pakistan were pro-Westernism and Islamism mixed in a platter which would
be combative to global communism, especially of Soviet variety. Multi-party democracy or democratic pluralism was not their cup of tea as the great majority
of them were groomed under Pakistani military dictators like Ayub Khan or Yahya Khan. They were alarmed at the possibility of the emergence of Soviet-style socialism in Bangladesh and they were ready to stop the process at any
cost even if it resulted in bloodshed.

Aside from this group, there were other army officials who had become
disgruntled with Awami League’s continued policy of benign neglect of
cantonment and emphasis on Rakkhi Bahini. The grievance of the latter group
gave the former enough strategic inspiration to change the course of
 history.

4. The defeated forces of Bangladesh, i.e., The Fifth Columnists. They
included all the Islamist parties like the Muslim League, PDP, Jamat-i-Islami,
Nezam-I-Islami, etc. And also the auxiliary forces of the Pakistani Army,
namely, the former members of Razakar, Al Badr, and Al-Shams. It is true that
many of these elements saved their skins because of the nepotism policy of
Awami Leaguers. But they perceived Awami League to be their eternal enemy
and blamed the party for their ill fate. They realized that if BAKSAL got
full control of the country, they could never make the situation favorable
to their ideology.

5. Pro-Chinese political parties and ultra-left parties scattered around the
country. Many of these party members openly sided with the Pakistani Army and
were adversaries of freedom fighters. After the country became independent,
some of those ultra-leftists went underground and were active in secret
killings of Awami Leaguers. For them, Pakistani-influenced politics was far better than Soviet-influenced BKSAL. As a
significant portion of those ultra-leftists believed in the bloodshed,
inevitably they were in favor of a bloody ouster of the BAKSAL regime.

6. Last but not least, the formidable enemy of Awami League, namely,
Jatiya Samajtantrik Dal. This party was getting enough clout in educational
institutions across the nation. At the village level its underground fronts,
namely, Gono Bahini and Bangladesher Communist League were gathering
experience in killing Awami Leaguers and confronting Rakkhi Bahini. Although
JSD was a proponent of “Scientific socialism” whatever it meant, it was not
thrilled to see a left-wing metamorphosis of Awami League. This party was
ready to push the country to a bloody civil war with the clear ambition of
eliminating the Awami League from political power.

Some critics of BAKSAL often give the reasoning that a one-party system would
wreak havoc in Bangladesh as it was against democratic pluralism. The fact
is after the liberation, Bangladesh faced immense difficulty in building
democratic institutions. Already the legacy of Pakistan under successive
military regimes of Ayub and Yahya kept the Bengalis in the dark about the
essence of democratic values for more than a decade.

Not only that, prior to Ayub Khan’s ascension to power, a few palace cliques
and intrigues deprived the Bengali masses of being active partners in the
political process. It is also noteworthy that after liberation, because of
the Awami League’s absolute majority representation in a national parliament,
the voice of dissent was not a common scenario. The parliament became almost a
rubber stamp institution. And Awami League hooligans’ muscle power and their
regular clash with the rival parties’ muscle men was nothing close to a test
case of democratic pluralism.

Most newspapers decided not to rock the boat for fear of reprisals. They showed a symptom of subtle appeasement of the ruling party. Probably the only
paper, Haq Katha, a tabloid of the National Awami Party (Bhashani) was
staunchly critical of Awami League and its party members. So, when BKSAL was
formed, the average citizens did not miss much. After all, pre-BAKSAL Bangladesh was not the epitome of democracy, as some critics would like to
argue.

Expecting democratic pluralism on the basis of simply a multi-party system is
not always pragmatic. The Institutional Revolution Party of Mexico (PRI)
ruled that country for more than seventy years. The ruling party made sure
winning in the election was guaranteed for decades. There was corruption at
the highest level; there was drug trafficking and secret killing. The people
were living in a less than civil society and the ruling elites amassed
amazing wealth.

During PRI’s draconian rule, how the election in that US’s neighbor was
stolen is now an open secret. The PRI oligarchy was prudent enough not to
antagonize the northern neighbor so the continuity of rule went unabated.
Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines and General Suharto of Indonesia ruled
their countries with an iron grip. Both the authoritarian leaders appeased
Western allies so that a constant cash flow could be secured.

The urban middle class was typically not very unhappy with this arrangement. These
"less than democratic" rulers ruled their respective countries for years to
come hardly facing serious challenges at home and abroad. The ousted
President Alberto Fujimori of Peru showed the world how autocracy thrived in
a multi-party democracy. The record of Fujimori may pale to many authoritarian
rulers’ misdeeds all around the world.

During the time of the Cold War, U.S. administrations supported a number of
right-wing military dictators in Latin and Central America. From
Paraguay to Chile, Argentina to Brazil, Nicaragua to El Salvador, and Uruguay to
Guatemala, the countries were shadowed by unsavory regimes.

There were numerous instances of human rights violations while most of the
regimes were corrupt to the teeth. Death squads were formed to suppress
political dissidents. Civilians accused of being sympathizers of left
politics disappeared in the middle of the night. Death squads acting like
the Nazi German Gestapo or East German Stassi were active in their evil
designs. Today’s unclassified documents in archives around the globe show horrific evidence of the dark days of the Cold War.

These documents are enough to disclose that some democratic nations do
not always promote democracy. In Bangladesh, in the post-1975 time, two
successive military rulers with western and Islamist leanings proved that
an infusion of hard cash could make miracles. With a relatively satisfied urban
middle class, the iron men from the barracks played Houdini with ease. Both
the right-wing military dictators ostracized Bangabandhu and the concept of
 BAKSAL as vestiges of totalitarianism. They acted as if they were the
ultimate saviors of Western-style democracy.

In reality, they had an iron grip in all matters of state power that included
executive and judiciary bodies. During the election, their manipulative acts
gave them startling results of 80 to 90 percent support, which is rare in
pluralistic democracy. They made sure they would not be ousted by ballot
forever. Because of their commitment to thwarting Soviet influence in this
South Asian nation, the Bangladeshi military dictators obtained significant
support from not only the proponents of western democracy but also from
theocratic regimes such as the Hashimite Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.