Author: Sunanda K Datta-Ray
Publication: The Pioneer
Date: March 13, 2009
URL: http://www.dailypioneer.com/162146/Islamic-Right-plotted-mutiny.html
In those agonising weeks of Bangladesh's bloody
birth, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto observed that if 'Muslim Bangla' was seceding because
of language, it should logically merge with West Bengal. But if it felt more
Muslim than Bangla, it should remain in Pakistan.
Many Bangladeshi Muslims (nearly 90 per cent of the 154 million population)
have not been able to resolve that dilemma in 38 years of sovereign existence.
It is a continuation of the complex that prompted Mian Mumtaz Daultana, a
Muslim League politician of aristocratic Rajput descent who became Chief Minister
of Pakistani Punjab in 1951, to confess that a Muslim in pre-independence
India "did not really quite know whether he was basically a Muslim or
an Indian".
Problems of identity, underlying explosions
like the Bangladesh Rifles' February 25 rampage, transform law and order problems
into a major political challenge to everything that Prime Minister Hasina
Wajed and her Awami League represent. New Delhi was being strictly formal
when it described the turmoil as "an exclusively internal matter".
But almost everything that happens in Bangladesh has an external dimension,
as confirmed by Dhaka Press reports accusing India's Border Security Force
of exploiting the crisis. Mr Pranab Mukherjee's guarded utterances, confirming
the complexity of India-Bangladesh relations, justified India not joining
Scotland Yard and the FBI in probing the mutiny.
In a seminal address to the Dhaka (then still
Dacca) Rotary Club nearly 30 years ago, India's then High Commissioner, Mr
Muchkund Dubey, hit the nail on the head. "To a very great extent, our
problems are psychological," he said. "This psychology is derived
from our common past. At times it is also due to what one can call small neighbour-big
neighbour syndrome." He might have added that the Bangladeshi elite's
perception of West Bengal and Kolkata compounds the complex.
Mr IK Gujral had the same ambivalence in mind
when he advised Sheikh Hasina Wajed in her previous incarnation as Prime Minister
to sell gas to India through an American consortium. Its commission would
be a small price for freedom from 'political pressures', like some Indians
wanted the Kolkata-Dhaka-Kolkata Moitree Express discontinued because the
Harkat-ul-Jihad-ul-Islam, suspected of being behind the Hyderabad bombing,
was believed to operate from Bangladesh.
Geography reinforces psychology. Being surrounded
by Indian territory on three sides induces a siege mentality and gives half-a-dozen
Indian States a stake in Bangladesh's stability. The 4,400-km land border
also encourages hundreds of thousands of illegal migrants - mainly Muslim
economic refugees - who are responsible for demographic change in West Bengal's
sensitive border districts, as well as in Assam and other North-Eastern States.
Ideally, strong cultural links, economic inter-dependence,
shared inland water resources and overlapping maritime claims should make
for close cooperation and even an open or soft border. That was the lost hope
of liberation under Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. A friendly Bangladesh can still
activate river, road and rail traffic to facilitate communication with North-Eastern
States that are politically, economically and strategically vital for India.
An unfriendly Bangladesh can compound India's
problems there with armed secessionists, as Mr Hafizur Rahman's confession
about the clandestine arms consignment seized in Chittagong in April 2004
proved. Bangladesh can also abort India's search for energy in Burma. At the
same time, Bangladesh cannot interact with landlocked Nepal and Bhutan except
through Indian territory.
Closer ties with India are precisely what
Bangladeshis who are uncertain of their identity fear most. They opposed liberation,
plotted Mujib's elimination and are now afraid of Sheikh Hasina Wajed's call
for a South Asian anti-terror task force and her election promise to punish
the 1971 'war criminals' which the Jatiyo Sansad has unanimously ratified.
The Jamaat-e-Islami, which was a coalition partner of Begum Khaleda Zia's
Bangladesh National Party and is suspected of being close to Pakistan's Inter-Services
Intelligence, is understandably concerned.
That also explains Pakistan's President Asif
Ali Zardari sending a special envoy, Mirza Zia Ispahani, scion of a prominent
Calcutta political family that migrated to Pakistan, to Dhaka on a five-day
visit just before the mutiny to persuade Sheikh Hasina Wajed to abandon the
move. While Ministers, MPs and the Sansad Speaker objected to his intervention,
the most vehement criticism was by the Workers Party MP, Mr Rashed Khan Menon,
a member of a leading Pakistani-Bangladeshi family. He is anathema to the
Islamic Right which resents his leftist politics as much as his aversion to
beef, and predictably identifies him with Hindus and India.
True, the mutiny's immediate and more specific
reasons had nothing to do with India. The BDR men complain of pay and perquisites
and resent the Army monopolising United Nations peace-keeping assignments
carrying monthly wages of $ 1,100 or 75,680 Bangladeshi takas. But these alone
may not have precipitated a coordinated massacre in Dhaka's Pilkhana barracks
with simultaneous revolts in Rajshahi, Satkhira and Teknaf without a powerful
emotional motivation. Sheikh Hasina Wajed speaks of "a wider conspiracy"
and blames a "plot by a section of conspirators". Her Local Government
Minister, Mr Jehangir Kabir Nanak, says "millions of takas" were
spent on fomenting the revolt. Bombed bridges and road ambushes bear out the
Government's charge that it was "pre-planned". There is evidence
of truckloads of armed strangers in BDR uniform in Pilkhana.
The mutineers cannot have expected to achieve
better employment terms by slaughtering their officers, including the commandant,
Maj-Gen Shakil Ahmed, and his wife. Perhaps, agents provocateur hoped to provoke
the 67,000 BDR men and the 250,000-strong Army into massacring each other
in a repetition of the horrors of 1971. Perhaps they convinced the mutineers
that sections of the Army would join their revolt. Either way, but for Sheikh
Hasina Wajed's swift and decisive actions, the Government would have been
swept away in an anarchic torrent leaving the field open for other forces
to seize control.
That might explain not only the mystery surrounding
the mutiny but also reports that the Jamaat indoctrinated many new Army and
BDR recruits. The Islamic Right cannot have been pleased when Gen Shakil succeeded
in healing the anger the Indian authorities had nursed ever since the BDR
killed 16 BSF jawans at Boraibari in Assam in 2001. Nor when Gen Moeen U Ahmed,
the Army chief, buried another hatchet with a well-publicised visit to India.
A period of harmonious partnership seemed to lie ahead. That was - and is
- intolerable for those Bangladeshis for whom 'Muslim' will always take precedence
over 'Bangla'.
- sunandadr@yahoo.co.in
