By P.K.Balachandran/Sunday Observer
Colombo, November 3: After 15 years of Sheikh Hasina’s highhanded rule, Bangladeshis are feeling free to make and press their demands. But the Interim Government of Dr.Muhammad Yunus is in sixes and sevens trying to meet the multifarious and competing demands from various interest groups.
The hurriedly put together Yunus regime is handicapped by the fact that the de-facto cabinet, called the Advisory Council, has no political structure to lean on. The members of the council have no past of working together as a cohesive unit. Council members are no doubt distinguished, but they come from diverse backgrounds and different ideological orientations. They had not worked together a single political entity in a disciplined way as in a political party. Therefore, they tend to pursue different and sometimes contrary agendas, and issue contradictory statements.
Demands Galore
The Advisory Council is facing a bewildering array of demands. Students who spearheaded the August 5 movement which overthrew Sheikh Hasina, are agitating for the resignation or removal of Bangladesh President Mohammad Shahabuddin because he had said in a newspaper interview, that there is no official document to say that Sheikh Hasina had resigned. She had fled to India without handing in a letter of resignation!
This set off a political storm. In the student agitators’ view, the President was hinting that the interim government was illegal in the absence of Hasina’s resignation letter. The students recalled that Shahabuddin owed his job to Sheikh Hasina and perhaps wanted her back. Angry students tried to storm into this President’s palace across barricades to demand his resignation.
This incident sparked off a debate with some demanding the President’s resignation and others like the Bangladesh National Party (BNP) opposing any hasty action which could lead to a constitutional crisis.
If the President were to resign, the question of a successor would have to be decided. That is a knotty problem as the body that should elect a President, the country’s parliament, had been dissolved!
The “Student movement against discrimination” and the Jatiya Nagorik Committee urged the Interim Government to form an all-party council, which would advise it on who should be the successor to Shahabuddin if he were to leave. “Political parties should together decide who will be the President,” said Nasiruddin Patwari, convener of the Jatiya Nagorik Committee. Patwari added that the students’ main concern was that the person assuming the post of President should not have a fascist agenda.
Arresting Spree
Even before the shattered law and order machinery was restored, the Interim Government was ordering the arrest of scores of people who were part of the earlier regime in some way and filing cases against them.
Banning Political Parties
After the Interim Government banned the Chhatra League, the student wing of Hasina’s party, the Awami League, a group of people filed writ petitions in the High Court seeking an order to ban the Awami League and 10 other parties. The parties whose ban was sought are: Bangladesh Awami League, Jatiya Party (of Gen. H.M.Ershad), Jatiya Samajtantrik Dal, Bikalpadhara Bangladesh, Tarikat Federation, Communist Party of Bangladesh, Liberal Democratic Party, Jatiya Party (Manju faction), Ganatantri Dal, Communist Party of Bangladesh (Marxist–Leninist Baruna group) and the Socialist Party of Bangladesh.
Another petition sought the nullification of the 10th, 11th, and 12th parliamentary elections on the grounds that these had been rigged by the then Prime Minister Hasina.
The Jatiya Nagorik Committee also demanded cancellation of the result of these elections, said committee member Ariful Islam Adeeb. We proposed that all political parties except the Awami League and its allies come together to form an all-party council,” Adeeb said.
Repeal of 15 th.Amendment
There are petitions in the Court to nullify the 15 th. Amendment of the constitution which had did away the system of conducting parliamentary elections with a county being put under a Caretaker Government. The BNP Secretary General Mirza Fakhrul Islam Alamgir joined the petition on the 15th Amendment.
On 19 August, the High Court had addressed the preliminary hearing of the writ filed by five eminent individuals, including Badiul Alam Majumdar and representatives from Sushashoner Jonno Nagorik, questioning the validity of the 15th Amendment Act.
Senior lawyers Zainul Abedin, M Badruddoza, Farzana Sharmin, and Anisur Rahman Raihan represented the BNP in the hearing. Attorney General Asaduzzaman, Additional Attorney General Mohammad Arshadur Rauf, and deputy attorney General Tanim Khan represented the state.
School Students Agitate
Meanwhile, high school students who had taken only a few of the papers in the final exam because of the political turmoil in June, July and August, demanded that they should be declared as having passes in all papers including the ones they could not sit for. Protesting school students blocked roads in Dhaka.
University students held demonstrations seeking the de-linking of seven degree colleges from Dhaka University. They demanded that each of these seven colleges should be made full-fledged university.
Garment Workers Strike
On September 30, a garment worker in Ashulia, near Dhaka, was shot dead and at least 20 others were injured in a violent clash between protesting workers forcing the closures of several factories. The unrest erupted after hundreds of garment workers blocked a major highway, demanding higher wages and improved working conditions. Agitated workers hurled bricks at police vehicles, injuring police officers.
“We are calling for enhanced safety measures, as the factories remain vulnerable due to the unrest,” said Abdullah Hil Rakib, senior Vice President of the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association told Reuters.
Hindus Announce Stir
The Bangladesh Sanatan Jagaran Mancha, a platform for members of the Hindu community, held a rally at Laldighi Maidan in Chattogram (Chittagong) with an eight-point demand. They announced that they would hold a “long march”” towards Dhaka following rallies at the division, district, and upazila levels to press home their demands.
Addressing the rally, the head of the Pundarik Dham Chinmoy Krishna Das Brahmachari said: “If any attempt is made to uproot the Sanatanis (orthodox Hindus), from Bangladesh, the consequences will be severe.
Monks of all Hindu monasteries and missions in Bangladesh have endorse the declared demands of the Sanatanis.
“The more the oppression of the Sanatan community, the more united we will become. After holding rallies at the division and district levels to press for our demands, we will proceed with a long march towards Dhaka,” Brahmachari added. A huge number of people from the Hindu community from Chattogram and adjacent districts participated in the rally.
Speakers protested against the nationwide attacks on temples and houses since August 5. They also demanded punishment for those involved in the incidents. Their other demands include forming a tribunal to prosecute minority oppression, enacting a Minority Protection Act, establishing a Ministry for Minorities, and a five-day holiday for Durga Puja.
Commenting on the situation in Bangladesh, philosopher and Bengaio poet Farhad Mazhar told The Daily Star: “To progress, we must challenge the conventional Awami League (AL) narrative that 1971 was the culmination of our journey. No. It is only the beginning. We must integrate the golden history of Islam both in its place of origin and its arrival in the subcontinent and contribute to building powerful foundational imaginations and structures in our own language, and culture integrating the traditions and legacies we carry within us from pre-Islamic era.”
“ We must cultivate a critical, historical and creative mind that keeps us united and altered to our collective self-consciousness as the agent of world history, and not slaves of colonial, imperialist ideologies and power.”
“The intellectual shortcomings of the Awami narrative become apparent when we consider the constitution’s adoption, which was driven more by the preferences of lawyers and bureaucrats than by the general will of the people formed by the collective self-consciousness.”
Many in Bangladesh like Farhad Mazhar want a new constitution that is more in tune with the lived in realties in Bangladesh and with an outlook for the future to suit the masses’ real aspirations.
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