When the demonstrators ransacked the official residence of Sheikh Hasina and set fire to an honorary museum his murdered father – the founding chief of Bangladesh – they symbolically offer a good storage room to the rule of his oldest Prime Minister, whose rise in power was inextricably linked to him.
Hasina, 76, one of the two women to have been Prime Minister of Bangladesh, resigned and fled the country on Monday. In a breathtaking turn of the events, the army chief announced that she had resigned, while the demonstrators led by students converged on the capital Dhaka to demand the ouster of his government after 15 years of consecutive rule, which saw him derive towards authoritarianism.
Hasina, whose supporters had nicknamed him “the mother of humanity”, leave the office in the midst of a fragile economy and only seven months after her government was elected to a fourth consecutive and fifth consecutive term in the general classification.
However, there were widespread allegations according to which the polls were biased in favor of his Awami League party in power. The main nationalist opposition of Bangladesh (BNP), led by his Amer Khaleda Zia enemy, boycotted the general elections of January 7 after Hasina refused to give way to a goalkeeper government to supervise the electoral process.
Since its entry into office in 2009, Hasina had directed the South Asian nation of 170 million people on a trace of mainly robust economic growth. But in recent years, it has been the subject of an international examination for an increasingly iron style and a record overshadowed by allegations of forced disappearances and arrests of journalists and criticism.
“If I made mistakes along the way, my request will be to look at the question with the eyes of forgiveness,” Hasina told the nation in a television address in January when she asked for a re -election. “If I can train the government again, I will have the opportunity to correct the mistakes.”
Hasina’s life as a politician was born following bullets fired by assassins.
She officially resumed the Awami League six years after her father, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, her mother and other family members were slaughtered during a coup in 1975.
By a stroke of luck, she escaped from being killed by their side. She and her sister traveled abroad during the assassination of Rahman, who led the Bangladesh independence movement during the 1971 war against Pakistan.
“I entered the policy to realize my father’s dream,” Hasina told The Nation during her electoral speech in January.
Hasina saw this as her mission to continue with the heritage of her late father, who was largely venerated as a national hero in the Bangladesh struggle for independence. In 2021-222, its government spent several million US dollars to commemorate its memory and mark the 50th year of the nation.
As the striking anniversary approaches, it has become more and more dangerous to speak freely about the founding father of Bangladesh, because the government of his daughter had instituted strict laws against defaming him in an effort to control the historical story, analysts said.
But Rahman, who was also known as Sheikh Mujib, slipped into his own brand of autocratic domination after having become the leader of the young nation. A year before his assassination, Rahman prohibited all political parties and the majority of the press, and trained a system of Chinese communist style called Bakshal.
The generalized anti-hasina demonstrations that began last month and resulted in its evidence on August 5 is coming from anger ventilated by students on quotas for government jobs which strongly favored children and grandchildren of veterans who had fought in the Mujibur team in the 1971 war against Pakistan.
Deadly demonstrations have persisted, although the country’s Supreme Court has moved to reduce quotas and make requests for most government jobs based on the country where there is a high unemployment rate among young people.
Political career start
In 1981, Hasina returned to Bangladesh exile abroad shortly after being elected president of the Awami League. At the time, the country was governed by President Ziaur Rahman, a military general who a few years earlier had founded the BNP.
Ziaur Rahman was killed in a coup after Hasina’s return, allowing another army general, Hussain Muhammad Ershad, to take power.
Hasina collaborated with the widow of Ziaur Rahman of the BNP – to oust Ershad in a civil mass movement.
In 1996, when the BNP held an election defying Hasina’s request that a neutral goalkeeper government oversees the polls, it led the opposition parties to boycott the elections.
The BNP returned to power practically without opposition – similar to its last victory on January 7 – but street agitations of the Awami League have forced the government of ZIA to resign and to call for new elections within the framework of a newly constituted guardian system.
In this election, Hasina became Prime Minister for the first time.
His party has become known for its aggressive and implacable political tactics, even when it was relegated to the opposition in 2001. National strikes and road blocks at the national level called by the Awami League kept the BNP government on the back.
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Hasina’s political life has also been marked by direct threats of violence against it.
According to the count of the Awami League, it survived up to 19 assassination attempts, the most recent of which occurred in 2004. In this incident, it narrowly escaped a grenade attack which killed more than a dozen people.
When the elections approached in 2006, Hasina’s party again boycotted the polls, saying that the BNP has manipulated the goalkeeper system. Bloody street battles that followed the soldiers to intervene in 2007, and she took a victory parade. But the new government supported by the army has placed Hasina and Zia in prison for corruption.
Both were released a year later to contest the elections in 2008, which Hasina won in a landslide.
![Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina speaks to the opening session of the National Parliament in Dacca on July 14, 1996. [Pavel Rahman, AP]](https://www.rfa.org/resizer/v2/BABGYRMTYXZAWWGK73PLVMZTUE.jpg?auth=e0a82e00903f8f5db9d62e0452016dd33543d27250adb85c39518319afcc7784&width=800&height=564)
In recent years, Hasina has been widely recognized to tackle the problem of Muslim extremism in Bangladesh, in particular after groups such as the Islamic State and Al-Qaeda have committed murders of writers and secular bloggers in the country. However, the deadliest terrorist attack in the country, a night seat of a coffee by pro-East activists which left at least 20 dead, occurred under its watch.
Meanwhile, allegations concerning the security forces carrying out extrajudicial killings continued to surface. An ostensive anti-drug campaign in 2018, an electoral year, killed more than 400 people, according to local and international human rights groups.
It was in 2018 that the government relaunched an internet law and made it harder. The law on digital security would target journalists and discourse on social networks in a disproportionate manner, stifling a climate for an expression without hindrance and leading to arrests of criticism from its government.
Benarnews is a press organization affiliated with the FRG.