Bangladesh’s deposed ex-premier Sheikh Hasina used to liken the resilience of her party to the mythical phoenix. Associated with the sun, a phoenix obtains new life by rising from the ashes of its predecessor. Some legends say it dies in a show of flames and combustion, while others say that it simply dies and decomposes before being born again.
A quick analepsis into the Awami League’s over 75-year history could be a testament to the fact that the party did rise from the ashes in the past. On several occasions (that is, 1975) in the past, the Awami League showed its resilience — it withstood tough times and recovered politically.
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But given the popular uprising last July that saw Hasina’s unceremonious exit from the premiership of Bangladesh and also from the country, it would be too ambitious to say that the Awami League would turn around anytime soon.
The Awami League, being one of the oldest political parties that predates the creation of Bangladesh as a nation-state, unfortunately, can’t find many today to blame for its current fate. It’s its own karma. For too many years, the party didn’t give any space to dissenters and took a perilous shift from all sorts of democratic norms to fascism.
Yet, the objective reality seems to be no bar for some short-witted, little-known political novices to spread false hopes. Privy to easy access to foreign media outlets, a few Awami League adherents are spreading rumours that Sheikh Hasina and her party are coming back to steer Bangladesh again.
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It’s a pity that a party, which had doyens such as Abdul Hamid Khan Bhashani, Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, Yar Mohammad Khan and Shamsul Huq among its founders, has to count on such cheap words of self-deceiving assurances today for a turnaround.
What the party needs more than anything else is retrospection and self-reflection. It needs to dissect what went wrong, what brought a party that Sheikh Mujibur Rahman once used as a launchpad to earn Bangladesh’s liberation, to such a low state.
Ask the average Bangladeshi, and they’ll be able to instantly recall how Hasina and her key comrades in the Awami League got dividends out of their humble acknowledgements that the party must have made some mistakes in the past. On several occasions, they sought public apologies and assured people of rectification.
Interestingly, this time around — after so many deaths and so much despair — there appears to be no public display of any remorse, neither from Sheikh Hasina nor from any of her top party functionaries. Not to mention apologies.
Hasina and her inner circle must have other explanations for their nonchalance, but it doesn’t go down well with the people of Bangladesh, many of whom endured personal losses with over 2,000 killed and over 20,000 youths losing limbs and eyesight during last year’s Monsoon Revolution.
In geopolitics, there may be many equations that the Awami League would seek comfort in, and it may find solace in the idea that tectonic shifts in superpower fault lines triggered its fall from power. However, as far as the people on the streets of Dhaka are concerned, they saw with their own eyes how youths had to sacrifice too much blood for one regime change.
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The Bangladeshi people — irrespective of party affiliations — have witnessed for too many years how banks and votes were looted, money plundered and stashed abroad, and how every possible dissenting voice was muzzled, hushed up through hundreds of cases of enforced disappearances — all under the watch of Sheikh Hasina as Bangladesh’s longest-serving prime minister.
If the Awami League has to revive itself like a phoenix, it won’t because of false hopes generated by a sidekick. It has to begin with a few steps in the right direction — firstly, acknowledging the crimes committed and seeking apologies, and then initiating a rigorous process of party rebuilding, changing the old guards (even if they belong to the Mujib clan) and infusing fresh blood.
The writer is the acting editor of the Dhaka Tribune
