Sheikhdown

A personal reflection on the cult of personality that underpinned the Hasina regime

So it has finally happened. Hasina is gone.

It’s not clear what may come next. Who will be in the interim government — the term used by General Waker-uz-Zaman. Nor is it clear what role he, or the army, would play — the general repeatedly used the first person singular: I have been given the responsibility, pleace have confidence on me and so forth. While there is celebration across the country, there is also anarchy. Most worryingly, there are reports of attacks against Hindu houses and neighbourhoods. These may well be done by Awami League remnants as a scorched earth tactics, but Hasina is gone and it’s now the responsibility of the interim powers-that-be, whoever they may be.

All that without even thinking about the economy, which must be reeling from the last few weeks of disruptions. Again, what the interim powers-that-be do in the first few days will make a huge difference.

Regardless, today is a day of celebration.

Nonetheless, it maybe the lack of sleep in the past few weeks, or perhaps the post-euphoric drop in energy (memorably put as শীর্ষ অনুভূতির পরে শূন্যতার বোধ in the Ayub Bachchu song), but I am in a reflective mood. And I am going to write some personal stuff.

Indulge me, there will be other times for analysis.

I had left Bangladesh with family in 1988 — you don’t have much choice when you’re in Class 8. I didn’t visit the country for most of the 1990s, leaving shortly after the 1991 cyclone, returning in the last weeks of the millenium. I made up for the lost time by travelling extensively in Dhaka and beyond. Had the technology existed, I might have been the OG Bangladeshi travel youtuber!

I visited the house in Dhanmondi Road 32 one wintry morning. Even though Sheikh Hasina was the prime minister, things were very different in 1999. The stuccato style house in Dhanmondi didn’t have any of the pomp and ceremony one came to see in the last decade. It was just another old house in that still leafy suburb. There were still quite a few such houses left, the only thing distinguishing this one being perhaps a few uniformed guards in front.

Walking around that house, seeing the furniture, wash basins, staircases and light switch, one wouldn’t have known there was anything special about it — just another Dhanmondi house, one might have thought, until you saw the bullet holes.

A few months ago, at a soire with some cultural folks in London, I met a Pakistani dissident poet and realised that she was a good friend of a famous Bangladeshi poet who happened to be a childhood friend of my mother’s. “How is it that your politics is so different from apa’s”? She asked. I replied, “Do you mean, how is khala’s politics with respect to Bangladesh so different from her views about everything else?”

I had wondered many times in the past decade about why so many otherwise liberal, progressive, urbane, cultured Bangladeshis of my parent’s generation stayed loyal to the Hasina regime (or refused to condemn it even in private) when they could clearly see that hers was the most brutal anti-democratic government in our history (barring perhaps the Pakistani occupation during the war) and the most corrupt inequitable one since perhaps Clive’s time.

I had wondered whether it had something to do with the fact that in their youth, when Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and his family was massacred in that house in another August four decades ago, these folks cheered, if they did anything. A collective generational guilt, if you like.

I used to go to Cherokee on Mirpur Road, just round the corner from that house, for a haircut whenever in Dhaka. The last time must have been shortly after Hasina’s return to power — visits all blend into each other after a few years. By then, the cult of Mujib was in full swing. I saw school children waiting in line to visit the shrine — and it had all the parapharnalia of a shrine — in the hazy, dusty Dhaka morning.

Some of those kids were very likely spearheading the Monsoon Revolution!

I have been blogging (or its equivalent) on Bangladesh and related stuff for two decades. Back in 2010, I was one of the editors of the now defunct Drishtipat blog. For an offshoot of a supposedly human rights organisation, the blog’s coverage of the execution of August 1975 killers was a peculiar thing.

No. I am not ideologically against death penalty as such. Nor did I have any problem with the legal proceedings that led to the conviction and sentencing of the August 1975 killers (unlike, say, the so-called war crimes trials that happened a few years later).

But did the execution have to be a carnival?

Could one not be sombre on the day and note that it was indeed a tragedy that a family was massacred, that the nation should reflect on how it came to be thus, that we must work towards avoiding a repeat at all costs?

Evidently, among a bunch of sophisticated, uber-progressive Bangladeshis, this was too much to hope for.

And that was before the force-feeding of the cult of Mujib down the people’s throat. The irony, of course, was that the more the mania around Mujib, the lesser the man became.

If you had visited the house in Dhanmondi 32 in the late 1990s, you would have felt a sense of tragedy. When you saw old footages of Mujib in his white pajama-panjabi-black sleeveless coat smoking pipe and towering over others, you could be foriven for thinking that you’re watching a Bollywood gangster film — and I love classic Bollywood, perhaps now I will have the time to write about them!

Mujib’s negotiations with the Pakistanis in 1971 make for a fascinating historical analysis. But trying to make him the be-all-and-end-all of 1971 just makes him responsible for all the death and mayhem.

I could go on — there was that ridiculous laser show in March 2020, when covid lockdowns were delayed by weeks to showcase the man’s centenary birthday, or the horrendous so-called biopic from last year. You get the point. Fifteen years of hagiography made Mujib the symbol of a hated regime.

And now Hasina is gone, and within hours the statues are being torn down and the house in Dhanmondi is attacked. As the kids might say — Sheikh Mujib ke Joy Bangla kore deya hocche!

Sheikhdown indeed!

I try to visit a museum in every city I travel to. In most African capitals I have been to, the musuems have a curious feature — the exhibits end at independence (Kigali being a notable exception).

There is a certain logic to this. Post-independence leadership in most newly independent countries were failures. These failures are better analysed by academics than be parts of government propaganda.

Perhaps we too should protect our museums from the cult of the Sheikh family and consign them to academic tomes.