In the just-concluded parliamentary election in Bangladesh held last Sunday, the centre-left Awamy League Party, led by Sheikh Hasina, gained a spectacular victory. The Awamy League-led coalition, called the Mahajote (Grand Coalition), thrashed their powerful rival, the centre-right Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), which was allied with Islamist parties. The Grand Coalition captured 262 seats of the 294 decided so far.
This election results, the crushing defeat of the Islamists to be specific, must have stunned most observers, because after the ouster of the Taleban and their al-Qaeda allies from Afghanistan in 2001, Bangladesh was being increasingly seen as the next Afghanistan as al-Qaeda cadres were shifting their base over there. The BNP-led Islamist-allied government, then in power, turned a blind eye and took refuge in persistent denials in the face of mounting evidence of such a possibility. Al-Qaeda-inspired radicals, trained in Afghanistan and Pakistan, slowly started their violent campaigns. Islamist terrorist attacks had started in Bangladesh as early as in March 1999 when a gathering for a cultural program, seen as anti-Islamic by puritanical Islamists, in Northern Bangladesh was bombed, killing 10 and injuring about 100 people. A month later, a fair in celebration of the Bengali New Year, also seen as un-Islamic, was bombed, killing 10 people. Sporadic incidents of Islamist violence as well as threats and attacks on the life of secular intellectuals followed.
In the midst of these mounting Islamist terror activities, the Far Eastern Economic Review called Bangladesh an emerging “Cocoon of Terror” in April 2002. The Islamists-allied BNP government vehemently denied and condemned the report and took the publisher to court on charges of maligning the nation’s image. This was followed by a report in the New York Times in October 2002, entitled “Deadly Cargo”. It pointed to al-Qaeda activities in Bangladesh, including al-Qaeda and Taliban Jihadists, armed with AK-47 weapon caches, entering Southern Bangladesh through Burma. Taking recourse of outright denial again, the Government strongly condemned the report. Then in January 2005, the New York Times published another report, entitled “The Next Islamist Revolution?” It painted a grim picture of Islamic extremist activity in Bangladesh, especially by the group of Bangla Bhai, whose vigilante Islamist group, Jagrata Muslim Janata Bangladesh (JMJB), had launched a campaign of terror to Islamize Northern Bangladesh. The JMJB thugs had cruelly butchered 35 people, whom, they considered anti-Islamic and included communists. The government again took recourse of furious denials and pursued those, who acted as informers for the report for punishing them.
Article comments