THE UNMAKING OF BANGLADESH?

RSN SINGH explains how geopolitics seems to have reversed a liberation

- RSN SINGH

The British created Pakistan as a strategic wall against the Soviet Union in a post-World War II extension of the Great Game.

A few years later, after the onset of the Cold War, the US assumed the British mantle. In 1971, during the Cold War, the Soviet Union, in turn, split Pakistan by helping India to create Bangladesh.

The US “Deep State” then caused regime change through the assassination of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman in 1975. His pro-US and pro-Pakistan successor, Ziaur Rahman, amended the Constitution to give political legitimacy to Jamaat-e-Islami (Jel), whose loyalty had always been to Pakistan. As the Cold War entered a new phase with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Ziaur Rahman was assassinated in May 1981. He was succeeded by the pro-US and pro-Pakistan General Mohammad Ershad, who committed Bangladeshi forces as an ally to the US in the Gulf War. It was Ershad who made Islam the state religion of Bangladesh. There seems to be a direct correlation between policy alignment with the US and radical Islam in Pakistan and Bangladesh, i.e., the greater the tilt towards the US, the greater the impetus to radical Islam and political dependence on it.

At the end of the Cold War and with waning US interest in the region, democracy asserted itself, and between 1991 and 2014, power in Bangladesh alternated between the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) and the Awami League (AL), led by Khaleda Zia and Sheikh Hasina, respectively. Since 2014, it has been the Awami League all the way.

In 2024, the US “Deep State” struck back and installed its stooge, Mohammad Yunus, in power in Bangladesh. Strategic ingredients may have been different, but this is the geopolitical journey of Bangladesh, which was East Bengal from 1947 to 1955 and East Pakistan from 1955 to 1971, when it emerged as the independent state of Bangladesh.