Unveiled: The Swift Fall Of Sheikh Hasina That Was Scripted By External Forces

As the dust settles on the dramatic events that unfolded in Dhaka, leading to Sheikh Hasina’s hasty exit from Dhaka before mobs stormed ‘Gonobhaban’ (her official residence), a scary picture of how foreign powers and forces encouraged, funded, and directed the uprising against Hasina is emerging slowly.

A rough account of how things played out in Bangladesh has been pieced together after conversations with officers of various intelligence agencies, Indian diplomats, and multiple sources in Bangladesh.

The primary players in the well-scripted drama are Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI)-backed Jamaat-e-Islami Bangladesh and the United States (US). And, to a much lesser extent, China. 

These players acted, at various stages, independently and in concert with each other.

The US, acting on its pseudo-moralistic impulses, has been working towards a regime change in Dhaka for a while.

The US Role

Washington viewed Hasina as a despot who was throttling democracy in Bangladesh. That Hasina continuously disregarded the US's urgings to tone down her repressive policies and allow opposition parties (primarily the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, or BNP) to function freely angered the ruling Democratic establishment in the US. 

The last parliamentary election in Bangladesh precipitated matters. The US wanted Hasina to heed the BNP’s demand to step down in favour of a caretaker government that would conduct elections.

But Hasina refused, point blank. US diplomats and government officials met Hasina and other leaders of the Awami League and leaned heavily on them. 

Even the country’s president, Mohammad Shahabuddin, and the Bangladesh Election Commission were asked by the US, as well as diplomats and leaders of some Western nations, to force Hasina to step down and hold elections under a caretaker regime. 

But Hasina was able to ward off all such demands due to the unstinted support of India and China. That riled the US and the Western nations, who have arrogated to themselves the responsibility of imposing Western-style democracy on the rest of the world.

Hasina, by her own admission, also angered Washington by refusing to allow the US to establish an air and naval base on St Martin’s Island off the coast of Chittagong. She also said in January this year that a Western nation (she meant the US) was trying to create a Christian country carved out of contiguous areas of Bangladesh, India, and Myanmar (read this). This earned her the ire of the US.

An angry US then put in motion a sinister plot to create unrest in Bangladesh. The US rightly gauged that there was a lot of latent discontent against Hasina and that that could be leveraged into a full-blown uprising against her.

The political establishment in the US had already been infiltrated cleverly by the Jamaat and Islamist groups through non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and think tanks, especially the left-leaning ones. To them, the Jamaat was a political player whose rights had been suppressed by the repressive Hasina regime in Bangladesh. 

Washington, which has inexplicably never learnt from the monumental blunders it has committed around the world, looked to the Jamaat as a democratic force in Bangladesh. 

Washington was so blinded by its righteous outrage over Hasina’s suppression of democracy that it conveniently overlooked the Jamaat-e-Islami’s deep ties with the Pakistan-based Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami, a terror outfit closely affiliated with al-Qaeda.

The US also overlooked the BNP’s deep ties with Islamists and decided that the only path to the restoration of democracy in Bangladesh was to orchestrate the downfall of Hasina and pave the way for the BNP to come to power.

The 'restore democracy' project was so important to the US that it paid little heed to concerns expressed by India and some other countries that allowing the BNP to come to power would pave the backdoor entry of the Jamaat and Islamists to positions of power and influence. Such a move would make Islamists powerful and endanger not only regional security but also US interests in the region. 

Hence, the US, through its diplomats, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), NGOs, think tanks, and other affiliates, started looking for an opportunity to fuel popular discontent against Hasina.

Pakistan’s ISI Played A Major Role

At the same time, Pakistan’s ISI also realised that if Hasina stayed in power for another five years, she would crush Jamaat and Islamabad’s affiliates in Bangladesh. The ISI realised that Hasina, facing growing opposition from the US, would gravitate closer to India. And under India’s influence, Hasina would deal a fatal blow to Pakistan-affiliated Islamists in her country. 

It may be worth mentioning that though US-Pakistan ties have deteriorated in recent years, the ISI maintains good links with the political, security, and military establishments in the US. The ISI had worked very closely with US agencies and affiliates during the years of Russian occupation of Afghanistan and also for many years after that, and thus still has many ‘friends’ in the US ‘deep state’. 

The ISI got some covert help and guarantees from its friends in the US deep state to encourage and fund the Jamaat and its student wing, the Islamic Chhatra Shibir. 

China also got involved, but to a much lesser extent. Hasina had earned Beijing’s ire in recent months by leaning too closely to New Delhi. Beijing wanted Hasina to toe its line and step up strategic, economic, and other engagements with China. 

But Hasina was reluctant to play ball and insisted that she would not do anything that would harm India’s interests in the region. That stand did not go down well with China, and that is why her visit to Beijing last month was unsuccessful.

But China desisted from meddling directly in the unrest against Hasina. It limited itself only to approving, and maybe even providing some financial muscle, to the ISI’s project of using the Jamaat to whip up popular anger against Hasina.

How The Sinister Plot Progressed

All these players had, since January, been sniffing for an opportunity to take on the Awami League government. 

The anti-quota stir by university and college students came in handy. The students’ agitation, under the banner of ‘Students Against Discrimination’, started in mid-June in a lowkey manner and was largely confined to university campuses. 

The Hasina government committed the grievous error of not addressing the demands of the students to permanently scrap job reservations. It made the mistake of allowing the movement to fester and grow.

It is widely believed that the students’ agitation gained irreversible momentum after police and pro-government activists tried to repress it by brute force in mid-July. And once violence erupted, the BNP, Jamaat, and other players opposed to Hasina hijacked the movement.

But it is now emerging that much before the anti-quota stir took a violent turn after students were attacked by pro-government activists on campuses and the streets, the movement had already been infiltrated by the Jamaat through the Islamic Chhatra Shibir.

This happened through the students’ bodies of some prominent private universities in the country, especially in Dhaka. These private universities are funded and managed by some prominent Jamaat leaders and their relatives. 

Without the students (especially from Dhaka University) who launched the anti-quota stir even realising it, the movement had already gone out of their hands by early July. The leaders (convenors) of the ‘Students Against Discrimination’ became mere puppets at the hands of the invisible BNP-Jamaat puppeteers. 

The BNP-Jamaat combine, which started controlling the anti-quota movement, had two benefactors: the US and Pakistan’s ISI. 

Meanwhile, once the BNP-Jamaat combine gained control of the movement, it deployed its activists to indulge in looting and arson and carry out attacks on policemen. 

The BNP-Jamaat knew fully well that this would attract a brutal crackdown by the government, thus fuelling more anger against Hasina. And the cycle of violence and counter-violence would gain momentum to ultimately result in a mass uprising against Hasina. 

The authoritarian (Hasina) government walked right into this trap when it unleashed the police and armed goons on the protesters in mid-June. Once the first student was killed, there was no turning back, and things spiralled out of the government’s control. 

That the students have long lost control over the movement they started was evident on the final day of the uprising when radical Islamists tore down the statue of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman (Hasina’s father), vandalised and set fire to the Bangabandhu Memorial Museum, and looted the Indira Gandhi Cultural Centre in Dhaka’s Dhanmondi.

It became abundantly clear that the university students who had first launched the anti-quota stir had become ‘useful idiots’ being played by the BNP-Jamaat and foreign powers when Islamists attacked houses and properties of Hindus and Awami League leaders, desecrated Hindu temples, and killed dozens of innocent people throughout Monday night and Tuesday (5, 6 August). They torched thousands of vehicles and destroyed vital infrastructure, including power stations. 

Thus, while Hasina surely mishandled the anti-quota stir in a ham-handed and brutal manner, the stir was used by the BNP-Jamaat and their backers (Pakistan’s ISI and the US) to ignite latent disaffection against Hasina and convert the stir into a mass uprising. 

Had it not been for the anti-quota stir, the BNP-Jamaat would surely have found some other agitation to hijack so as to oust Hasina, who had made very powerful enemies. 

This enmity and her own obduracy and authoritarianism have led to her inglorious downfall.

But in this whole high-stakes game, whose sole objective was Hasina’s ouster from power, it is the BNP-Jamaat that will have the last laugh. 

As radical Islamism takes root in Bangladesh now, as it inevitably will, it is US interests in South Asia that will suffer. The US will soon discover it has another adversary in the region.