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Awami League | The party of the state
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Bangladesh’s ruling party, which built itself up through mass protests and played a central role in the liberation of the country from Pakistan and in ending military dictatorship later, is facing a massive challenge as angry students are organising themselves against its rule
Awami League. Illustration. R. Rajesh
When India proceeded to hold its first general election in 1951-52, Pakistan witnessed a different set of landmark developments. On January 27, 1952, Pakistan Prime Minister Khawaja Nazimuddin declared that, as envisaged by Mohammed Ali Jinnah, Urdu would be the only state language of Pakistan.
This rocked the campuses of East Pakistan. In the subsequent crackdown, Salam, Barkat, Rafique, Jabbar, Shafiur, Abdul Awal and Ohiullah became the the ‘language martyrs’. The leader of the movement was Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, who was at that time in prison. On July 9, 1953, Mujib was elected as the general secretary of the East Pakistan Awami Muslim League.
The language movement, under the Awami Muslim League, tried to draw pro-Pakistan Shaheed Suhrawardy, A.K. Fazlul Huq and leftist Maulana Bhashani into a coalition. A Jukta Front, or United Front, was formed on November 14, 1953. In the first legislative assembly election of East Pakistan, held on March 10, 1954, the United Front won 223 seats out of 237. It was the first major electoral victory of the Awami Musim League, which won 143 seats.
Bangladesh students call for nationwide civil disobedience
The future ruling party of free Bangladesh, which has been in news over the past few weeks because of a government crackdown on students protesting against a system of job quota in public employment, was not born as a mainstream Indian nationalist or pro-Pakistan political party as the leading political formations before 1947 were mostly.
The Awami League (AL) came at a time when the major leaders of Bengal politics had either joined the pro-Pakistan wave or were left on the margins. They started from the university campuses of Dhaka and Calcutta as the students realised early on that the idea of Pakistan was going to fail sooner or later, says Iqbal Hasan Mahmud Tuku, a leader from the opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party. Mr. Tuku, who started his political journey as a supporter of the leftist student movement under Maulana Bhashani, says the Awami League started as a protest movement and it remained so for many years before coming close to power in the 1970 national election in Pakistan.
Secular platform
From the beginning, the Awami League had been staunchly secular in contrast to the culturally tilted identity of the Muslim League. To emphasise its political break from the Muslim League, the Awami Muslim League dropped the ‘Muslim’ from its name during a special council meeting on October 21, 1955.
From 1955 to 1969, the AL remained a party driven by student activists and educated professionals of East Pakistan. On January 5, 1969, the Central Students’ Action Council was formed for campaigning for the autonomy of East Pakistan. Next year, in the backdrop of the devastating cyclone Bhola, Pakistan held another election in which the AL secured 167 of the 169 National Assembly seats in East Pakistan and won 288 out of the 300 seats in the Provincial Assembly.
The country witnessed as a stalemate as there was no consensus on government formation between Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, leader of the Pakistan People’s Party, the majority party in West Pakistan, and Sheikh Mujib. The AL leader was later arrested, and there was a massive crackdown on his supporters, triggering a crisis and flight of refugees from East Pakistan, which eventually led to the India-Pakistan war of December 1971.
Protests continue in Bangladesh amid outrage over crackdown
The defeat of the Pakistani military in the war and emergence of an independent Bangladesh brought the next phase of the AL. Mujib was released on January 8, 1972 and returned to Dhaka.
It was the first time that the AL tasted power. It consolidated its gains by legislative and administrative moves, and sought to strike a balance between the Islamic tradition and modernity. In 1973, the first major election of Bangladesh, the AL joined hands with the Communist Party and the National Awami Party (NAP), and won 293 seats out of 300.
Political discontent
The AL had become the establishment in the new country but it found the challenges of unemployment, food scarcity and lack of political cohesion as overwhelming. On January25, 1973, the AL took a fateful turn when Mujib formed the single party system in Dhaka named Bangladesh Krishak Shramik Awami League. Bangladesh witnessed some improvement in the economic situation in the following years, but political discontent exploded soon. On August 15, 1975, Mujib and 15 members of his family were killed by a rogue military unit.
The rise and rule of the AL was stopped temporarily as the country was ruled by General Ziaur Rahman and his Bangladesh Nationalist Party till he was assassinated on May 30, 1981, setting the country up for nearly a decade of military rule of Gen. Hossein Mohammed Ershad.
The AL was out of power during the subsequent nearly two decades but the idea of liberation that it represented remained strong. Mujib’s daughter, Sheikh Hasina, who had returned to Bangladesh in the early 1980s after six years of life in exile in Europe and India, launched a public movement, in coordination with Khaleda Zia, the widow of Ziaur Rahman, and deposed the Ershad regime in 1990. Just like the 1970’s cyclone, the year 1991 also saw a devastating cyclone. Ms. Zia came to power in March 1991 and in April, the cyclone exposed her government’s ineptitude in handling disasters.
Ms. Hasina, who launched an anti-government movement after the cyclone hit the country, came to power for the first time in 1996, riding the anti-government sentiment.
The AL’s support base was revived because of the extraordinary energy that Ms. Hasina displayed in the early 1990s, first in deposing Gen. Ershad and then in voting out Ms. Zia. Over the past five terms, out of which four terms were consecutive, Ms. Hasina has maintained a tight grip on the state, and strengthened a generation of young student leaders whom she brought to the party.
The latest protest is perhaps indicative of a new break in the history and the huge challenge the Awami League is facing. The protests, in which more than 200 people were killed, were apparently not triggered by the forces of tradition and orthodoxy that the AL had fought throughout its journey. The new adversary appears to be a progressive force — the students who have got wind beneath their wings.
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