Sunanda K. Datta-Ray | India faces a ‘Hobson’s Choice’ in Bangladesh

India faces what used to be called a “Hobson’s Choice” in Bangladesh ruled by Sheikh Hasina Wajed of the Awami League. A daughter of the murdered Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, Bangladesh’s founding father and its first President, she has served as Prime Minister for a combined total of over 20 years. Now, sadly, she and her political rivals are engaged in fighting yesterday’s battles.

This is their -- as well as India’s -- Hobson’s Choice. The term means “no choice at all”, and is derived from Thomas Hobson who worked as a carrier of passengers and mail between Cambridge and London in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. He rented out his horses for this purpose to university students who always wanted their favourite mounts, which meant that the most popular of Hobson’s horses were overworked. As an antidote, he began a strict rotation system, giving each customer the choice of taking the horse nearest the stable door or none at all. The rule became known as Hobson’s Choice, and soon people were using it to mean no-choice in all kinds of situations.

A grim version of that dilemma haunts Bangladesh, where 162 student protesters have been shot dead at the time of writing and 532 others jailed. Bangladesh is in the grip of what Ali Riaz, a professor of politics at Illinois State University, calls “the worst massacre by any regime since independence”. He said: “The atrocities committed in the past days show that the regime is entirely dependent on brute force and has no regard for the lives of the people.”

The violence and bloodshed do not directly concern India but then, the student-led protests sweeping Bangladesh are the strongest indication yet of popular discontent with a government that Narendra Modi stoutly backs.

India has become habituated to seeing Bangladesh through a binary prism. While Sheikh Hasina and her Awami League are thought to stand for secular stability and friendship with India, the forces represented by the ailing Begum Khaleda Zia’s Bangladesh Nationalist Party, the late Gen. Hussain Mohammed Ershad’s Jatiyo Party and the Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami (Jamaat for short), the oldest and reputedly largest Islamic political party in Bangladesh, are regarded as instruments of Pakistani machinations, fundamentalist bigotry and terrorist activity. They are accused of opposing Bangladeshi independence in 1971 and helping the Pakistani “Razakars” to massacre liberal Muslims and Hindus. Not unexpectedly, Sheikh Hasina blames them for murdering her own parents and siblings in 1975. Clearly, the bereavement cannot be forgotten or forgiven.

Complaining of continuing genocide, a report in the Harvard International Review claims: “While the Bangladesh genocide of 1971 is in the past, its effects still resonate in the present. Genocide in Bangladesh is a persistent problem.” These activists want Resolution 1430 “Recognising the Bangladesh Genocide of 1971”, which US Representative Steve Chabot and his co-sponsors introduced in the US House of Representatives in 2022, to become law.

India denies intervening in Bangladesh’s internal affairs but many Bangladeshis -- including even perhaps Sheikh Hasina herself -- view India’s Citizenship Amendment Act of 2019, which makes it easier for Hindus who fled to India before December 31, 2014 to acquire Indian citizenship as a form of indirect intervention. Similarly, the Hasina government’s job quotas for the relatives of the 1971 freedom fighters -- which triggered the present upsurge – is seen as a means of singling out and persecuting the anti-liberation, anti-India BNP, Jamaat and Jatiyo Party veterans.

Although a political nuisance, the Jamaat has never received more than five per cent of the vote in any election. Whether or not Pakistan can significantly influence Bangladeshi society or its politics through funding or its intelligence services is open to question.

Some also claim that the BNP, which many freedom fighters are said to have infiltrated, caters to anti-Indian and pro-Pakistani sentiment. A recent book, Being Hindu in Bangladesh: The Untold Story, by Deep Halder and Avishek Biswas, both Hindus, vividly describes how pro-Pakistani elements insinuated themselves into the pro-liberation fighters’ ranks. Some freedom fighters as well as their Indian sponsors view the BNP’s search for a uniquely Bangladeshi (as opposed to Bengali, which has Indian connotations) identity as a ruse. There are also allegations of anti-India insurgents (Nagas and Mizos) receiving support during the decades that the BNP had ruled Bangladesh. Some Indians argue that a streak of perversity in the Bangladeshi psyche ensured that such clandestine help for Indian rebels persisted even during the Awami League’s rule between 1996 and 2001, and that India responded likewise in the Chittagong Hill Tracts.

A government suspected not only of using its Rapid Action Battalion, the elite unit of Bangladesh’s police forces, but also one group of militant students (the Awami League’s Chhatra League) against others, exposes the fragility of Bangladeshi politics. Even the UN human rights chief, Volker Türk, recently called on Sheikh Hasina’s government to carry out an independent investigation into the “horrific violence”.

While the protests became markedly less deadly after Bangladesh’s Supreme Court decided to curtail the number of reserved jobs from 56 to seven per cent, most of which will still be set aside for the children and grandchildren of “freedom fighters” from the 1971 liberation war, the Students Against Discrimination militants want the curfew to be rolled back, Internet facilities restored, full democratic rights and an end to what they call the victimisation of students.

Muhammad Yunus, the 83-year-old Bangladeshi Nobel Peace Prize laureate and economist whose pioneering microfinance bank is credited with lifting millions of peasants out of poverty, but whom Sheikh Hasina accuses of “sucking blood” from the poor, urges “world leaders and the United Nations to do everything within their powers to end the violence”. Mr Yunus’ first public comments since the unrest began demanded that “there must be investigations into the killings that have taken place already”, adding: “Bangladesh has been engulfed in a crisis that only seems to get worse with each passing day. High school students have been among the victims.”

What neither Prime Minister Modi nor Sheikh Hasina can afford to overlook is that given South Asia’s communal dynamics, India’s patronage can be as much the kiss of death for Bangladeshi politicians as American blessings were for Asian leaders like South Korea’s Syngman Rhee, the Shah of Iran or Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines during the Cold War years. Bangladesh’s options cannot forever be restricted to the Awami League. To be credible, Indian foreign policy must be strictly neutral.