Dhaka, Oct 24 Bangladesh's painful legacy of dictatorial rule under former Army Chiefs Ziaur Rahman and Hussein Muhammad Ershad left democratic politics gravely wounded, a condition further worsened by the “darkness” that descended on the country in August 2024, a report stated on Friday.
Between 1975 and 1990, Bangladesh witnessed two military regimes, which remain embarrassing symbols of blatant conspiracies that undermined the democratic principles on which the nation was founded in 1971.
"In the 54-plus years of Bangladesh's existence as a sovereign state, many have been the times when the constitutional government was overthrown through conspiracy shaped at home and abroad. The violence with which the government of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was overthrown on August 15, 1975 — and Bangabandhu was President at the time, with Parliament at work under the Constitution — was the first instance of the long years of illegitimacy the country would go through," noted Bangladeshi journalist, historian and political analyst Syed Badrul Ahsan wrote in the Northeast News.
"The Zia illegitimacy drove a dagger into secular democratic politics in Bangladesh through its patronisation of the assassins of August-November 1975 and then through its unabashed indulgence of the very elements who had collaborated with the occupation Pakistan army in 1971," he stated.
The report stressed that the country's second military ruler wasted little time in seizing power. Within 10 months of Zia's assassination, it said, Ershad took control in March 1982, marking a new phase of political decline in Bangladesh.
"Ershad permitted the assassins of Bangabandhu to form a political party in clear defiance of morality and political decency. Where the Zia regime knifed the principle of secularism out of the Constitution, the Ershad dispensation went for a wholesale imposition of majoritarian faith as the religion of the state on the country," the report detailed.
"The legacy of Ziaur Rahman and Hussein Muhammad Ershad, symbolised by the Bangladesh Nationalist Party and the Jatiya Party, was a potent hurdle to a restoration of secular democracy in Bangladesh. Together, these two parties have fanned the flames of political trends inimical to the concept of Bangladesh," it stressed.
According to the report, the struggle for democracy has been renewed following the seizure of power 14 months ago by political upstarts, neophytes and anti-liberation elements. It noted that their vicious assault on Bangladesh's history and cultural legacy through the overthrow of the Sheikh Hasina government marks a new chapter in the fight against historical erasure.
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