Bangladesh - India Relationship: Challenges for Progressive Politics

[Banglar Bir]

Why did Sushma Swaraj come to Dhaka?
by M Serajul Islam | Published: 00:05, Oct 29,2017 | Updated: 00:49, Oct 29,2017

Explicitly, Sushma Swaraj visited Dhaka for the meeting of the Joint Consultative Committee with her counterpart AH Mahmud Ali, the Bangladesh foreign minister.
However, there was very little interest in the outcome of that meeting.
Instead, most of the media interest and those of the interested quarters was upon what transpired in the Indian external affairs minister’s meeting with the prime minister of Bangladesh, Sheikh Hasina and the leader of Bangladesh National Party, Khaleda Zia.

Leading to the visit, the media had speculated that the Indian minister was coming to Dhaka because New Delhi was unhappy that Bangladesh was moving deeper into the influence of the Chinese. New Delhi was concerned that China was getting involved in building economic infrastructure projects in Bangladesh, many of which were also strategic in nature.

New Delhi was also unhappy that Bangladesh had joined China’s One Belt One Road initiative, a decision that was announced in New Delhi by the foreign secretary of Bangladesh to the media there.
India is deeply opposed to the OBOR initiative with which China has brought 60 countries and 70 per cent of the world population together. Much to New Delhi’s discomfort, the OBOR land connectivity initiative would run through what India calls the Pakistani occupied Kashmir.

In some ways, the media speculation was the same that had surrounded Sushma Swaraj’s last visit to Dhaka in September 2014. In that visit, she had come to Dhaka primarily to bring Bangladesh out of the Chinese camp to which prime minister Sheikh Hasina had delivered the country.
Sheikh Hasina was worried that the BJP-led Government would not back her government over the January 2014 controversial national election, and faced with international pressure for a new election had visited Beijing.
In her visit, she had promised China a number of strategic projects including the Sonadia deep-sea port.
Sushma Swaraj had successfully brought back Bangladesh to New Delhi’s camp and most of the strategic projects along with the Sonadia deep-sea port were dropped.

That speculation was not borne out from the outcome of the visit of the Indian external affairs minister. If Sushma had indeed come to Dhaka primarily with that intention, it would have brought some good news for the ruling party.
There were three in particular towards which the AL-led government was eagerly and expectantly looking forward.
The first had been pending since September 2011, namely the Teesta Deal for which it had given to India two of its most eagerly sought interests in Bangladesh, — security needs and the land transit.

The other more recent one is indeed India’s unbelievable stand on the Rohingyas.

Finally, the Awami League did not get much encouragement from New Delhi with the country on the cusp of the next general election.

The Teesta Deal did not figure seriously in Sushma Swaraj’s discussions in Dhaka. In fact, even the hitherto given promise that it would be delivered soon was also no longer New Delhi’s narrative. With the worsening of New Delhi-Kolkata relations and with talks of an early election in India, Sushma Swaraj had nothing to offer to Dhaka on the Teesta Deal.

On the Rohingya issue, New Delhi had perplexed Bangladeshis across the political divide. Having sheltered 10 million victims of 1971 Bangladesh Genocide, its denial of the Rohingya Genocide was not just a stand against its historical relations with Bangladesh, but also against something glorious in its own history for few nations had done what India had done for the people of Bangladesh in 1971.

Therefore, there were hopes again across the political divide that Sushma Swaraj would explain to Bangladesh its perplexing decision and give some hope to Bangladesh.
She explained, New Delhi’s position but that did not meet Bangladesh’s expectations.
She agreed with the stand of the government of Bangladesh that all the refugees must return to Myanmar. However, she did not suggest how.

That stand was, in fact, similar to what the Myanmar government had taken publicly, that it would take the refugees back but only those that were their citizens that was like giving by one hand and taking it back with the other. Sushma Swaraj made no mention of the genocide or the ethnic cleansing against the Rakhine. In fact, she was careful not to upset the Myanmar government; she avoided calling the Rohingyas by their name!

That underlined another outcome of Sushma Swaraj’s visit is that it made it evident it was Myanmar in which New Delhi was more interested because of strategic reasons.

Thus Sushma Swaraj spoke of an economic zone in the Rakhine State where India had invested heavily and that Bangladesh would also benefit from it.
Of course, the fact that China was also present in the region not just with lures of investment in Myanmar, but also with an eye towards the fragile Seven Sisters of India.

It was a major reason for New Delhi to keep the Myanmar government happy. In fact, those reasons were important enough for New Delhi to go into denial over the genocide and ethnic cleansing against the Rohingyas and Bangladesh’s present predicament as a consequence.

The third and perhaps the most important outcome of Sushma Swaraj’s visit was mixed, as far as the two mainstream political parties of Bangladesh were cornered. Perhaps, it is a fundamental change in New Delhi’s way of conducting bilateral relations with Bangladesh.
It was good news for the opposition BNP.
In her meeting with Khaleda Zia, the Indian minister stated that New Delhi wanted the next general election of Bangladesh to be participated by all the political parties and free and fair.
She stated separately in her meeting with the media that it was the duty of the government to create the conditions for a free and fair election with the participation of all the political parties.
Those were music to the BNP’s ear.

It was not so to the ruling party. In December 2013, when Bangladesh was preparing for the national election, New Delhi had sent to Dhaka its foreign secretary Sujata Singh with the direction to do the reverse of what Sushma Swaraj did with her just-concluded trip.
She had met HM Ershad on that meeting and told him directly that his party must participate in the election in order to stop the BNP and its allies from coming to power.

Perhaps, the change in stance was due to the fact that in 2014, it was the Congress in power that had a special historical relationship with Awami League. In addition, even if the BJP led government in New Delhi wanted to repeat what the Congress had done for the Awami League during the 2014 election, the political situation in Bangladesh would not favour BNP to participate in election.

In addition, there were no Shahabag or Hefazat movements or the war crime trials that had helped create the conditions for New Delhi to help the Awami League to hold an election similar to that controversial 2014 election.

New Delhi’s support for participatory election was influenced by two other factors.
One was its awareness of the restlessness in Bangladesh among the people to regain their voting rights that were affecting India’s acceptance in Bangladesh.
The other was the volatile situation in Bangladesh over the presence of the one million Rohingya refugees that according to many strategic analysts had the potential to attract the international terrorist groups such as ISIS and Al Qaeda now on the run in their base in the Middle East to the region.

A non-participatory election in Bangladesh with the prospect of violence would aggravate the situation further and turn the region (including Bangladesh) as one analyst, Jasminder Singh of the S Rajaratnam International School in Singapore had suggested, into a ‘hotbed of international terrorism.’

Therefore, Sushma Swaraj perhaps came to Dhaka to start a new era of Bangladesh-India relationship based upon the country to country tie rather than party to party connection.
The existing reality in Bangladesh and in the region influenced the emergence of this new era.
And such a direction would protect New Delhi’s interest, because both the mainstream parties of Bangladesh had given clear evidence that they wanted New Delhi’s friendship.
More importantly, it would also help New Delhi’s regional interests in competing with China where Myanmar had emerged as the new bone of contention.
M Serajul Islam is a former career ambassador.
http://www.newagebd.net/article/27143/why-did-sushma-swaraj-come-to-dhaka

 

[Banglar Bir]

FOREIGN HANDS IN BANGLADESH POLITICS
On subservient political elite and uncritical intelligentsia
Nurul Kabir | Published: 18:26, Nov 16,2017 | Updated: 19:52, Nov 16,2017

THE couple of rhetorical slogans of the ruling class political parties, the Bangladesh Awami League and the Bangladesh Nationalist Party in particular, that most Bangladeshis hear almost every day, and that too for years, are the ‘spirit of liberation war’ and ‘nationalism’ while the politically conscious sections of the people have painfully been observing for years now that both the parties, when in trouble to retain or return to power, rush to foreign powers, far and near, for multidimensional blessings.
Understandably, the foreign powers find the phenomenon very useful, for it provides the foreigners with ample opportunity to interfere easily with the host country’s domestic affairs and twist arms of the pleading political parties when necessary to get things done in their national interests, more often than not at the cost of Bangladesh’s.

Under such a political circumstance, any country’s patriotic intelligentsia is expected to critically intervene in analysing the actions and inactions of the political class as to how the latter’s subjugation to foreign powers compromises the ‘spirit of liberation war’ – national progress with dignity being one, and ‘nationalism’ – preference of national interests to any other things on earth that is, and mount popular pressure by way of guiding public opinions in the right direction.

But, alas, Bangladesh’s mainstream intelligentsia is sharply divided on a partisan line and, therefore, they support, and make efforts to justify, whatever approach their respective parties take to foreign powers and whatever foreign policies those parties adopt and pursue, instead of presenting before the public the critical analyses of the approaches and policies from the point of view of the ‘spirit of liberation war’ and ‘nationalism’.

The result is obvious: foreign powers continue to interfere with Bangladesh’s national politics, and at times substantially influence the process of change of guards in power in gross disregards for the country’s liberation war spirit and nationalistic pride of the people at large. The people of Bangladesh, after all, did not fight for national independence to get the state controlled by any foreign country, including India that had helped us achieve independence from Pakistan in 1971.
II
THE subservience of the ruling class parties of Bangladesh to foreign powers has reached such an ugly state that some foreign countries, India for an example, do no longer feel constrained to hide their interferences with Bangladesh’s internal political process – the recent public disclosure of such interference in 2008 by Pranab Mukharjee (b 1935), a former minister and president of India from the Indian National Congress, being a glaring example.

Mukharjee has unambiguously stated in the recently released third volume of his biography as to how he had decided the course of Bangladesh’s internal politics in 2008, which, understandably, led to the process of Awami League’s return to power and a smooth exit of General Moeen U Ahmed who had illegally grabbed power in 2007.

General Moeen U Ahmed, former chief of the Bangladesh army, who had illegally grabbed power in January 2007 and misruled the country until the Awami League was voted to power in December 2008, escaped a trial for sedition despite pervasive popular demand.

The general and his civil and military cohorts illegally ran the affairs of the state through a proxy cabinet, headed by Fakhruddun Ahmed, for two years.

Those two years, they had humiliated the entire political class, harassed many a member of the dissenting section of the intelligentsia, disrupted national economy by arresting almost all the big industrialists, jeopardised livelihoods of thousands of small traders and their families by way of demolishing their makeshift establishments in the name of cleanliness drive, so on and so forth.

However, a new parliament was eventually elected under the supervision of the military-driven government in late December 2008 and the Awami League-led political alliance formed government in early January 2009 with a command over the two-thirds of members in the parliament. Then, the House repeatedly witnessed a bi-partisan demand for trying General Moyeen U Ahmed and his military and civilian associates for their seditious activities.

But the government of Sheikh Hasina refused to meet the justified demand, without providing any explanation in or outside the parliament. Meanwhile, the general left the country.

The government’s silence about the proposed trial gave birth to many ‘speculations’ in the country’s political arena. Some of the League’s political opponents attributed the general’s safe exit to his juntas behind-the-scenes contributions to the Awami League’s electoral victory while others attributed it to the League’s long history of overt and covert cooperation with the military coup leaders.

There was hardly any reason to take seriously the allegation of the army assistance for the League’s victory for, given the fresh memory of the BNP’s misgovernance and Hawa Bhaban excesses, the League was sure to win the national elections in 2008, without any military cooperation although the victory by more than two-thirds majority had genuinely raised some eyebrows.

The second allegation that it was the League’s post-independence tendency to cooperate with military juntas, barring only that of General Ziaur Rahman, dissuaded the party leadership from taking the guilty generals to justice found some grounds.

The League, after all, had first appreciated General HM Ershad’s illegal takeover of power in 1982 through its party’s now-defunct Bangla daily newspaper, Banglar Bani, the next day and later cooperated with Ershad in legalising its martial law regime by participating in general elections in 1986 when most opposition parties refused to do so.

Then the party sympathised with General ASM Nasim’s abortive coup d’état in 1996, and finally Sheikh Hasina publicly announced in 2007 that her party would give retrospective endorsement to General Moyeen’s illegal regime, if, in the end, the Awami League goes to power.

Even earlier, following the gruesome murder of Bangladesh’s founding president and the Awami League supremo Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, along with most of his family members, in August 1975, a large section of the League leaders had joined hands with the commanders of the brutal military putsch and joined the government installed by the coup leaders on the Sheikh’s unattended body.

Then, some League leaders, such as Mizanur Rahman Chowdhury, admittedly, aspired to work with General Ziaur Rahman. (Mizanur Rahman Chowdhury, Rajnitir Tin Kal, Hafez Mahmud Foundation, Dhaka, 2001, p 179) Given the history, it was not unusual for many to believe that the government of the Awami League, despite its bitter rhetorical criticism of the political parties born out of cantonments, must have politically reconciled with another military regime, and this time that of General Moeen U Ahmed.

Now that Pranab Mukharjee has publicly stated the role that he had played in shaping the Bangladesh’s politics those days, it is crystal clear that Moyeen’s job security and impunity from seditious crime were directly related to Sheikh Hasina’s release and return to power, and that too through Indian mediation.

Mukharjee writes: “In February 2008, Bangladesh Army Chief Moeen Ahmed came to India on a six-day visit. He called on me too. During the informal interaction, I impressed upon him the importance of releasing political prisoners. He was apprehensive about his dismissal by Sheikh Hasina after her release.

But I took personal responsibility and assured the General of his survival after Hasina’s return to power.” (Pranab Mukharjee, The Coalition Years: 1996–2012, Rupa Publications, New Delhi, 2017, p 114) The sequence of events, after all, took place exactly in the order that Mukharjee had suggested to Moyeen: Sheikh Hasina was released, her party returned to power through an election supervised by the military-driven government, General Moyeen’s job was saved and he left the country after his regular retirement safely, without being tried for the seditious crime that he had committed. The general, then, reportedly received his Indian mentor’s assistance for his medical treatment in the United States. Mukharjee writes, “I also facilitated General Moeen’s treatment in the US when he was suffering from cancer.” (Pranab Mukharjee, The Coalition Years: 1996–2012, p 115)

Be that as it may, this is indeed very difficult for a people, who had created Bangladesh by fighting a bloodied liberation war, to reconcile with the fact that a foreign state plays a role in shaping the politics of their independent country. Moreover, it is equally difficult to accept that the chief of Bangladesh’s national army, which is a prime symbol of the independent republic’s national sovereignty, sought his job security from the politician of a foreign state – India in the present case.

The general should have been court-martialled for the offence against the country’s sovereignty.

It is, on the other hand, a matter of serious disappointment that the Awami League, the country’s oldest political party, which had presided over Bangladesh’s liberation war and is still having a substantive amount of popular support, allowed an errant general and his partners in crimes to go unpunished at the advice of a foreign power.

On top of these all, it is strange that a section of the country’s mainstream intelligentsia has indulged in appreciating the Indian politician in question, Pranab Mukharjee, for doing a ‘great service’ by helping Bangladesh come out of a grave political crisis in 2008.

Some of the members of the intelligentsia in question have even gone to the extent of claiming that by doing the ‘service’, Mukharjee has rather proved once again that India remains ever-ready to help Bangladesh since in 1971! The self-defeating strange observations might, who knows, further inspire India to continue poking its hegemonic nose into the Bangladesh’s internal affairs.

III
THE sections of the Bangladeshi intelligentsia that tend to consider Indian political and intelligence establishments, or those of any other countries for that matter, philanthropic forces dedicated to Bangladesh’s interests, one is forced believe, suffer from certain dangerous intellectual inadequacies — ranging from the lacking in the sense of history to the inability of grasping the importance of geopolitics in determining international relations.

That Bangladesh has all the reasons to remain thankful to India for the latter’s multi-dimensional assistance during Bangladesh’s liberation war is unquestionable, but it is very important for the Bangladeshi intelligentsia to understand that the Indian friendship in 1971 was neither altruistic nor philanthropic in nature.

They need to note that when India was arming the patriotic youths who were from East Bengal to fight for liberating Bangladesh from Pakistan, the Indian army and special police were brutally repressing the patriotic Mizo and Naga youths making similar efforts for their respective national liberation from India.

On top of that all, the Indian military, as well as diplomatic and political establishments, did hardly hide their self-seeking objectives behind helping Bangladesh get liberated from Pakistan. K Subrahmanyam, director of India’s Institute for Defence Studies and Analysis, publicly persuaded the political establishments in Delhi to get involved, even intervene, in the East Bengal crisis for the sake of India’s ‘national interest’.

Subrahmanyam argued at a meeting of the Indian Council of World Affairs in Delhi on March 31, 1971, as was reported by the Hindustan Times the next day: “What India must realise is the fact that the break up of Pakistan is in our own interest, an opportunity, the like of which will never come again.” (The Hindustan Times is cited in Zaglul Haider, The Changing Pattern of Bangladesh Foreign Policy: A Comparative Study of the Mujib and Zia Regimes, The University Press Limited, Dhaka, 2006, p 31. Also Mizanur Rahman Shelley, Emergence of a New Nation in a Multi-polar World: Bangladesh, Fourth revised and enlarged edition, Academic Press and Publisher’s Library, Dhaka, 2007, p 60) Subrahmanyam would also defend his position in a post-independence interview to a Bangladeshi researcher, saying that ‘it was the chance of a century for India to divide Pakistan’. (K Subrahmanyam’s interview in Afsan Chodhury, Bangladesh: 1971, Vol 4, Mowla Brothers, Dhaka, 2007, p 663.)

JN Dixit, an Indian foreign ministry official who headed a ‘special unit to deal with East Pakistan crisis’ in 1971 and later became the first Indian deputy high commissioner in Dhaka, also admits that it is ‘correct’ that ‘India’s primary motivation for supporting the Bangladesh liberation war was its own strategic interests’. (JN Dixit, Liberation and Beyond: Indo-Bangladesh Relations, University Press Limited, Dhaka, 1999, p 175)

Dr Triguna Sen (1905–1998), a leader of the Indian National Congress and former education minister, unequivocally admitted to Swadhin Bangla Betar Kendra-famed Belal Muhammad in the last week of April 1971 that he had been working for dismembering Pakistan since 1949. Dr Sen said, “We had set up a ‘Bangladesh Cell’ in 1949. I have been heading the Cell since then. After so many years, the two rivers have met in the same confluence.” (Belal Muhammad, Swadhin Bangla Betar Kendra, 2nd reprint, 4th edition, Anupam Prokashni, Dhaka, 2012, p 84)

Finally, Indira Gandhi, prime minister of India, unambiguously told her cabinet on December 10, 1971 that Indian objectives were ‘to emerge from the [Bangladesh] war as the dominant power in South Asia and the Indian Ocean’, following which ‘China would respect India and might even decide to improve relations with New Delhi’. (BZ Khasru, Myths and Facts: Bangladesh Liberation War: How India, U.S., China, and the U.S.S.R. Shaped the Outcome, Rupa Publications, New Delhi, 2010, p 376) After all this confessions by the eminent Indians, one cannot have any justified reason to find Indian assistance for the Bangladesh cause in 1971 to be a selfless political and military exercise.

Nevertheless, the fact remains that India’s strategic interests to dismantle Pakistan and Bangladesh’s legitimate aspiration for independence converged at that point of the sub-continental history. Evidently, it was in the mutual interests that Bangladesh and India helped each other to achieve their respective objectives in 1971, which does not bind either of the parties to sacrifice their ‘national interests’ for the other in the post-1971 realities.

Indian political elite and its nationalist intelligentsia hardly appear to be confused about the national interests in international relations, which is being reflected in their changing foreign policies towards different countries on many occasions, the latest being Delhi’s present support for Myanmar vis-à-vis Bangladesh.

The government of Myanmar has been conducting, what the United Nations has said ‘a textbook example of ethnic cleansing’ against the poverty-stricken Rohingya population of the country’s Rakhaine state since the early 1980s, forcing as many as 10,00,000 people so far, of them more than 6,00,000 since the end of August this year, into bordering Bangladesh while the Indian establishment has unequivocally been supporting the Rohingya genocide for its own geostrategic interests in the region.

For the same reason, India helped Myanmar in more than one ways in the latter’s dispute with Bangladesh over maritime boundary. Bangladesh or its intelligentsia should not blame India for pursuing its national interests with Myanmar, or any other country for that matter, but at the same time they also should not preach that Bangladesh’s interest lies in the eternal unilateral friendship with India, even if Indian political, economic, cultural and diplomatic manoeuvres continue to hurt Bangladesh’s interests.

Bangladesh’s political force/s and their partisan intelligentsia tolerating, let alone making efforts to justify, Pranab Mukharjee’s meddling with the country’s internal political process serves, wittingly or unwittingly, Indian interests at the cost of Bangladesh’s. It is now common knowledge that India has reaped many a unilateral benefit from Bangladesh particularly since 2008.

That such subservience to foreign powers in national politics inspires the foreigners to continue with the interference rather more zealously became evident in Delhi’s direct intervention in Bangladesh’s electoral process and political polarisation in late 2013.

While visiting Dhaka on December 4, 2013, Sujata Singh, then foreign affairs secretary of India when Pranab Mukharjee was the foreign minister, bluntly asked Jatiya Party chairman HM Ershad, as the latter told the national media which reported the event the next day, to participate in the ensuing elections, although his party had decided earlier not to on grounds that there was no environment for inclusive elections scheduled for January 5, 2014.

Following Ershad’s disclosure about Singh’s persuasion, he was forcibly taken to the Dhaka cantonment and admitted to the military hospital and then Ershad gave in, for reasons any citizen with average level of intelligence can understand. While the Awami League and Indian establishments of the day succeeded to coerce Ershad’s Jatiya Party into the ‘elections’, with all the opposition parties boycotting the polls, the farcical event has actually produced poisonous consequences for both the Awami League and Bangladesh.

The disastrous episode began with the entire opposition’s refusal to participate in polls under the ruling Awami League’s crude partisan control of the electioneering process — a situation that the country had witnessed in 2006 when the Awami League took the same stance as the erstwhile government of the BNP tried to conduct polls the same way.

However, even after Ershad’s Jatiya Party was coerced into the similar polls by the Awami League in 2014, no other political party, not even any non-party individual, outside the League’s ruling coalition set any candidate in 153 of 300 seats of the parliament while there were some apolitical or non-political ‘independent’ individuals contested in the rest 147 parliamentary constituencies where, again, less than 10 per cent of voters visited the polling stations.

But at the end of the process, a subjugated Election Commission declared the Awami League and its partners to have own the polls by more than two-thirds majority, with 153 candidates elected uncontested, and thus the Awami League retained its power.

Naturally, it was considered illegitimate by all at home and abroad, excepting India.
It was unquestionably a duplicitous stance on part of the Indian political establishment for Mukharjee and the likes of India would not have reconciled with such an elections in their own country. Be that as it may, the installation by and the continuation of Sheikh Hasina’s government through such a sham election has not only further shattered the people’s aspiration for inclusive elections, but also damaged almost irreparably the Awami League’s political credibility.
Besides, nobody knows how many years Bangladesh would need to overcome the political and constitutional crises that the disastrous political event has pushed the country into.

While the politically conscious sections of the Bangladeshis primarily blame the political class of their own for the present political impasse, they also hold responsible for the crisis the foreign politicians interfering with Bangladesh’s political process — the reason the patriotic Bangladeshis dislike Pranab Mukharjee, no matter what his wishful thoughts about it are. (Mukharjee believes that, as reflected in a recent interview published in a Dhaka-based Bangla daily, Prothom Alo, in November 7-8, ‘every Bangladeshi loves’ him and that ‘none in Bangladesh is ready to accept’ his criticism!!) Mukharjee and the like are only expected to realise that a people who laid down their lives in hundreds of thousands for achieving national independence cannot appreciate foreigners irrationally poking noses in the internal affairs of their independent country.

The people of Bangladesh, after all, are completely aware of the facts that taking away voting rights of the citizens by fraudulent electoral practices amounts to denying ‘people’s sovereignty’ in making and unmaking laws of the republic through the elected representatives while committing the political offence in question collaboration with any foreign power/s is tantamount to compromising ‘sovereignty of the republic’ in the community of states.
IV
WHILE the ruling class political forces of Bangladesh have visibly deviated from the ‘spirit of liberation war’ and ‘nationalism’ in the true sense of the terms, the country’s intelligentsia committed to the ideals is expected to remain critical of the policies and performances of the political parties and their foreign ‘friends’ in question.

The people of Bangladesh fought the liberation war with the unambiguous objective of creating a democratic republic based on the professed principles of ‘equality, human dignity and social justice’, but the successive governments of the ruling class have pursued policies that generate pervasive inequalities, strip the citizens of human dignity and breed injustice across society.

The freedom fighters laid down lives for creating a state that would shape its own destiny based on the consent of the people at large, but the political forces of the ruling classes have developed the habit of retaining or returning to power with the help of their ‘foreign friends’, ignoring the people’s consent.

Under such circumstances, it is time that the country’s intelligentsia presented before the public multidimensional critical analyses of the shameful phenomenon and provided the citizens with a clear sense of direction towards a democratic future, imbibed with liberation war spirit and, thus, did justice to those who sacrificed their lives for the country’s independence.
Nurul Kabir is editor of New Age.
http://www.newagebd.net/article/28495/on-subservient-political-elite-and-uncritical-intelligentsia

 

[Banglar Bir]

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