‘New Bangladesh’ in the grip of retributive justice as mobs send Sheikh Hasina’s accomplices packing

A key figure of the Hasina regime, he has been evicted along with five other apex court judges. The decommissioned powerful coterie specialized in providing judicial cover for Hasina’s misdeeds.

The backlash against the judiciary, police and the media underway in Bangladesh is only to be expected considering the insidious supporting role all these three key institutions played in toppled Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s authoritarian rule for 15 long years; they were willing accomplices for a decade-and-a-half and are now having to pay a price for their servitude after the autocrat’s sudden fall.

Predictably enough, nobody is shedding tears for the old guard as retributive justice is meted out to them in the ‘new Bangladesh’, underlining the urgent need to depoliticize the pillars of democracy.

The counterblast is felling one heavyweight after another. The biggest gun to have been thrown out so far is the Chief Justice of Bangladesh, Obaidul Hassan. A key figure of the Hasina regime, he has been evicted along with five other apex court judges. The decommissioned powerful coterie specialized in providing judicial cover for Hasina’s misdeeds.

Hassan is being politely described as a Hasina loyalist, although he was literally an executioner! As chief of the war crimes tribunal, he sent several Hasina opponents, especially Jamaat-e-Islami leaders, to the gallows. He even had the temerity to ridicule the pro-democracy student protestors, not realizing that his own innings was about to end. He had acquired quite a reputation for meticulously denying justice to anyone who challenged Hasina on any ground. He stepped down only after protestors threatened to storm the Supreme Court and remove him and his group bodily

His successor, Syed Refaat Ahmed, admitted that “judicial excesses” were indeed committed no sooner than he was sworn in, indicating an upcoming overhaul of various courts. Just before Hassan’s fall, another Hasina supplicant, Attorney General A. M. Amin Uddin who openly defended the government’s sins, was kicked out.

Notably, the Governor of the Reserve Bank of Bangladesh, Abdur Rouf, Talukder, has also been removed. Known for his proximity to Hasina, he hurriedly put in his papers when pro-democracy protestors stormed the central bank overrunning the fortress-like security arrangements. He narrowly escaped getting lynched.

Similarly, the country’s police chief, Chowdhury Abdullah Al-Mamun, was promptly sacked by the interim government for indiscriminate killings, and Bangladesh’s newly-appointed Inspector General of Police, Mainul Islam has publicly apologized for the shameful and spineless conduct of the men in uniform during the agitation against quota in government jobs which gave freedom fighters’ progeny an unfair advantage amid shrinking employment opportunities.

The severity of reprisal attacks on security forces after Hasina fled forced the police to go on a strike! Security forces licked their wounds as 40 policemen were beaten to death by vengeful mobs and hundreds of police stations were attacked and armouries looted. The police is paying the price for teaming up with Hasina and executing her shoot-at-sight orders.

Notably, even the dreaded Directorate General of Field Intelligence (DGFI), the Bangladeshi equivalent of India’s Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) and Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), is not being spared. In an unprecedented display of people’s power, pro-democracy activists turned up at DGFI headquarters in Dhaka demanding the immediate release of detainees, which was unthinkable when Hasina was in the chair and the DGFI, like its cousin, Rapid Action Battalion (RAB), was a law into itself. But, no longer, it seems.

The anger against the pro-government media, which either blacked out or ridiculed the students’ protests, is evident from the storming of the headquarters of the state broadcaster, Bangladesh Television (BTV), in Dhaka in broad daylight in the initial stage of the movement which ultimately brought down Hasina. Agitators set fire to BTV trapping many inside who had to be rescued by police helicopters. After Hasina’s exit, offices of several private TV channels, including Jamuna, were targeted by mobs for their one-sided coverage.

Last week, Students Against Discrimination (SAD), which spearheaded the protests and is represented in the interim government, vowed to punish print and television journalists, who they characterized as “enemies of the people” for blindly supporting the Hasina regime. The top office bearers of the National Press Club in Dhaka have been removed, a new committee of neutral reporters has been appointed to run it, and the membership of 50 journalists, including senior editors who toed the government line, has been terminated.

Hasina couldn’t have commandeered the whole country violating constitutional norms and flattening all checks and balances without the collusion of collaborators in various branches of the State. They helped her take over the country knowing fully well that all of them, particularly Hasina, were acting illegally and unconstitutionally. But in the end, all their guns and indiscriminate killings couldn’t keep the protestors armed with sticks and bricks at bay. Hasina’s hatchet men, including her supporters in the fourth estate, now fear for their lives in the dawn of a ‘new Bangladesh’.