Bangladesh will struggle to restore economic momentum or regain investor confidence

Brahma Chellaney, Nikkei Asia

Bangladesh, the world’s eighth-most populous country, is at a crossroads following a military-backed regime change and violent upheaval. Amid purges, extrajudicial killings, arbitrary arrests, systematic attacks on religious and ethnic minorities, and the freeing of jailed terrorists, one development stands out — an upsurge of radical Islamism across the country.

Since its violent birth in 1971, Bangladesh has been struggling to evolve into a full-fledged democracy, with the powerful military’s two-dozen coups or coup attempts casting an enduring shadow over the country’s politics.

Today, empowered by the overthrow of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina on Aug. 5, when the military packed her off to neighboring India before she could formally resign, Islamists are asserting themselves on the streets.

Student marchers holding black flags or banners of the Islamic State group are calling for a caliphate. Islamists are harassing and mistreating women for not wearing veils, exposing their stomachs while wearing saris, or for having short hair. Some attacks on women have been brutal, including on mountaineer Shayla Bithi, a national icon.

The Hizbut Tahrir extremist group, proscribed by Hasina and several Western governments as an international terrorist threat, is now operating freely in Bangladesh, holding big rallies. A memorial for police officers killed while repulsing a terrorist attack mainly on foreigners at a famous cafe in Dhaka, the capital, was demolished and a Hizbut Tahrir poster put up.

Since the overthrow of Hasina’s secular government, which kept Islamists and the military in check but became increasingly undemocratic, hundreds of Islamist-backed attacks have been reported on Hindus, Christians, Buddhists and the tribespeople that inhabit the country’s southeastern hill tracts. Hindus, the largest minority, are bearing the brunt of such violence.

During the most important religious occasion of the long-persecuted Hindus, Islamists seized the podium from worshippers at a site and sang a song calling for an Islamist revolution.

According to a U.S. intelligence assessment, Islamic State created a terrorist network in 2015 with the goal of “overthrowing the Bangladeshi government to establish a fundamentalist Islamic state.” The recent regime change has clearly emboldened Islamic State supporters and sympathizers.

Seeking to Arabize Islam in Bangladesh, extremists are targeting the country’s syncretic tradition of Sufism by demolishing shrines and attacking preachers in an effort to wipe out the Sufi culture. Violent attacks have also extended to members of the Ahmadiyya sect, which Islamists refuse to accept as Muslim.

Jihadists, especially those belonging to the student wing of the Hasina-proscribed Jamaat-e-Islami organization, played a key role in the violent, youth-led uprising that overthrew the 76-year-old “Iron Lady.” Hundreds of people were killed in the violence, many by police shooting but also in shooting by rioters, some of whom, according to the new military-installed regime, looted powerful sniper rifles from law enforcement personnel or government armories.

Mob attacks on some 450 police stations reduced them to burned-out shells. Crowds captured dozens of police officers, beating them to death and hanging the bodies of some from bridges in Dhaka.

Today, lawlessness still rules Bangladesh. Amid political vendettas, mob violence and targeted attacks have persisted under the new regime, which is led by the 84-year-old Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus but includes a leader of the radical Hefazat-e-Islam organization that seeks the rule of Islamic law.

Yunus has sought to appease jihadists, including meeting with Islamist leaders. His regime, despite lacking constitutional legitimacy, has lifted bans on Islamist groups and freed jailed terrorists and convicted jihadists, including the chief of the outlawed al-Qaida-affiliate Ansar al-Islam. Hundreds of more Islamists have escaped from prisons.

Furthermore, to Islamist delight, the new regime is rewriting Bangladesh’s history, including attempting to erase or obscure the role of its charismatic founding leader, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, whose statues and portraits have been defaced or dismantled. Rahman, Hasina’s father, was killed by army officers in the first coup in 1975.

While mollycoddling Islamists, the regime has been making large-scale arrests of critics and political opponents and even scholars and journalists, often on fake murder charges. It also removed the chief justice and the five other most-senior Supreme Court justices.

Just in the first week of October, according to official figures, 7,018 people were arbitrarily jailed. At least 129 journalists have been slapped with trumped-up murder, abduction or assault charges. To make matters worse, political detainees often face physical assault in courts, with a retired Supreme Court justice needing emergency surgery after being badly beaten up.

To be sure, the army is today calling the shots behind a civilian facade, just as it did during 2007-2008 when it kept an interim civilian-led regime in power after staging a coup. The military sees Yunus, the regime’s nominal head, as its fall guy.

Meanwhile, the economic and human toll from the Islamist violence in Bangladesh, including attacks on factories, hospitals and hotels, is increasing. In a case of apparent mass murder, 182 people are still listed missing and presumed dead from the Aug. 27 burning down of an $84 million tire-manufacturing plant, the country’s largest.

Bangladesh is urgently seeking more than $5 billion in financial aid from international lenders to rescue its economy, which was one of the world’s fastest-growing until 2021 but is now in dire straits. The garment industry, which last year accounted for 85% of the country’s total export earnings, is today in turmoil due to vandalism, arson and labor unrest, with many factories shut. Is that correct?

It will not be easy to restore economic activity or reestablish the confidence of foreign investors given that Islamists now have free rein to violently push their revisionist agenda.

In fact, risk is growing that the world’s most densely populated country, excluding microstates and mini-states, could slide into jihadist chaos.

Brahma Chellaney, a professor of strategic studies at the independent, New Delhi-based Centre for Policy Research and fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin, is the author of nine books, including “Water: Asia’s New Battleground” (Georgetown University Press), which won the Bernard Schwartz Book Award.