Sheikh Hasina: Caught Between The Call Of Jihad And The Politics Of Poverty

Caught between the call of jihad and the politics of poverty, Sheikh Hasina is battling alone for Bangladesh. India and the West had better take notice.

- Ullekh NP

For a celebrated artist whose photographic works border on the melancholy and the macabre, Dhaka-based Shumon Ahmed is a happiness habitué, guffawing at the slightest hint of a joke. The burly 29-year-old has had an unpleasant if not traumatic childhood, born to a differently abled mother and a strict, laconic father, but betrays not a whiff of lament about those years, about how he overcame taunts and provocations in a joint family that was extremely judgmental. The grimness of contemporary Bangladesh, however, is never too far from the mind. “To be honest,” he pauses mid-conversation to say, “we are all shaken. I wouldn’t do things I would have otherwise done.” Ahmed, seated in the VIP Lounge of the Dhaka Art Summit, sipping coffee, is referring to the fatal attacks on atheists and bloggers over the past few years in a country that has prided itself on its hyped secular credentials.

The zealous public display of Bengali identity over the Muslim one, a cause championed by the ruling Awami League led by Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, is under fire. And lately, with the shadow of IS designs on the country looming large, artists and writers are too overwrought to listen to the all-is-well counsel offered by caviar liberals, who it seems are unabashedly aligned with the federal government. It is run with an iron hand by Hasina, daughter of Mujibur Rahman, Bangladesh’s founding leader whose death in 1975 at the hands of renegade military officers threw the country into political turmoil and frequent bouts of military dictatorship.