Day of infamy that changed Bangladesh
The unprecedented scale of atrocity of the grisly grenade attack on August 21 2004 meant to wipe out the whole leadership of Awami League and its leader Sheikh Hasina has been burnt into the collective consciousness of the nation forever. Nothing like this had ever happened before, and nobody wants anything similar, ever. It was by sheer luck that Sheikh Hasina survived. In the subsequent struggle, it was the combined effort of the people of Bangladesh and the party's leadership that helped the country recover from the descent into abysmal chaos. Today is the day that the nation will reaffirm its determination to resist any such atrocity and hatred that led to this event that would weaken us as a nation and hurt its growing economy.
On this day 18 years back, in 2004, the nation witnessed the gruesome event that will forever be considered the darkest day in the country's political history since the killing of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and most of his family members.
Those who were present on 21 August 2004 at the Awami League rally in front of the party office at Bangabandhu Avenue still carry the gruesome mementos of the heinous grenade attack, some on their bodfies, and some in the mental trauma suffered in those few seconds of determined terroristic assassination attempt in that summer afternoon on the leader of the opposition and Party President Sheikh Hasina, and the top leaders of the party.
This was not only an event of political violence perpetrated on another hugely popular political party, it was something even more sinister born in the darkest labyrinths of the cruellest minds of state sponsored actors fed by pure and unmitigated hatred.
It is now known that the grenade attack on that day on the leadership of Awami League and its workers was meticulously planned wrapped with the ideologies of atrocity, fascism, and crude schemes of elimination practised by forces opposed to democratic ideals of Bangabandhu and Bangladesh.
That day the political landscape of Bangladesh was changed in an instant when the exploding military grade grenades on the Awami League rally left at least 24 people dead and numerous others wounded and maimed.
The path to that catastrophic event was paved by the BNP-led government over the years.
The attack of August 21 was not an isolated blip in the country's history but it was a link of a chain of events that also propelled Bangladesh on the path to militancy.
When BNP came to power in its first term in 1991 after the restoration of democracy, it gave no indication that it was to become a sponsor of such a grotesque crime. It was considered a centre-right party going about negotiating with donors for funding the national budget and little else.
When the Awami League took to the streets on occasional protests, BNP used its partisan police to wield the batons on the leaders and workers irrespective of status. On one occasion, it even beat up the League's veteran leader Motia Chowdhury, a leader respected by all. But this was business as usual in this country where politics in the streets is a time-honoured tradition. There was no indication that BNP would turn into the deviant ogre of a party a few years down the line.
Under the wings of the party in power, an extreme militant outfit, Harkatul Jihad Al-Islami Bangladesh (Huji), was getting nurtured. Its public appearance through a formal press conference in Dhaka in 1992 elicited no reaction from the BNP government. It can be assumed safely that such an outfit cannot appear in public domain without state patronage.
Soon, the first dark clouds of serious extremism appeared in the form of a string of bomb blasts when the Awami League came to power in the next election in 1996.
A function of Udichi – a left-leaning cultural forum – was bombed in Jashore, killing 10. A bomb was planted at the venue of then prime minister Sheikh Hasina's meeting in Gopalganj. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had investigated the incident and identified Harkatul Jihad as the suspect group.
Then Huji chief Mufti Hannan's name entered public consciousness when the US president Bill Clinton's trip to Manikganj in 2000 was cancelled because of threats from Islamist militants.
That the militants were on a roll was asserted when, at the end of an Awami League term, another bomb blast at a traditional programme to welcome the Bangla New Year at Ramna Park, came as a token of declaration by the militants that they were bent on wiping out anything they considered "non-Islamic".
Things started to take on an ominous turn when the BNP came to power again in 2001. The nation looked on helplessly as Tarique Rahman, the BNP chairperson's son, took on supreme control of the party.
Subsequent events would show that Tarique wanted to steer his party with a fascistic intent taking the eager help of Islamist militants to eliminate BNP's arch rival Awami League.
Arms by the truckload started to come into the country, apparently with state sponsorship. While the media sounded the alarm, nobody else seemed to care and the gunrunners remained shielded.
It seemed that everyday a Islamist groups was popping up around the country with names like al Baiyenat, Harkatul Jihad, Jamiatul Mujahideen, Shahadat-e-al-Hikma, Hijbut Tawhid and so on. But the government routinely denied their existence except for that of Shahadat-e-al-Hikma, which was later banned.
Meanwhile, the militants were gaining in strength. And the country was thrown into murkier waters through a string of incendiary events all with state sponsorship.
Only four months before the August 21 grenade attack, ten truckloads of sophisticated arms were, accidentally, found to be coming into the country through Chittagong Port. Later investigations unearthed how the very high-ups of the BNP-led government, including the home minister himself, were involved in the case of arms smuggling.
Only three months before the grenade attack, Huji struck again by throwing bombs on the British high commissioner in Sylhet.
And then came the fateful August 21.
Twenty-four people were killed, many of them instantly– and for many, death did not come easy. Ivy Rahman, president of Bangladesh Mohila League, was one particular victim whose body was blown away down from the waist and had a most gruesome death days later.
Then opposition leader and now Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, who was the main target of the attack, survived by sheer luck and a human shield formed by party leaders and workers. Her hearing had suffered damage.
Hundreds are still suffering from the wounds received that day.
Today we know who were involved in the attack. It was none other than Tarique Rahman, then home minister Lutfozzaman Babar and many of the high-ups in the government and intelligence agencies.
But the BNP-led government tried to change the narrative and divert the investigation into the grisly attack revealing its political bent driving the country into a dark age.
In a Kafkaesque act, it had put the blame on the Awami League for the attack. It destroyed the evidence. It cooked up a hardly credible story of a petty criminal named Joj Mia, claiming that he had thrown the grenades. It formed a ridiculous one-man commission headed by a justice who "investigated" the attack and said a foreign country was responsible.
In the end, their charade unravelled as power changed hands and a new investigation revealed that the puppeteers were from the infamous Hawa Bhaban–Tarique Rahman and his cohorts.
The whole affair has left a deep divide in our national politics, almost surely, forever. It has shown politics in this country was not, is not, about democracy, or elections, or the people's mandate, but to go for the throat, bloodying each other's nose in the most dangerous way. It has drawn new lines and definitions of enemies.
Fortunately, the party that the BNP-led government had wanted to annihilate with blasts of grenades, has grown back in strength and unity after the initial shock.
Today, in retrospect, BNP, including its current leadership, can be held solely responsible for failure to check and condemn the genocidal attack and the events before and after the macabre crime.
The BNP should have come clean about its inglorious past. It did not.
As a result, we bear the burden of what happened on that fateful day, even today.
While the BNP and the Awami League were political rivals fighting for the seat of power in a democratic system before August 21, in the years since, the relationship between them has transformed into a zero-sum battle for survival.
Many of the turbulent political events that followed August 21 – the cancelled elections of January 2007, military-backed caretaker government rule for two years, the political violence in 2013 in the backdrop of the war crimes trial, BNP's boycott of the 2014 elections and the subsequent arson attacks during a four-month road blockade – can all be traced back to the malfeasance that was created on that fateful day.