On August 15, 1975, the Father of the Nation Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, and almost all his family members were brutally killed. Shortly after this murder, on 25 August 1975, Major General Ziaur Rahman was promoted to the post of Chief of Army Staff removing Major General AKM Shafiullah. Following this, four national leaders were killed in prison on November 3. Then began the indiscriminate trampling of the constitution of Bangladesh one after another, e.g. politics of all the parties was banned, The Bangladesh Collaborators (Special Tribunals) Order, 1972 was abolished and the prohibition of communal politics was lifted by repealing Article 38. After the traitor Khondaker Moshtaq, Justice Abu Sadat Sayem took over as president of Bangladesh. General Ziaur Rahman, the martial law administrator of Sayem, became the president by removing him at gunpoint. Ziaur Rahman established the Bangladesh Nationalist Party or BNP using the powers of president, martial law administrator, and army chief at the same time. Born on September 1, 1978, in less than six months, this party won two-thirds of the seats in the disputed February 1979 election. This is how the BNP started its journey in the arena of politics of Bangladesh with the blessing of foreign powers through apolitical policies.
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From the beginning, they drew in war criminals and communal political forces, with the nefarious aim of displacing Bangladesh Awami League, the mainstream party of the liberation war and directing Bangladesh to Pakistani ideology. On May 31, 1981, Ziaur Rahman died in a military coup at Chittagong Circuit House. Since his death, the estranged and embattled BNP’s dependence on the war crimes group Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami increased. The leaders of Pakistan’s collaborators Razakar, Albadar, and Al-Shams became their main political support. During this time, they indulged in the fiendish game of distortion of the history of the great liberation war, declaration of independence, etc.; no wonder ‘Bangabandhu’ became a taboo word. After that, 16 years of long military rule was ended by a mass coup. The national election was held in 1991 under an interim government in which the BNP won. After the formation of the government, BNP’s aim was only to destroy the Awami League. By not focusing on the development of the country, they became alienated from common people.
On February 15, 1996, they installed the Freedom Party, the party of Bangabandhu’s murderer, as the opposition party in the parliament. All the other political parties boycotted that election. The government collapsed in the face of violent protests within a few days. The election was held again in 1996. Bangladesh Awami League came to power after 21 years through this election held under a caretaker government. At the end of the term, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, in 2001, systematically handed over the responsibility of conducting the next election to a caretaker government. BNP won this election. But at the end of the term, in 2006, the BNP started various tussles and conspiracies with forming the next caretaker government. After that, the anti-BNP-Jamaat movement started again. BNP lost its foothold this time too. The BNP-Jamaat alliance left no stone unturned to form a biased caretaker government by increasing the retirement age of judges and then making the president (who was a party man) the chief adviser to the caretaker government. In order to wipe out the Awami League in this last term of BNP, on August 21, 2004, 13 grenades were thrown at Sheikh Hasina and other leaders in broad daylight at a political congregation. On August 17, 2005, a series of simultaneous bombings were carried out across the country. Courts were the main targets of these bombings. The rise of militancy in Bangladesh was expected due to the BNP’s excessive dalliance with anti-independence communal forces. During this period of BNP, the country was run mainly through Tarique Rahman’s so-called Hawa Bhaban.
To maintain the posts, the ministers and MPs had to regularly visit the party’s senior vice-chairman Tarique Rahman at Hawa Bhaban. Such was the naughtiness that even the country’s Prime Minister Khaleda Zia was helpless in dealing with her son Tarique Rahman. The parallel administration of the entire country became axed in the hands of Tarique Rahman, who was more known as Mr. Ten Percent at that time. The BNP-Jamaat alliance, which was in complete disarray in this reality, lost miserably in the 2008 elections to the 14-party alliance led by the Awami League. People’s mistrust and hatred towards them had reached a level from which they still could not come out. That is why they failed in 2014 even with arson to prevent the election held under the constitution. In the subsequent years, they became leaderless before the 2018 elections. Party chairperson Begum Khaleda Zia was convicted of corruption and the party’s senior vice-chairperson was sentenced to life imprisonment in the grenade attack case and has been living on the run in London. In this situation, they hired Dr. Kamal Hussain and ASM Abdur Rob from other parties to form a new alliance. But from behind the scenes, Mr. Ten Percent Tarique Rahman did extensive business with candidate nominations in this election.
The leaderless and disoriented BNP managed to win only six seats in this election. The parliamentarians who won these six seats have been in the parliament for almost four and a half years enjoying all the privileges and then suddenly fell into the movement to establish a caretaker government by overthrowing the government with the help of foreign powers. There is no reason why the people of the country would suddenly become more confident in the BNP than the Awami League and that they would forget all the past misdeeds of the BNP and declare solidarity with them. This movement of BNP-JAMAAT versus Bangladesh Awami League led 14-party alliance establishing big development campaign in almost all sectors has therefore, as expected, flown like a straw. Despite the blessings of some foreign powers, their past apolitical policies, electoral alliance with the war criminal party Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami, failure to understand the geopolitical reality, and failure to understand the difference between Smart Bangladesh and Take Back Bangladesh have caused BNP to be unsuccessful once again. They will not be able to come out of this black hole of failure anytime soon, according to political calculations.
