Amonth into Sheikh Hasina’s ignominious fall from the throne, political groups of different hues and colours are trying to fill the vacuum that her dictatorial rule has left behind in Bangladesh. During her 15-year in power, Hasina systematically destroyed the country’s political institutions.

When Muhammad Yunus, the country’s lone Nobel laureate, replaced her following a mass upsurge, Bangladesh didn’t have a functioning police force to speak of — a large number of its officers, handpicked by Hasina and her cronies, have either fled the country or are still in hiding.\

With no effective monitoring of the law and order situation, there are signs that extremism and Islamic militancy is trying to raise its head in a country once plagued with large scale terrorist attacks and targeted killings of atheists, militant-atheists and an LGBTQ activist.

In this context, it’s significant that last month the Yunus government released on bail Jashimuddin Rahmani, a cleric who was trained in Darul Uloom Deoband, an Islamic seminary in India’s Uttar Pradesh. He was charged with the murder of a blogger in 2013 and was accused of being the spiritual head of Al-Qaeda associated Ansarullah Bangla Team, also known as Ansar Al Islam, which has been proscribed by Bangladesh, India, US and the UK.

But the case against him was so weak that back in 2015 he was given only five years’ imprisonment for abetting the murder. To make matters worse, Hasina’s prosecution team has never been able to effectively prove Rahmani’s connection with Ansarullah Bangla team, a transnational terror outfit thought to have operatives and sympathisers in India’s West Bengal and Assam.

In addition to the case for which he has already served his term, Rahmani faced four more charges. Before his release, all but one case filed in 2008 has been withdrawn by the Yunus government.

Culture of denial

Rahmani is a glaring example of how criminally inefficient Hasina’s law enforcement agencies were. The cases against him were filed under the country’s infamous Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Act, which Hasina mostly used against her political opponents. Absurd it may sound, Shahidul Alam, Bangladesh’s most celebrated photographer, has faced the same charges under the same law. Alam’s crime was that he gave an interview to Al Jazeera criticising Hasina.

Before his prison sentence, Rahmani was a little-known cleric with some popularity among fringe elements of the society. But the media attention given to him following his release has now made him look like a victim of Hasina’s autocratic rule, and he’s cashing in on the new-found limelight. Given that anti-India sentiment is running high in Bangladesh, thanks to the India’s shoddy and myopic foreign policy, who else would Rahmani target to grow fan-following?

In one of his first speeches given after his release, Rahmani warned India that if the country interferes with the internal affairs of Bangladesh or plays foul with him, “We will ask China to close down the Chicken’s Neck and tell Northeast India to fight for its independence. We will tell Kashmir to get ready for Independence. I urge Pakistan and Afghanistan to help Kashmir become independent.” He goes on to say that he will urge West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee to liberate her state from India.

Rahmani’s case is just a small part of a bigger problem that Bangladesh’s mainstream politicians have always been infected with— the culture of denial.

Islamic militancy in Bangladesh dates back to Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) leader Khaleda Zia’s final term in office between 2001-2006. In 2004, Siddique ul-Islam alias Bangla Bhai (Bengal’s Brother) started a Salafi vigilante group in some remote parts of the country and led a reign of terror by lynching members of different Maoist insurgent groups. When the newspapers were flooded with reports of these barbaric acts, Jamaat-e-Islami was a junior partner in Zia’s government. Jamaat leader Motiur Rahman Nizami, then Industries Minister, called Bangla Bhai a figment of media’s imagination—”Bangla Bhai was created by some newspapers as the government has found no existence of him.”

The BNP also kept denying until it rudely woke up to reality a year later. Meanwhile, Bangla Bhai joined hands with a cleric Abdur Rahman and formed an Al-Qaeda affiliated group named Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB). In 2005, the group simultaneously blasted at least 459 time bombs in 63 of 64 districts across the country. It was followed by strings of terror attacks that witnessed Bangladesh’s first suicide bombing. The BNP government arrested the top JMB leaders who were later executed.

However, the culture of denial continued. It went on even when Hasina’s Awami League came to power. In 2015, the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in its magazine Dabiq claimed responsibility for killing Italian aid worker Cesare Tavella and Japanese national Kunio Hoshi in Bangladesh’s capital. The Hasina government denied any ISIS involvement in the attacks. It invented the hands of a group called neo-JMB for the incidents.

A year later, Bangladesh faced the biggest terror attack in the country’s history when five ISIS terrorists killed 29 people and posted photos of the attack in the group’s media. The government again blamed it on the ‘neo-JMB’, because accepting the presence of ISIS would harm Bangladesh’s image abroad. Hasina’s Home Minister Asaduzzaman Kamal even questioned “Why will the ISIS come here?”