In 1996, I flew to Dhaka to meet Sheikh Hasina, the newly elected prime minister of Bangladesh, to discuss her economic strategy. It was not a pleasant experience. Hasina was humourless, arrogant and bitter – by a long stretch, the most unlikeable politician I’ve met in the sub-continent. By contrast her diminutive niece, Tulip Siddiq, Labour’s anti-corruption minister who has just resigned over her ties to her aunt, is a charmer.
It just stretches credulity that Siddiq and the Labour party did not know that aunty Hasina was a rotten apple
To be fair to Hasina, she had excuses for her unattractive demeanour. There was a singular focus on her political raison d’etre – to avenge the brutal assassination of her father, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the leader of Bangladesh’s independence movement and its first president. Pakistan’s attempt to crush Mujibur’s revolt was arguably the most egregious genocide of the second half of the 20th century. In the early hours of 25 March 1971, the army swept through Dhaka, slaughtering the leaders of Mujibur’s Awami League party and the pro-independence ‘intelligentsia’ in their homes.
Later the inquiry into the so-called ‘Night of the Intellectuals’ would conclude that ‘it was as if a ferocious animal having been kept chained and starved was suddenly let loose’. In the course of the genocide over several months, 200,000 women were raped, with some kept as sex slaves in army cantonments. A total of three million people died, including academics, scientists, teachers, lawyers, students, and non-Muslim minorities such as Hindus and Christians. Time magazine described Dhaka as ‘a city of the dead’.
Even after India invaded Pakistan and smashed its army, thereby securing Mujibur’s dream of an independent Bangladesh, the bloodletting did not end.
Mujibur, the charismatic revolutionary leader, became a repressive and tyrannical socialist ruler. On 15 August 1975, four army majors stormed his house and gunned him down with 17 members of his family. Sheikh Hasina, who was 27 at the time and was visiting Europe, survived. In 1981, she took the reins of the Awami League. She morbidly preserved her father’s house with blood and brain matter splattered on the walls.
Hasina’s first period of office lasted five years but her second term, following four successive election victories, albeit strongly disputed by international observers, ended last August after 15 years of rule. Mass street demonstrations, which incurred some 2,000 deaths and 20,000 people injured, chased her from power. She fled to India.
Hasina had reneged on her electoral pledges to combat corruption, to ensure an independent judiciary and to strengthen human rights. Like Mujibur, she turned into a nepotistic tin-pot dictator plagued by allegations of corruption. Bangladeshi journalist Arafat Kabir has posited that she lived in delusional bubble: ‘As the scion of Bangladesh’s founding father, she had cultivated an image of herself as an unassailable, almost deity-like figure – the undisputed daughter of democracy.’
Muhammad Yunus, the Nobel Prize winning economist who popularised the concept of ‘microfinance’, persuaded Bangladesh’s president to appoint him as chief adviser in the country’s interim government and he has embarked on a cleanup with gusto. Hasina now faces more than 100 charges, including for murder and theft (allegations her associates say are ‘baseless’). One of her closest confidants, Salman Rahman, whose family controls Beximco Group, Bangladesh’s most powerful conglomerate, was arrested soon after she fled. Bangladeshi businessmen who have built vast property empires in London through offshore holding companies, have also been arrested.
At Yunus’s insistence, Hasina’s whole family, Tulip Siddiq included, were drawn into the criminal investigations. Focus was given to Siddiq’s alleged ties to a bribery scandal involving Rosatom, Russia’s state nuclear power corporation. Yunus is also demanding the return of London properties that were lent or given to Siddiq by Hasina’s associates. This was not a great look for Sir Keir. While the independent advisor on ministerial standards found that Siddiq had not broken the ministerial code, she should have been ‘more alert to the potential reputational risks – both to her and the government – arising from her close family’s association with Bangladesh.’
It was clear that Siddiq’s political career was over. But the Labour party and Sir Keir defended the indefensible. Even now, the Prime Minister has said the ‘door remains open’ to her in future if she wishes to rejoin government.
Siddiq has consistently denied any wrongdoing, but even if she is cleared of direct involvement in her aunty’s alleged racketeering, given her lifelong interest in politics and her enthusiastic public support for Hasina, how could she possibly not have known about Hasina’s dodgy elections, her nepotism and her reputation for corruption? Did she not question the reason for her aunty’s associates throwing properties her way?
And furthermore, how could Siddiq and the Labour party have been unaware that, in November 2023, more than 170 global figures, including former president Barack Obama, had written to Sheikh Hasina to urge her to end the ‘continuous judicial harassment’ of Muhammad Yunus? It just stretches credulity that Siddiq and the Labour party did not know that aunty Hasina was a rotten apple.
As Yunus advised Siddiq: ‘Maybe you didn’t realise it [Hasina’s corruption], but now you do. You should say: “Sorry, I didn’t know it [at] that time, I seek forgiveness from the people that I did this, and I resign.”’ Siddiq may not have apologised, but she has at least done the right thing now by resigning.
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