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Tarique Rahman — Hasina’s top rival, Bangladesh’s ‘fugitive dark prince’ eyes BNP revival in exile
BNP acting chairman Tarique Rahman has been sentenced in absentia to jail terms ranging from 3 years to lifetime. He has his supporters, but many journalists remember his ‘excesses’.
DEEP HALDER26 September, 2023 08:32 am IST
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File image of Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) acting chairman Tarique Rahman | Credit: Bnpbd.org
New Delhi: Mohammad Ekhlas Sheikh was a Class 5 student at a village in Bangladesh’s Magura district on 21 August 2004, when 13 grenades were lobbed on a crowd almost 392 kilometres away in Sylhet.
The attack left 18 people dead on the spot, with the toll eventually reaching 24. More than 500 people were injured.
Among the survivors that day was Bangladesh’s current Prime Minister, Sheikh Hasina, then an opposition leader.
One of the people awarded life imprisonment for the attack was Tarique Rahman of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) — which was in office at the time of the attack under his mother, former PM Khaleda Zia.
As it sentenced Rahman on 10 October 2018, a special court for speedy trials called the attack a “well-orchestrated plan, executed through abuse of state power”.
Cut to the present, Rahman — helming his party from London, while his mother is under house arrest — has emerged as Hasina’s biggest political challenger.
Talking to ThePrint from Magura, Mohammad Ekhlas Sheikh said he wanted Rahman to defeat Hasina and become the next prime minister of Bangladesh.
A “proud worker” of the BNP, Ekhlas calls himself a part of “Zia’s army” on his Facebook profile, and says he is angry about the state of his country.
“Like cancer, corruption has spread into every part of Bangladesh’s society and politics, there is unemployment on the one hand and such blatant abuse of power on the other that every government job appointment happens by greasing palms,” he added.
“Now, only the son of the former president of Bangladesh, the late General Ziaur Rahman, and the former Prime Minister of Bangladesh, Khaleda Zia, can save this country,” he said.
The problem is, for now, Tarique Rahman, cannot even enter Bangladesh, forget contest polls.
Declared a fugitive in Bangladesh, Rahman faces over a dozen cases, including for corruption. In May, Bangladesh’s Dhaka Tribune ran a three-part series “on patronisation of bribery and financial irregularities during the 2001-06 period (BNP tenure) based on documentary evidence”, where it referred to Rahman as the “dark prince” and delved into allegations of corruption as well as media intimidation.
These allegations, however, mean nothing for supporters like Ekhlas, who believes all the cases against Rahman, including the 2004 grenade attack one, are fabricated, designed to keep him away from Bangladesh’s politics.
“But once the Bangladesh Nationalist Party wins the January 2024 national elections, I am certain Tarique will come back from his exile in London and take over the reins of the country.”
The ‘dark prince’ in exile
Tarique Rahman, 55, stays in London with his physician wife Zubaida and barrister daughter Zaima. His face appears on BNP posters in Dhaka and outside. But his voice remains unheard.This is because the Bangladesh High Court has banned the media from reporting anything that Tarique Rahman says.
Advocate Nasrin Siddiqa Lina had, on 6 January 2015, filed a writ petition, pleading for the court’s instructions to effect necessary measures not to publish, broadcast, screen or reproduce any statement of Tarique Rahman in any newspaper, electronic media, social media or any other electronic device or media, on the grounds that he is a “fugitive” convict.
On 7 January 2015, the court issued an interim rule banning the publication and broadcasting of Rahman’s speech in the media, according to a report by the Bangladesh Sangbad Sangstha dated 22 August 2023.
On 28 July this year, at an “anti-government rally” organised by the BNP, the party played a rare phone call from “its exiled leader to tens of thousands of supporters as they gathered in Dhaka”.
“The address to Bangladesh Nationalist Party supporters by acting chairman Tarique Rahman, some said, was the first since he fled to London in 2008,” Benar News reported. “BNP officials played Rahman’s speech over a loudspeaker, despite the country’s high court having banned his speeches from being published or aired.”
According to an audio recording of Rahman’s 8-minute address, posted on Facebook by the BNP, he reportedly said the rally “is not a rally of only the BNP, it is a rally for journalists who have been assaulted and oppressed by the government for many years”.
“This is a rally for human rights activists who [have] suffered for long … if this rally fails, the nation will fail,” he said.
Soon after, on 2 August, Rahman and Zubaida were given a three-year jail sentence in a graft case filed by the Anti-Corruption Commission in 2007. In the chargesheet, the couple was declared fugitives.
“Tarique is accused in 15 other cases, mostly filed during the caretaker government rule in 2007 and 2008, and Zubaida has been indicted only in this one,” the Daily Star reported on the 2 August judgment of the Dhaka Metropolitan Senior Special Judge’s Court.
“Accepting the charges brought against them, this court on 1 November last year issued arrest warrants against the duo,” it added.
For the 2004 grenade attack, Tarique was awarded life imprisonment by the Speedy Trial Tribunal-1.
Nitai Roy Chowdhury, vice-chairman of the BNP central committee, told ThePrint that “court cases, adverse judgments and gag orders won’t be able to stop Tarique Rahman anymore from realising his destiny”.
“Bangladesh is crying out for change against the dictatorship of Sheikh Hasina who has turned it into a one-party state,” he said.
“Tarique Rahman is the face of that change. He is young and motivated. I see how determined he is when standing committee members meet him over Skype every week. Even though the young workers of the party do not get to see or hear him, they want him back to lead the country,” he added.
Beyond what the current government and the courts in Bangladesh have to say about Tarique Rahman, there is a memory of him from much before. And it is not flattering.
The Dhaka Tribune’s three-part series this May talked about how Rahman allegedly turned the Hawa Bhaban, the political office of the BNP chairperson, into an alternative power centre that “had an immense capacity to abuse power and enjoy impunity, as observed by BNP politicians, US government officials, international rights watchdogs, and the media at the time”.
Journalists who tried to cover Tarique Rahman’s “excesses” from the Hawa Bhaban were tormented, intimidated and assaulted by state agents and non-state actors, according to the report.
Dhaka-based senior political journalist Sahidul Hasan Khokon said Rahman was “Bangladesh’s very own Mr 10 per cent” when his mother was the prime minister.
“Khaleda Zia ran the country from the prime minister’s office. Her son Tarique ruined it from outside. Not a single government contract was passed without Tarique getting a commission,” he added.
“It is fashionable among BNP supporters to say today that the cases against Tarique are politically motivated. Journalists who have covered that period in Bangladesh’s political history know what Tarique is, truly a ‘dark prince’,” he said.
When the Awami League, under the leadership of Sheikh Hasina, came to power in 2009, Rahman went into self-imposed exile in London, citing safety concerns and alleging persecution by authorities.
With Khaleda Zia barred from making political moves and under house arrest over corruption charges, Rahman runs the BNP from London.
Also Read: War criminal Delwar Hossain was against Bangladesh. Why is his face on the moon now?
The India angle
In a news piece for Somoy News on 24 September, veteran columnist and Bangladesh watcher Sukharanjan Dasgupta wrote how the BNP had been trying to reach out to the Indian government for a while and garner support for Tarique Rahman.Talking to ThePrint over the phone from Kolkata, Dasgupta said BNP leaders met an Indian delegation in Singapore last month to discuss the national elections in Bangladesh.
“I have exclusive information that a high-powered delegation from India met top BNP leaders Mirza Abbas, Mirza Fakhrul and Khandaker Mosharraf Hossain in Singapore on 26 August,” he said. “The Indian side said that a primary condition to even begin talks with the Bangladesh Nationalist Party would be for Tarique Rahman to be removed as chief of the party and also for the party to sever all ties with the Jamaat (Jamaat-e-Islami, the anti-India Islamist party),” he added.
According to Dasgupta, the Indian side also told BNP leaders that Rahman has held close ties with fugitive don Dawood Ibrahim and Pakistan’s spy agency ISI, and has in the past told CIA officers that Bangladesh should never have been created.
Rahman’s connections with terror groups have come up for discussions elsewhere as well.
In an interview to India Today on 23 February 2023, retired deputy director general of India’s Defence Intelligence Agency, Major General Gaganjit Singh (Retd), said a huge consignment of weapons — 10 trucks full of arms — was seized at Bangladesh’s Chittagong in April 2004. It was meant for the United Liberation Front of Asom and a few other rebel groups in India’s Northeast to destablise the country, he said.
Singh said the arms supply was done through the alliance between the BNP and the Jamaat. ULFA chief Paresh Barua, the “mastermind of the plot”, was in close touch with Bangladesh’s intelligence agencies that had close links with Tarique Rahman, he added.
Sahidul Hasan Khokon, who interviewed Gaganjit Singh for India Today, said “India will never be able to trust Tarique Rahman because of his close ties with Jamaat”.
Nitai Roy Chowdhury, however, said the BNP wants to build a new relationship with India and look towards a new future. “Inflation, corruption, dictatorship will end Hasina’s rule. When she loses power, Tarique Rahman will be back in Bangladesh to lead the nation. The world will see how capable he is then.”
