Politicization of the Bangladesh Military: A Response to Perceived Shortcomings of Civilian Government

Abstract

THE ARMED FORCES during the British Raj were expected to be politically neutral, but the politics of colonialism itself was against such bureaucratic neutrality. In the post-independence era of the former colonies, the gap between what was expected of the military bureaucracy and what was happening in reality continued to widen. In the subcontinent, Pakistan during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s and Bangladesh in the 1970s have epitomized this trend. The process of politicization of the armed forces was associated with three main factors. First, the to phenomenon occurred at regular intervals after 1949 in Pakistan whenever the civil administration failed to tackle a crisis, no matter what the source. Whether the crisis was caused by communal riots as in 1950, 1952, 1954, 1963, and 1970, by a devastating flood, by periodic epidemics, or by food shortages and near-famines, the army had always been called into action to provide the necessary administrative and logistic aid to the civil administration.1 As in any culture of poverty dominated by the politics of