Mahfuz Sadique

“When the right time comes, we shall achieve our goal,’ says a smiling, bright-eyed Mohiuddin Ahmed. As the head of Hizb ut-Tahrir in Bangladesh, he is an Islamist revolutionary with a twist. Having graduated from Bangladesh’s top business school, the Institute of Business Administration at Dhaka University, with enviable scores, Mohiuddin presently teaches the same corporate strategies and ‘cash-cow’ principles at his alma mater that his teacher’s had taught him.

HM Ershad is again the talk of the town, and again about to play the power game as he does so well. Will he, won’t he join the ruling alliance? Will they, won’t they withdraw all the corruption cases against him? While everyone is busy trying to guess the answers, Mahfuz Sadique retraces the life and times of the greedy tyrant The Machiavellian villain of Bangladesh politics is back on centre stage. His moves are well known.

Last Saturday, Bangladesh executed a senior Islamist party leader, Mohammad Kamaruzzaman, for war crimes committed during the country's 1971 war of independence from Pakistan. It was the second such hanging, with several more death sentences handed down by a domestic court set up to try local collaborators of the Pakistani army from that period.