Hussain Muhammad Ershad, was former military dictator of Bangladesh passes away

Hussain Muhammad Ershad (89), the former military dictator of Bangladesh, has passed away in Dhaka on July 14, 2019. He was the Jatiya Party chief and also the leader of the opposition in Parliament. He was born in 1930 in Coochbehar district of West Bengal state in the then British India. His parents migrated to present-day Bangladesh, which was then a part of Pakistan, in 1948, after the end of British colonial rule in the Indian subcontinent. In 1982, Ershad took over the state power in a bloodless coup and subsequently ran the country for 8 years until he was forced to quit in a pro-democracy mass upsurge in 1990. Despite being imprisoned subsequently on several charges, Ershad emerged as one of the most powerful political leaders in the 1990s after his Jatiya Party became the country’s third biggest political outfit. His rule was marked by a controversial move to make Islam the state religion of the officially secular Bangladesh.