With only the visit to the polling booth now left, a look back on the campaign may reveal events over the 7-day stretch from April 14-21 to be most telling in our final reckoning. Provided the election does indeed prove credible in the end, the government should be prepared for a blowout. Especially if the vote falls along the same faultlines that characterise our national politics.
In this, the opposition BNP, or the candidates backed by them, have enjoyed an advantage to be sure, being able to field their half of Bangladesh politics’ two star performers for a limited but decisive spell of the campaign during which most people would have been making their minds up.
The government and its stooges were visibly unnerved by the response Begum Khaleda Zia received from normal people, the coverage she commanded in the media (that the PM especially disliked). The fight she has sustained is pretty remarkable for a woman of her age, at her stage of life. It goes woefully unrecognised in the discourse, whereas the other side is adept at composing psalms to its leader out of everyday events.
But the way the government’s apologists were seen first condemning as “a matter of principle,” the very serious attacks on Begum Zia from appallingly close range, before in the very next sentence condoning them based on the hypothesis that disgruntled “commoners” were venting their anger, was as pathetic as it was disgraceful -- the height of intellectual dishonesty. And the people saw through it with their eyes closed.
It was pathetic because the perpetrators of the worst attacks -- that took place in Kawran Bazar on April 21 -- were identified by the media, and they were identified as members of Chhatra League. Their names and positions within the BCL’s labyrinthine structure were provided, beside close-up shots of their faces.
To take refuge in the fact that no-one was officially charged or arrested or even acknowledged by the police is cowardly, not to mention idiotic, for that is one fact that is never going to change.
Get with the program -- the people’s faith in the police is lower than their sock’s roll. Any argument premised upon the police having found nothing is simply not credible, because everyone knows the police in Bangladesh can never find anything. Except opposition activists and apparently would-be terrorists. After which, no-one else can find them.
Crouched on top of this leaky edifice you have the government’s hypothesis, their dodgy conjecture, and in some tellings wild speculation, that the people have taken up arms (as some of the attackers were carrying, again captured on film by credible photojournalists) against the BNP-Jamaat force. We should like to believe those who govern us have slightly more faith in our civility. Or loud and clear, the government should know better than to judge the people by its own standards.
Whatever aspersions the people may harbour for all that happened while they were besieged by the BNP’s movement over the first three months of the year, no-one expects redress, if that, in any form or through any process except the legal one. No one, not even those who lost loved ones to petrol bombs, has advocated anything to the contrary. A secure, responsible government would suffer no qualms over condemning the attacks on Khaleda Zia outright, minus any caveats.
But the AL’s dependence on its front organisations to maintain its current rule without a mandate from the people as a whole, makes it necessary for them to condone their barbarity, to which the government has no right to append the general public. That is what makes it downright disgraceful.
The same reasoning of course, explains why you won’t see those who were captured on film getting a cheap thrill out of sexually harassing a number of women in the midst of all the revelry on April 14 at the DU campus brought anywhere near justice. And why Moja Losss?, the irreverent social media campaigners, had to rein in their operations abruptly.
The government may assume its elaborately-wrought shenanigans and false narratives manage to fool the people, but really all they do is insult our intelligence -- a lesson likely to be dealt, at least in Dhaka and Chittagong, through the ballot. But will it be learnt? The prime minister, during her last press conference on Sunday, was visibly smarting from the public’s receptiveness to her great rival during the campaign. Come Tuesday night, she might be smarting harder still.