Whether you put it down to an inherent anti-incumbency amongst the electorate, or successive governments’ failure to meet their expectations, it’s a good bet that Bangladeshis were preparing to get rid of the Awami League this winter, if only the opportunity presented itself in the form of a proper election.
A “proper” election doesn’t necessarily mean one under the deposed caretaker system that Bangladeshis had come to rely on in the post-Ershad period, and other countries have since adopted. In the absence of the neutral caretaker administration, a strong, independent Election Commission (something the current one led by Rakibuddin Ahmed has never quite resembled), an atmosphere where opposition parties had the opportunity to pursue their activities freely (remember that a ban on political rallies was in place right up to election day, while joint forces were out hunting opposition activists), and viable alternatives on the ballot (when was the last time anyone took Jatiya Party seriously?) would have sufficed.
Sadly, it wasn’t to be. And to make matters worse, what we got in the end was beyond a farce, what with the 154 seats elected unopposed, the direct denial of franchise rights faced by over half the electorate, the unnecessary stuffing of ballot boxes, etc. It was Orwellian, Machiavellian and Kafkaesque all at once.
Whoever wrote the script displayed a penchant for borrowing elements from varied sources worthy of Bollywood. It’s not the only thing that lent itself to the suspicion that it was in fact written not very far from the citadel of Indian cinema.
Be that as it may. What we’re left with now is a government without a mandate, but a highly dubious intention to govern for five years. This of course flies in the face of what most people were led to understand in the days leading up to the election on January 5, with all the talk of it being a “constitutional necessity.”
It also makes a mockery of the calls made upon the BNP to renounce violence – an inevitable outcome of their movement on the streets – in the days following the election, in return for a dialogue process leading to fresh elections within a year or two.
As part of this deal, they were also asked to ditch their principal alliance partners, the Jamaat-e-Islami. An extraordinary demand when you consider that if Jamaat is truly as nasty as they claim, surely the onus should lie with the government to have them prosecuted in court?
In any case the BNP has fully complied with the former, and in refraining from announcing any joint programmes with Jamaat, could be said to have met the government at least halfways with the latter.
In return, they have received nothing. Except gleeful exclamations over their supposed demise from the prime minister, unseemly threats from the likes of Amir Hossain Amu, and not-quite-nuanced dissections of their decision to boycott the elections from Obaidul Quader. It has all served to demonstrate that you cannot negotiate in good faith with the current administration.
To be sure, the BNP does appear in a hapless state. Left without a platform to make itself heard following their decision to boycott the January 5 election (if one may call it that, in the interest of simplicity), it is now faced with the strong challenge posed by social and economic realities, to define itself anew for the new era in Bangladesh politics - like the League as the upholder of the “Spirit of 1971,” Jamaat the vanguards of Islam, JP a surrealist’s fantasy.
Yet, that is a task the party looks distinctly incapable of at the moment, with the party’s future leadership exiled in London, and Khaleda Zia’s admirable turn at carrying on the legacy of her husband, looking increasingly tired and bereft of ideas.
Yet, despite those issues, they have come out on top in both phases of the staggered-out upazila elections completed so far – comfortably, and despite the government’s use of the state machinery as well as parts of the security apparatus to ensure success for AL-backed candidates.
They have all come a cropper against the expression of the people’s will, for which all that has been necessary is that the vote be held in their respective upazilas with viable options on the ballot.
Even more stunning than the BNP’s revival, to some, will have been the performance of Jamaat, whose candidates have seemingly poured cold water on the government’s designs to have them recognised as a band of terrorist outlaws to bag a tenth of the chairman posts decided so far, comfortably outperforming everyone except the big two. It all begs the very serious question: how out of touch with the people of Bangladesh must this government be?
The answer, unfortunately, is very. And with the passage of time, this gap is only likely to widen, not close. Indeed, it has been this way for some time now.
Recall the meeting between JP president HM Ershad and visiting Indian Foreign Secretary Sujatha Singh in December, when the disgraced ex-president stated his principal reason for not joining the elections being concocted by the government as: “Their (the government’s) popularity has dropped to zero.”
If not quite as dire as that, a slew of opinion polls around the same time by various sources also predicted a blowout for the AL and its allies. No wonder Ershad, whose entire political career in the post-1991 period has been premised upon backing the right horse in each race to avoid spending his last days in jail, wanted out.
You can go further back, to the summer of 2013, when mayoral elections were held in five municipalities spread across five of the country’s seven divisions, for indications of voters’ intent with regard to the upcoming national election.
All had sitting mayors backed by the Awami League. All suffered resounding defeats, including in Gazipur, regarded as second only to Gopalganj as a stronghold for the party that led Bangladesh’s struggle for independence. The stage was set, it seemed, for the BNP-Jamaat alliance to return to power even in their bedraggled state.
Of course, the roots of the League’s unpopularity lay even further back. We may trace it most faithfully to their decision in 2011 to scrap the 13th amendment to the constitution of Bangladesh, and with it, the settled issue of how to conduct national elections acceptable to all amidst a polity marked by such distrust and disharmony.
Opinion polls at the end of 2011 conducted by the Daily Star and ProthomAlo showed the first big closing of the gap in the public’s estimation of the government and the BNP, since the two publications started conducting their series of periodic surveys in 2009.
In the DS poll, although at 39% the AL had managed to more or less hold on to the percentage they had recorded in a previous poll at the end of 2010, the BNP’s share had jumped by no less than 15 percentage points to 37%, rendering the AL’s lead statistically insignificant. The same poll also showed a big drop in the popularity of the prime minister, whose approval rating had fallen from 54% a year ago to 39% at the end of 2011.
The government of course, brushed off these results with characteristic disdain, questioning methodology that has come to be accepted worldwide as well as the motives of the two publications. I suppose they couldn’t really come out and say they had no plan to bother with what the people wanted, which is how it turned out in the end. But how long can they actually hope to bypass the people and govern a country where the population is traditionally known to be politically conscious?
The answer may be: as long as they can. For as the upazila elections show, and will continue to show over the course of the three remaining phases, the public has no intention to forgive the AL for the way in which everyone have been hoodwinked with the 10th parliamentary election.
It’s like an itch that began setting in over the last two years of their previous term, and it won’t go away till fully vented by voting them out. Currently, every day that the AL is seen presiding over Bangladesh, is a day that the itch to remove them grows more pronounced within the electorate. Even fringe parties like Jamaat are set to benefit, as long as they stand in opposition to the League.
Indeed, on the point of Jamaat, the government’s crass strategy behind shutting them out of the political process looks likely to boomerang with untold circumstances. Long-term ambitions of establishing Shariah law notwithstanding, there can be no denying that the Islamists had successfully integrated into the democratic framework of Bangladesh, and that remained the best avenue for moderating some of the extremist views they espoused.
Countless studies exist to show this. Quoting from one, we find that “the democratic commitment of an Islamist party is not only determined by its ideological orientations, but also - and perhaps more significantly - by the degree of stability of the existing democratic institutions. If the institutions are weak and unstable, the party tends to act ideologically. If, however, the institutions are strong and stable, the party tends to act pragmatically.”
Needless to stay, the AL’s engineering of the electoral process to their favour has inflicted perhaps irreparable harm on all Bangladeshis’ faith in the democratic paradigm. And each day that they are seen to govern Bangladesh through the rubber-stamp parliament they have granted themselves, this faith suffers a little bit more. While the itch to remove them grows and grows. If the AL intends to return to the people for their verdict at the end of governing for another five years, they are likely to find themselves at the receiving end of what will have been a seven-year itch by then. And the consequences of that are likely to be far more unpleasant for Sheikh Hasina and co, than anything that may come before.
