In 1954, two former premiers of British Bengal visited my ancestral estate in Faridpur during the United Front election campaign. A K Fazlul Huq, known as Sher-e-Bangla (the Tiger of Bengal), and Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, who championed a free state of Bengal before partition, jointly campaigned for the first general election in East Bengal since the subcontinent was divided in 1947. The two men had lunch on the sublime grounds of the estate sandwiched between Faridpur and the Padma River.
As the story goes, Suhrawardy gave away his piece of hilsa to Sher-e-Bangla because the latter had a voracious appetite. The United Front triumphed over the Muslim League at the polls. But the new elected government which took power was dismissed by Pakistan’s governor general within months. The first federal general election took place in 1970 but its result was also dishonoured by Pakistan.
As a result, Bangladesh proclaimed independence and achieved its sovereignty. As for elections, Bangladesh experienced its most competitive elections from 1990 till 2014.
In 2022, another general election is on the horizon. Will the next general election be a chance for a constitutional revolution? We need to elect parties that will build upon our existing constitution by reforming and evolving it to represent a Bangladeshi democracy of the 21st century. We need to elect politicians who have the drive, intellect, and energy to take forward the aspirations of our young people in a manner in keeping with the timeless values that once inspired our elders for democracy.
The Awami League has been the incumbent party over the past 14 years. It has represented the centre-left of the Bangladeshi political spectrum over the past 70 years. Its role as the vanguard of the centre-left is undisputed and will remain so for a long and foreseeable future.
The question therefore is what will happen to our centre-right? Will the Bangladesh Nationalist Party under the leadership of its chairperson Khaleda Zia and acting chairperson Tarique Rahman continue to be the terribly flawed and insincere vanguard of the centre-right?
Its last term in power ended with a draconian two year state of emergency because Begum Zia polarized the nation with her antics. Her previous term between 1991 and 1996 also ended amid controversy, which forced the political class to enact a system of caretaker governments due to a rigged by-election in Magura.
Begum Zia should be credited for her finance minister’s liberal, pro-market reforms in 1991. Her governments are credited with improving growth and increasing primary school enrollment, especially among girls. But the BNP’s centre-right politics has been stuck ever since. Its past record shows that it cannot deliver on combating corruption, slashing red tape, or pursuing normal parliamentary politics.
Centre-right politics often banks on a nation’s culture and conserving its national identity. The problem with the BNP is its implicit distaste for Bengali history and culture. It almost feels as if the BNP needs to be taught about the history of Bengal’s Islamic period which saw pluralism and a focus on trade. Bengal was an independent sultanate and a highly influential part of the Mughal Empire. The BNP also harbours a distaste of the British Empire which gave Bangladesh its present-day territorial boundary.
Much has already been said and written about the BNP’s India and South Asia policies, which have often been against the national interest of Bangladesh in promoting regional stability and prosperity. For example, the BNP was not keen on joining the South Asian Free Trade Area (SAFTA). For a centre-right party, the BNP has paradoxically grown into an anti-free trade party. This shows how much Khaleda Zia’s BNP is different to the BNP of Ziaur Rahman, who was the champion of SAARC.
The BNP’s disregard for the rule of law and the independence of the judiciary is a bane for investors and entrepreneurs. Businesses rely on legal certainty and efficient procedures. The BNP has no vision to enact the necessary legal and regulatory reforms to facilitate business and trade. Bangladesh did not improve its scores on the benchmarks of doing business during the BNP’s last term. Corruption ate away Bangladesh’s potential for economic growth and development.
The BNP has a miserable defense policy for the armed forces. While Khaleda Zia signed a Defense Cooperation Agreement with China which institutionalized pre-existing defense cooperation with Beijing, her government hardly improved the hardware and equipment of the Bangladeshi military.
Even as Pervez Musharraf led Pakistan into becoming a major non-NATO ally of the United States during the War on Terror, Begum Zia and her regime kept a democratic Bangladesh away from joining other democracies and allies like the United States, Turkey, and India in the War on Terror. Bangladesh failed to capitalize on lucrative opportunities for its military due to Begum Zia. This stands in sharp contrast to Bangladesh’s role in the 1991 Gulf War authorized by the Jatiya Party. The first deployment of Bangladeshi UN peacekeepers was also authorized by the Jatiya Party.
It is clear to me that any visionary, constructive centre-right force in Bangladesh needs new leadership, and plausibly a new party. The times demand vision and hope from the centre-right, not the misery and hypocrisy we see from the BNP.
This needs to start with regulating the quality of leaders and cadres. In South Africa, the opposition Democratic Alliance hired Deloitte to develop a database of potential candidates for elections. The final selection of candidates was left to the discretion of the party’s top brass.
When Emmanuel Macron gained power in France, he did so on the back of the newly formed centre-right party En Marche. The party gave nominations to a cross-section of French society from the business, cultural, and sports worlds instead of just the traditional political class.
Finally, the concept of national unity needs to be seriously appreciated by Bangladesh’s parties. In Germany, national unity governments have been commonplace in German political history. The immediate past chancellor Angela Merkel governed under a coalition of her own Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Social Democratic Party (SPD), both of which are the country’s largest parties.
Bangladesh is not alone in this quest for a return to sensible centre-right leadership. The Republican Party in the United States is grappling with the Trump phenomenon. In Great Britain, the former Conservative parliamentarian Rory Stewart penned a piece in the Financial Times calling for “a new era of serious leaders.”
Rightwing politics in India, Pakistan, Israel, and Turkey have degenerated into populism and flirting with theocracy. I was asked by my academic advisor a few months back about the “Bengali right.” I am asking this -- will Bengal show the way for the global centre-right? Nowhere is the need for centre-right reform more acute and dire than in Bangladesh.
Umran Chowdhury works in the legal field.
