Sadeq Khan
The strategy of the opposition 19-party alliance leader Begum Khaleda Zia for isolating the ruling coterie from the public and from the ‘international community’ step by step, in order to obtain mandate for a fresh general election and to ensure victory for the opposition in that election, appears to be working. In the least, it has racked the nerves of the ruling party leaders so much that they are now resorting to naked political violence as well as reckless abuse of coercive powers of the state.
They are employing RAB, police and BGB contingents to search and disturb houses and work places of opposition leaders and workers, harassing and torturing them and making mass arrests, implicating top opposition leaders in gang cases of all sorts, using the courts to cancel bails of political opponents, and using the Anti-corruption Commission to go after opposition leaders as well as those in the ruling party who have fallen from grace.
After allowing the first round of upozilla polls to be held smoothly, the ruling coterie realised it would not do to let votes to be cast freely. The second and third round of upozilla elections have witnessed dangerous increase in the use of armed criminal bands by ruling party candidates to simply take over polling centres and stamp ballots favouring themselves to fill the ballot boxes. Election-related violence and deaths increased, but more alarming is the kidnapping of political workers as well as voters belonging to or sympathetic to the principal opposition. RAB and police officials are said to have publicly discouraged and in some cases barred opposition-minded voters from voting at all.
No stone unturned
Some Presiding or Polling officers who were reluctant to cooperate with the ruling party robbery of ballots were either manhandled or simply forced out of their posts. In many places, though, public resistance to ruling party misdeeds was so solid that the combined opposition still remained ahead of the ruling coterie in the total number winners declared so far in Upozilla Councils.
Ahead of the January 5 one-sided general election, the ruling coterie and its obedient administration, the police and the judiciary were able to frustrate the December 29 “Dhaka Chalo” democracy march of the opposition. Imposed an official blockade of Dhaka city barring rail, road and river traffic towards Dhaka from one day ahead. But the boycott of January 5 voterless general election was very much a success. In many mofussil areas, not even a cycle-van was available for transporting voters. In most polling booths, there was no voter presence. All well-known political parties of the right and the left stayed away from the polls. In more than half of the constituencies, not even an individual could be found by the ruling party to contest its nominees. Thus in 153 constituencies, the voters were deprived of their right to vote, and government nominees under an unabashed arrangement to sit both in government and opposition benches were declared uncontested.
The international community expressly found the result of January 5 polls unrepresentative and unacceptable, but appeared to acquiesce in a ruling party (as well as Indian Foreign Office) position that January 5 election was a compulsion for constitutional continuity, and it’s in adequacies could be corrected by another fully participatory general election held on agreed terms by and between political parties soon after the 10th parliament took office.
UZ polls: Vote of no confidence?
But as the 19-party opposition changed tactics for a pause in street movement to demand talks for a fresh election, the government declared upozilla polls schedule to engage the public and also to step up repressive actions against strong-willed opposition activists in the mofussil districts as well as in the metropolis. The decision then of the 19-party opposition to contest the upozilla polls en bloc was at first ridiculed by government leaders as evident “retreat” of the opposition. But they laughed on the other side of the face when they found out that the upozilla polls were proving to be largely a vote of no confidence on the ruling party cabal by the voters. The ruling party strategists had inserted a safety value in upozilla elections by staggering the polls schedule in 5 stages. It was now using that safety value to try obtain a face-saving equality in numbers local government representatives by hook or by crook to get their nominees elected in the remaining two phases of polls.
Will that stop the “pressure”, as it is assumed, of the international community on the ruling party to go to the negotiating table with opposition parties for modalities of a fresh general election? Even if the Awami fails to pull through a fair number of its nominees in the local government, some Bangladesh-watchers like former Ambassador and scholar William B. Milam are not very optimistic about an easy solution to the political stalemate in Bangladesh. On March 19, Milam questioned as follows in dhakatribune.com whether the worst is yet to come for Bangladesh people:
“Last December, a month before the January 5 election in Bangladesh, in this space, I wrote that history does not always repeat itself. It was an effort to dissuade all those who believed that somehow, somebody or something – the army, the international community, the West, a leader on a white horse – would appear and stop the clearly defective election that was in the offing. Of course, the political opposition believed that extreme violence and chaos would force the Awami League from its catbird seat to the negotiating table to work out a more equitable election structure. Those hopes hinged on the history of the past 25 years repeating itself – a period when election crises were the rule, not the exception, and some combination of violence and intervention always served to put things right.
‘History repeating’?
“But that history failed them this time. Instead, it suddenly seems that Bangladesh may be on the verge of repeating an older version of its history, the attempt to create a one-party authoritarian state 40 years ago.
“With no real opposition in the National Assembly, Bangladesh is again, in effect, if not constitutionally, a one-party state. The 1975 effort ended very badly; is it likely to succeed this time around? In the December article, I opined that there were two possible scenarios in the aftermath of the one-party election. One was to foment sufficient violence to force the AL to step down and call another election, vis 1996. But if the opposition couldn’t muster the muscle before the election, it seemed unlikely that it would be able to bring down the government after the election.
“Those who lament the outcome of the election because of its political implications for the future of democracy in Bangladesh are accused of assuming that the BNP was the ‘wronged party’. At least for me, that is a complete fabrication. In my view, the wronged party was the people of Bangladesh, who may either suffer under a growing authoritarian government, or spend much life and treasure trying to overthrow it. They will be adversely affected by a deteriorating economy that will result from the political uncertainty that will characterise the next few years.”
Source: Weekly Holiday
