Image source UNB
by M. Rashiduzzaman 28 April 2022
The Bangladeshi opposition leaders’ apathy towards dialogue with the Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) over the not-so-distant election carried a glut of catastrophic reminders from the bygone. Hunkering down under the virtual hegemony of one party, the rival parties are frantic about their future! Woefully, the recaps about the stalemated parties and the on-again-off-again electoral gridlocks are between the missing narratives of the country. Like the gush of a tsunami, inflexible electoral impasse reprehensibly visits Bangladesh every few years, for which the country suffers a global branding since the 1990s. The country’s electoral memoir brims with arbitrations that failed to resolve the earlier standoffs. Such unbending hostilities are indeed the markers of a polarized nation. Notwithstanding, competitive parties, as well as free and fair elections at regular intervals, are indispensable in a democracy, worthy of its name. Those countries and their leaders who, willingly or unwillingly, “change the goalposts” are amongst the defaulters in liberal democracies. Of late, the global community is seriously forewarning those dodgers. Major parties in any liberal democracy—from both sides of the political aisle–need a shared pitch that allows the national election authority and its local entities to undertake their polling fairly and independently. Such inter-party agreements are the acknowledged pivots of democracy. Frankly, the political fulcrums will not stay in place when the rivals try to eliminate, boycott and hartal each other!
The South Asian parties endured an asymmetric history since the colonial era. Especially in Colonial Bengal and later in East Pakistan and Bangladesh, the parties did not strictly concur with the Western democratic customs while the North American and Western European parties have too, in recent years, nudged away from their acclaimed political spin. The British rulers veiled their imperial juggernaut with new-fangled legislatures and enlarging franchise in India; still there was no rigorous allegation of election maneuvering against the Raj. All the political institutions in those days were gathering experiences in representative government. No doubt, it was a constructive inheritance from the British Raj, but it did not survive when election became sites where one party tries to eliminate others by fair means or foul!
Three predominant constructions highlighted the post-1947 East Pakistani parties: (a) the Muslim League’s (ML) single party power from 1947 to 1954 when the Awami League (AL), born in 1949, was the first structured opposition party daring the ruling ML, (b) the kaleidoscopic multi-party coalitions from 1954 to 1958 that once or twice skewed into violence and impasse and (c) the major parties wrestling the military-led authoritarianism from 1958 to 1971 that initially outlawed all political parties. General Ayub Khan later restored political parties for boosting his own regime with the remnant of the old Muslim League (ML) better known as the Convention ML, the so-called King’s Party of the 1960s.
Contrary to the soaring fears of fraud in voting before the poll, the 1954 election was fair-minded, and the ML, still in power, suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of the United Front (UF), a coalition of the Awami League (AL), Krishak Sramik Party (KSP) and a few other smaller groups. How and why was it possible?—rhetoric apart, it is still an unanswered subject of Bangladeshi chronicles! Way back in the early 1950s, the ML still enjoyed a degree of lead over its district outlets and their long-standing supporters, a hangover of the widespread Pakistan movement in the 1940s.
On the other hand, the UF, though more trendy over language and other pestering topics, was, however, not yet a powerful organization. But the opposition partnership, backed by students had a cluster of fascinating leaders like Maulana Bhashani, Fazlul Huq, H. S. Suhrawardy and Sheikh Mujibur Rahman (younger then, but later acclaimed as Bangabandhu). Those leaders’ pitch for a free and fair election endowed the middle ground between the parties that finally delivered the UF’s stunning election victory in 1954. But a stint of credit should also go to a few amongst the Muslim League actors including Nurul Amin, the Chief Minister of the time, deeply respected for his personal uprightness. Across the questions around Bengali for state language, provincial autonomy, economic disparity between Pakistan’s two wings, and national integration, East Pakistan peered at the conflicting precincts between the major parties. Notwithstanding those wrangles, the eminent leaders found a core to work together with an eye to the 1954 election. And it worked!
Once the much-maligned ML was out of power, those who forged the UF coalition were themselves fighting with each other—the old consensus binding the main partners melted away. The superb anti-ML victory of 1954 became a distant memory! While political instability spiraled in East Pakistan and Pakistan’s federal government, the 1958 martial law dashed the old parties’ hopes for the succeeding election. Neither competitive parties, nor free elections took their roots under Ayub’s tailor-made and executive-controlled steamroller. Frustrated folks in the 1960s yearned that the fractured parties and the fleeting coalitions of the 1950s were better than having no party or impeded parties, and the devious elections funneled through an electoral college open to bureaucratic underhand.
On the one hand, Ayub Khan, the Convention (Muslim) League leader and, on the other, the disparate opposition parties that sponsored Ms. Fatima Jinnah as Ayub’s challenger in the 1965 presidential race had few reciprocated arenas. Nurul Amin stood apart from the ML’s Convention rump. Ayub easily won that election, but a range of contentions punctured that victory. Apart from a few doubts about the 1970 poll, the military-controlled government held a fair election in that year which the AL, steered by populist Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, had won. Triggered by the seismic turns of events and the abortive negotiations trailed by a ruthless crackdown, East Pakistan catapulted into an armed struggle for independence in 1971. The 1970 election came out of an arrangement transacted between General Yahya Khan, Pakistan’s martial law chief and Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the AL chief, which was, of course, accepted by other Pakistani parties too. The Legal Framework Order (LFO) clenched the agreement until the election. It was an unbeaten illustration of working out a mutual covenant between two visibly uncompromising fronts.
At the height of the political architecture that shaped the 1971 Bangladesh independence movement, the exiled government and its civil and military tentacles were under AL’s sway with New Delhi’s crucial backing. A consultative committee of supportive parties, including a few leftist groups and leaders, had a liaison with the exiled government, but the AL did not formally share power with any of the other partners who also merged with the country’s independence struggle. Once Sheikh Mujibur Rahman came back from Pakistani jail and assumed power, the AL’s single party supremacy was beyond doubt from 1972 to 1975. Bangladesh abruptly switched to a presidential government in 1975, and more decisively, the country became the one-party state with the new BKSAL (Bangladesh Krishak Sramik Awami League) as the only legal political outfit allowed to function. Most of those steps were the AL’s unilateral feats. There was no visible inter-party consultation or compromise then. The leftist factions did not seriously challenge those spectacular shifts in Bangladesh. The BKSAL was, in fact, the AL with a different posture! Earlier, the 1973 election, the first voting in independent Bangladesh, gave the AL an overpowering victory. Without any momentous challenger, the poll, however, was not above doubts. However, the Jatiya Samajtantrik Dal (JASAD) was the AL’s radical offshoot that aggressively countered the post-1971 AL regime. Oddly, the earlier AL hegemony resembled the single dominant ML rule from 1947 to 1954 except that the East Pakistan Muslim League (EPML) did not have a captivating leader in its command.
After the 1975 brutal overthrow of the AL/BKSAL administration that killed Sheikh Mujibur Rahman with most of his family members, there was a long spell of military-led civilian regimes when multiple parties slowly came back to Bangladesh. The latest parties included the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP founded by President General Ziaur Rahman/Zia) and later the Jatiya Party (launched by ousted president General H. M. Ershad). Over the hiatus, the old AL recovered when Sheikh Hasina (Hasina, daughter of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman) accepted its leadership. After Zia’s slaying and Justice A. Sattar’s death, the BNP’s management fell upon Begum Khaleda Zia/Khaleda. From 1991, the AL-BNP rivalry escalated which narrowed the epicenter between the two major parties. An encouraging institutional maturity of that period was an operational two-party system alternated between the BNP and the AL with minor parties sharing power through their respective electoral pacts. After 26 years since 1975, the AL returned to power in 1996 with a coalition of several smaller parties and individuals–a fresh start of the AL’s preeminence!
But it was also the worst of time for the political parties’ institutional fate in Bangladesh. Combined with a ruthless deadlock, hartal, violence and vote swindling accusations, the politicians set up dangerous precedents for the hollowness of party politics. The BNP-AL hostility awfully lengthened over 22 months from 1994 and 1996. Those ceaseless strikes, unruly political strife , lawlessness, varying degrees of victimization and politicization of the spectrum disrupted the social equilibrium. The country was on the verge of a civil war during those 22 months of agitation. In a divided polity, dominated by uncompromising rivalry and partisan deadlock, members of the bureaucracy are not immune to politics when anti-government protests reach a boiling point. Regardless, the 2014 election bore the blemishes of nonstop boycott and violence, and in the next one in 2018, certain government employees and the party allies allegedly stuffed the ballot boxes before the voting date. The old vanity of a non-political civil service, a much-envied British institutional legacy, inspired by consensus and mutual trust between the bureaucrats and politicians withered away in recent years. Furthermore, the caretaker government, ushered under the AL’s adamant pressure, did not satisfy all the contenders for power. The accredited middle path of a caretaker regime bridging the brawling leaders that facilitated a smooth succession in 1996 did not last for long. Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina eliminated the caretaker arrangement once she was confident of her authority after her victory in 2008. Indeed, it streaked the return of the old phantom —the electoral gridlock!
The AL’s 2008 electoral victory overseen by a military-backed caretaker government indeed cemented the party’s decade-long ascendency. But then again, the BNP and its allies charged that the military-backed establishment, was not an evenhanded apparatus; it contrived an “uneven playing field” for the AL to win easily. Since 2008, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina won two more divisive elections (2014 and 2018); her triumphs, nevertheless, faced explicit admonition as the ominously fixed polls abetted by the police, bureaucracy, and the ruling party’s accomplices. They are at the bottom of the brewing deadlock as we write this. Obviously, the AL has, since 2008, reoccupied its earlier solo grip of power with a few minor allies. On the other front, the BNP and most of the rival parties have refused to participate in an election under the AL government. It is a reset of the old and grave impasse!—any way out of the revived one-party hegemony?
CONCLUSION:
Polarization between the parties, outright animosity between political rivals and the perils of engineered elections are the footprints of “illiberal democracy,” hyped by Fareed Zakaria’s book more than a decade ago. With a burst of enthusiasm, President J. Biden, since he won the election, called for a global “coalition of democracies” and he has also invoked the American “soft power” of sanctions against the anti-democratic proclivities in a swathe of countries. Paradoxically, the US itself is one of the polarized democracies in the West! More importantly, Washington cannot restore democracies unless the citizens of the concerned countries help themselves. This was the gist of the US Ambassador’s recent message in Dhaka. An “illiberal democracy,” immersed in partisan hubris, indifference, and political amnesia, is a threat to itself—its overconfidence ends up in a bonfire that destabilizes the country!
The parties, even the predominant ones, eventually fall apart when the political groups and even the government officials become the despised machines for corruption, enforced disappearances, extra-judicial killings, breach of civil liberties and horrifying vote swindling. A lesson from history: consistent control of one party that upends the rivals habitually subvert the democratic institutions. The standoff between the ruling party and the opposition might suddenly dissolve into hartal-thumping street stirrings and bloodshed as Bangladesh saw the worst of those in the past. It is high time for the Bangladeshi parties and their mentors to give and take for their mutual and continued existence. The leaders must observe the norms of democratic process and seek common grounds amongst themselves and demonstrate a regard for free and fair elections towards a peaceful transfer of power.