Beginning today, as much of Bangladesh prepares for the February 12 referendum and general election, several film stars, singers and theatre personalities – the cultarati – began expressing their apprehensions of a Jamaat-e-Islami victory in a process that will send political party representatives to the 13th parliament.
The buzz is whether the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) or the Jamaat will emerge winner in the electoral race. There has been sporadic violence over the past few days across some districts but certainly not of a scale that will warrant countermanding elections in these constituencies.
On the other hand, even as campaigning formally ended on February 9 evening, both the BNP and the Jamaat projected themselves prospectively as victors in an election in which the Awami League had long been barred by the Mohammad Yunus-led interim regime from contesting.
While the Awami League leadership – in exile in India since August 2024 – has exhorted party workers and supporters to refrain from voting, there are indications that many across Bangladesh’s eight administrative units will exercise their ballots in favour of the Jamaat or the BNP, if only as a protection against more violence.
And as Bangladesh is less than 48 hours away from an exclusionary election, there are also misgivings about the fairness and the use of electoral malpractices – “mechanisms” is the oft-used euphemism – by the Jamaat which many in the country fear will stop at nothing to project its acceptability among a wide section of the voting population.
The Jamaat has certainly captured the imagination of Bangladesh’s voters, especially when it was a treated a few years ago as a pariah outfit whose extra-territorial loyalties were with the Pakistan and was an extremist organisation that had nothing to do with the 1971 liberation movement and war.
Many of its leaders were sent to the gallows by Sheikh Hasina, for crimes perpetrated in the bloody months leading up to liberation.
The Jamaat’s political fortunes rose sharply after the Yunus-led administration withdrew the ban on the party and provided the outcast organisation with sufficient political leeway in the months after August 2024 to rejuvenate itself.
This the Jamaat did – as only the Jamaat can do – by surreptitiously pushing its sympathisers in a weak and rickety police force, the civil bureaucracy and in the Army which, as an arbiter, continues to play a shadowy role in government and decision-making. Among the key moves that the Yunus regime made was to place Islamist sympathisers in crucial positions in the bureaucracy.
The Home Secretary, Nasimul Gani, is a former head of the Hizbut Tahrir and the Chief Election Commissioner, AMM Nasir Uddin, and the Anti-Corruption Commissioner, Mohammad Abdul Momen are said to have strong Islamist affiliations.
The first two, if not the third officer, have been performing their assigned duties in ways that are directed at protecting the interests of not only the interim regime but also of the Islamist rightwing which is an adjunct of Yunus’ machinery.
Whether the Jamaat will take recourse to “electoral mechanisms” to maximise its seat share is hard to tell.
However, what can be said with certainty is that over a period of time the party has collected a massive number of National Identity Card and BKash details of hundreds of thousands of voters in Dhaka and elsewhere.
With just a day left for polling, the Jamaat’s students’ wing, the Islami Chhatra Shibir, promised that in the event the party comes to power all legitimate business in government offices and the courts would be performed without bribes, business monopolies and the bureaucracy-criminal nexus would be dismantled, prices of essential commodities would remain in control and women and girls would be able to move about freely without facing harassment.
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Besides, extortion, terror-related activities, rape and encroachments and appropriation will be put an end to.
The Shibir was, however, quick to add that should a party other than the Jamaat win the election there could be violence and law and order would generally deteriorate.
Essentially, the Jamaat and the Shibir seek to distinguish between two worlds – a Bangladesh of peace, prosperity and equity in the event the JeI wins the election, and a country that could plunge into chaos, lawlessness, turmoil and severe economic instability should the BNP-led formation assume control.
While the days leading up to the election have so far not seen sustained and widespread violence, Dhaka-based political analysts do not rule out a downward spiral in the law-and-order situation on polling day – results would be declared on February 13 – as the Jamaat and the BNP might escalate violence levels if one or the other senses defeat.
Such a situation could also arise in the event one or the other formation takes recourse to unfair electoral means.
The law enforcement machinery and the Army will be out in full force to thwart troublemakers on polling day, but political analysts do not wish to hazard any guess on how well the security management will hold up to determined bands of mischief-makers, especially if weapons and firearms are used.
