Talk of elections goes on unabated in Bangladesh. But despite the interim government’s statements about the electoral exercise being undertaken between December this year and June next year nothing concrete has yet been offered to the electorate.
Add to that statements emanating from within the government that there has been no indication that Bangladesh’s people are unhappy with those who hold power at present.
There is then the recent comment by the home affairs advisor in the current regime to the effect that people want the present dispensation to remain in office for five years. He did not explain how he arrived at such a conclusion.
Be that as it may, it is becoming pretty clear that political leaders and parties are becoming rather jittery on the issue of the elections.
Begin with the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, which was enthused at the time the Sheikh Hasina government was overthrown in August last year that a path to power had been made clear for it.
But such enthusiasm has been curbed over the past few months, with senior BNP leaders coming round to the disturbing realisation that they need to overcome a good number of hurdles before their ambitions can be fulfilled, if at all.
A major worry for the BNP is that its exiled acting chairman, Tareque Rahman, has so far given no hint of when he might return to Dhaka from London. Rahman has apparently little reason for worry, given that the cases so long pending against him have been withdrawn.
Even so, his followers, who look to him as a future leader of Bangladesh, are quite mystified about the delay in his going back home all these years after 2007, when he was forced into exile by the caretaker government of the time.
The BNP has not made it clear why its leader remains in the United Kingdom, save only to make regular public pronouncements about Rahman’s imminent return home. In the nine months since August last year, party leaders such as Mirza Fakhrul Islam Alamgir and Mirza Abbas have bravely kept the BNP banner fluttering through repeatedly demanding that the Yunus regime announce a schedule for elections and enable the country to return to constitutional politics.
Yunus and his regime have so far remained non-committal where a definitive response to the BNP’s demands is concerned. Making things even more difficult for the BNP is the growing opposition to it from adherents of the Yunus regime, particularly from the young people who have recently formed the National Citizens Party.
To be sure, political observers in Bangladesh see in the emergence of the NCP the making of a king’s party, obviously with the blessings of those who are part of the interim regime. There are all the growing hints of efforts underway to keep the BNP from regaining the power it dispensed with in October 2006.
How does Tareque Rahman figure in all this discussion?
It needs to be said to his credit that his statements and online speeches before BNP workers and leaders in recent months have been demonstrative of a degree of maturity, which has lately come into politics.
For observers of Bangladesh politics, that is a refreshing change from his stance in the days of the Awami League government when he went to the extent of questioning the role of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman in Bangladesh’s history.
At this point in time, when the BNP is not in a very comfortable state — its junior partner in the past, the Jamaat-e-Islami, has already mapped out an independent political route for itself — it will certainly need to re-evaluate its position in terms of its election policy.
The difficulty for politics in the country at present is that it is not just the BNP which has problems. The Awami League, whose young followers have of late been bringing out small demonstrations on urban streets before swiftly disappearing in order to avoid police action against them, is yet to come forth with a strategy that will allow it to hit the road again.
A likely scenario for both the BNP and the Awami League has them come together in an alliance of sorts in order to ensure that a detailed election schedule is presented to the nation soon. The BNP’s relative softness toward the Awami League has been made obvious by its leaders’ belief that the former ruling party should not be outlawed.
Rather intriguingly, the NCP and others who participated in the agitation against Sheikh Hasina’s government have been demanding a ban on the Awami League.
With politics in a state of uncertainty, the BNP and the Awami League will need each other. And that is not all. The Jatiyo Party, headed by G.M. Quader, will also be happy to be part of a political combination that can apply pressure on the interim regime regarding the elections.
From a broader perspective, an AL-BNP-JP combine (all three parties have been in government at various phases in the nation’s history) will have enough clout to compel the current rulers to shape a timetable for the return of the country to elected government.
Politics being what it has been in Bangladesh in the years since its emergence in 1971, one will not be surprised if feelers are sent out to the BNP by the Awami League and the BNP too approaches the Awami League about a coordinated approach to the elections. In the interest of a restoration of liberal or centrist liberal politics in Bangladesh, these two parties, together with the JP, will likely find common ground to work on.
ALSO READ: Mujibnagar: When the Bengali nation crossed the Rubicon
All three parties are in different ways today engaged in a struggle for survival. They will therefore need to be together. That said one cannot ignore the truth that while the BNP has been playing a role in public, the Awami League is yet to recover from the bad wounds inflicted on it since its fall from power.
The Jatiyo Party, whose offices have been under mob assault, does not appear to have the wherewithal to reappear on the streets anytime soon. That is a dilemma for the country.
