The Yunus interim regime has decreed that elections will be held in Bangladesh on February 12 next year. The announcement has certainly not aroused any enthusiasm on the part of citizens.
The reason is obvious: without the participation of the Awami League, the country’s largest and oldest political party, the voting will lack credibility.
With the Awami League holding to its 35-40 percent vote bank, perhaps more given the sympathy it has elicited as a result of the repression exercised against it since August 2024, it makes little sense to suppose that the February election will have any meaning.
The question now naturally arises: will there be an election at all?
Given the growing polarisation in national politics and given the chaos that has been developing in politics, one is not quite sure if the Yunus regime will be equipped to carry an election through.
There have been growing demands both at home and abroad for the election to be credible.
But credibility will simply be a missing factor if the February election is rammed through by those who were installed in office in August last year.
Perhaps the election will take place, with grave ramifications.
In the first place, a very large number of voters who have been concerned at the systematic assault on Bangladesh’s history and heritage since the fall of the elected government in August 2024 will likely choose to stay home.
One can therefore expect the polling booths to remain eerily empty on election day, a scene reminiscent of electoral exercises in the last few years when, in the times of an Awami League government, major parties such as the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) chose to boycott the exercise.
In the second place, without any assurance that the election will be fully participatory through the presence of the Awami League and the Jatiya Party on the ballot, the election will hit a roadblock right from the time when the votes have been counted.
An election that lacks the quality of being inclusive can only throw up more chaos than has been the disturbing reality so far.
A government formed on the basis of such a flawed election will, from day one, lack credibility and therefore will be unable to exercise proper constitutional authority.
Again, given the growing fissures in the political landscape, with the BNP and the Jamaat-e-Islami clearly poised against each other, there is little guarantee that an election in February will produce a definitive result for the political parties that choose to take part in the election.
There is then that important question of whether the Yunus regime, its existence based on the support of the young, a good number of whom have formed or chosen to join the new political outfit known as the National Citizens Party, will be morally capable of administering an election without running the risk of being accused of partisanship toward the NCP.
Moreover, parties that have been permitted to take part in the election have been recognized by an illegitimate regime. Uncertainty is thus a factor that cannot be wished away over the election question.
Besides, with elements of the extremist religious right being in the ascendant in the past sixteen months, together with growing civil disorder on the streets, there can be little expectation on the part of citizens that an election, if it comes to pass, will not be marred by violence.
The bottom line will not be missed: the Yunus regime, having presided over a regression of the country in terms of the organised assault on national history, now finds itself between a rock and a hard place.
Where its responsibility after August 2024 ought to have been to organise a fresh and participatory election and nothing else, it chose to zero in on areas which patently were not its remit, owing to its unconstitutional nature. Controversy has therefore dogged it all along.
Extend the election idea a little further.
The BNP’s exiled acting chairperson, Tareque Rahman, plans to return to Dhaka from London on Christmas Day.
That begs the question: with thousands of BNP supporters preparing to welcome him back home after seventeen years, how will the political arithmetic change in the country?
How will the Yunus outfit cope with the pressure it might begin to feel once Rahman comes home?
The son of the country’s first military ruler, Ziaur Rahman and former Prime Minister Khaleda Zia, Tareque Rahman has long been considered by the party faithful as a future head of government.
Yet there has been a dent in his party’s popularity, principally through the increasing influence of the Jamaat in the country’s politics.
Once the junior partner of the BNP, both in opposition and in government, the Jamaat has, in these past many months, edged ahead of the BNP in laying claim to significant areas of state activity.
The situation has undoubtedly rattled Tareque Rahman, who, for the first time in the history of his party, hit out at the Jamaat last week.
Departing from the established policy of the BNP, he accused the Jamaat, without taking its name, of the atrocities it committed during the War of Liberation in 1971.
The speech, aimed at his followers in a virtual meeting, certainly marked a rupture in ties between the BNP and the Jamaat. The Jamaat is yet to come up with its reaction to Rahman’s comments.
It was during General Ziaur Rahman’s rule that Ghulam Azam, the Jamaat leader who had collaborated with the Yahya-Tikka martial law regime in 1971 and then found refuge in Pakistan following Bangladesh’s emergence as a sovereign state, travelled to Dhaka on a Pakistani passport and a Bangladesh visa in 1978 but never went back to Islamabad.
In the post-Ershad period, the Jamaat was a happy ally of the BNP, going so far as to have some of its leading figures, all of whom were later to be accused of war crimes and convicted by the Awami League government of Sheikh Hasina, inducted as ministers in the 2001-2006 government headed by Khaleda Zia.
Despite its current travails, the BNP leadership obviously expects to form the next government of the country following the February 2026 election.
At the other end, the Jamaat and adherents of Muhammad Yunus, all determined to prevent any resurgence of the Awami League, will not likely be happy with a BNP government taking over in February.
Hanging over everything, of course, is the issue of what happens between now and February 12. Will the Yunus regime be able to conduct an election that has no blemish attached to it?
Or will circumstances warrant a major new move that will promise a return of proper democratic governance in the country?
The Yunus regime will certainly not be happy with the Awami League’s position that prior to handling the election question, the party would want Yunus and his regime out of office.
ALSO READ: Bangladesh remembers its martyred intellectuals
But that raises a bigger question: is the Awami League ready to shape a strategy that will take it back to the centre of politics in Bangladesh?
Sixteen months after August 2024, this question is being raised by its activists and citizens across the country as well as the Bengali diaspora around the globe.
