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Those who find her win promising may have fond memories of a similar landslide in 1973 when the same party under Sheikh Hasinaʼs father, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, won a resounding victory. It was a statement of purpose then, by the world’s most impoverished Muslim-majority nation, that secular democracy was possible. This was not long after Henry Kissinger, former U.S. secretary of state, had called Bangladesh an “international basket case.”
According to a leading Bangladesh daily, the New Age, the landslide victory will allow the winning political parties to stifle dissent, not unlike the current military-backed government. This would crush the very essence of democracy. If the victory goes to their heads, the new leaders can easily retract their pre-election promises.
Hasinaʼs father, fondly remembered as the “father of the nation,” used the heady year in the wake of the 1973 election to ban multi-party rule and allowed a situation resembling a dictatorship to prevail, which finally brought about his assassination.
Over the years, including its last failed attempt at electioneering in 2006, when the caretaker military government took over, the famed secular credentials of the Awami League took a battering. To play to the renascent religious bigotry that gripped the nation, the party took a leaf from the book of the rival Bangladesh National Party and aligned itself with the fundamentalist Khelafat-e-Majlish group. This means the party sacrificed its secular credentials to take advantage of a radical Islamic groundswell.
To think of a sudden compromise with radical Islam is galling, after a grenade attack on a party rally in Dhaka in August 2004 nearly killed Hasina while she was delivering a speech. At that time the Bangladesh National Party of her archrival, Khaleda Zia, was in power.
The BNP’s coalition partner, the Jamaat-e-Islami party, which practices fundamentalism in the name of Islam, was routed in last week’s election. The Awami League fought the election with promises to strengthen secularism and tamp down on terror, while the rival BNP vowed to save Islam – as if it were in danger in Bangladesh.
Now it remains to be seen whether Hasina and the rejuvenated Awami League will fulfill the promises made to the Bangladeshi electorate.
Ironically, the military-backed caretaker government tried to make the nation corruption-free and revive the ethos of the Bangladeshi independence struggle by maintaining an impartial stance between the two big rival parties, as well as recognizing Mujibur Rahman’s contribution as the country’s founding prime minister. But the same military also put his daughter Hasina, as well as her rival Zia, behind bars.
With nearly 40 percent of the electorate first-time voters, it seems the young population responded to the revival of nationalism based on a secular ethos, which may bode well for the future of Bangladesh and neighboring India.
But can the Awami League override the military and the border security force, the Bangladesh Rifles, even though it has secured a whopping majority? During the earlier Awami League government, the border force killed a few personnel from India’s border security force and sent the mutilated bodies back to India, causing tensions in cross-border relations.
Recently, when Pakistan was hyping up war hysteria against India to cover its inaction against the terror outfits accused in the Mumbai attacks, Bangladesh naval warships shooed away Indian vessels that they alleged were exploring for gas in their waters.
Again, during Hasinaʼs earlier tenure, the Pakistani high commissioner in Dhaka had the temerity to refer to the “mukti bahini” – the freedom fighters of the 1971 struggle for liberation from Pakistan – as “miscreants.” There was hardly any rebuttal from the government, let alone mass protests over this statement, which touched upon the sensitive issue of genocide in Bangladesh during its fight for independence.
Pakistan may have lost its “eastern arm” in 1971, but it still influences the Bangladeshi armed forces, while its spy agency the Inter-Services Intelligence facilitates terror groups based in Bangladesh.
In November last year, Islamic hardliners protesting the beautification of Dhaka airport forced the military-backed government to remove statues of “baul singers” – Bengali minstrels that travel from village to village – on the road to the airport. The singers were part of a monument to those killed in a Bengali-language protest in 1954, under Pakistani rule.
The hardliners claimed that statues of people violate Islam. The fact that they prevailed in this instance is a reflection of closeted radicalism that is coming to the fore and jeopardizing the high hopes of those who pursue the lofty mandate of democracy and secularism.
Besides, leaders of the insurgency in northeast India, who are apparently ensconced in Bangladesh, will remain protected as long as the Bangladeshi military, allegedly working under orders from Pakistan, calls the foreign policy shots.
All of this means it is too early for foreign policy pundits in western capitals to exult that the new government will meet the danger head-on and Bangladesh will stop breeding terrorists.
The responsibility to disallow religious fundamentalism to rear its head also rests on the politically conscious Bangladeshis. The world should invest in the nation’s youth, who form the bulk of the electorate.
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(Susenjit Guha is a freelance writer living in Kolkata, India. He can be contacted at sguha60@yahoo.com. ©Copyright Susenjit Guha.)
