BEHIND the Bangladeshi opposition leaders’ apathy towards the chief election commissioner’s bid for a dialogue about the not-so-distant election, there is a glut of deeper reasons awash with catastrophic reminders from the bygone. Sadly, those recaps are among the missing narratives of the country’s on-again-off-again gridlock over elections. Like the torrent of a tsunami, obdurate electoral impasse visits Bangladesh every few years. Such hostilities are the markers of a polarised nation. Parties as well as free and fair elections at regular intervals are essential in a democracy, worthy of its name. Major parties in any liberal democracy — from both sides of the political aisle — need a middle ground that allows the national election authority and its local units to accomplish their polling fairly and independently.
South Asian parties endure an asymmetric history since the colonial era. Especially in colonial Bengal and later in East Pakistan and Bangladesh, the parties did not develop strictly concurring with the western democratic norms while the North American and Western European parties have, too, in recent years, nudged away from their long-standing and venerated political fulcrum. The British rulers veiled their imperial juggernaut with new-fangled legislatures and enlarging franchise in India. Still, there was no severe allegation of election manoeuvring against the Raj — all the political institutions in those days were in their apprentice stages.
On the other hand, the United Front, though more trendy over language and other pestering topics, was, however, not yet a powerful organisation. But the opposition partnership, backed by students had a cluster of fascinating leaders like Maulana Bhashani, Fazlul Huq, HS 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 United Front’s stunning election victory in 1954. Across the questions around Bengali for a 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 disagreements, the eminent leaders found a core to work together with an eye on the 1954 election. And it worked.Three central configurations featured the post-1947 East Pakistani parties: (a) the Muslim League’s single party authority from 1947 to 1954 when the Awami League, born in 1949, was the first organised opposition party daring the ruling Muslim League, (b) the oscillating 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 rump of the old Muslim League better known as the Convention Muslim League, 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 not swindled, and the Muslim League, still in power, suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of the United Front, a coalition of the Awami League, Krishak Sramik Party 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 Muslim League still enjoyed a degree of lead over its old district outlets and their long-standing supporters, a hangover of the widespread Pakistan movement in the 1940s.
Once the much-maligned Muslim League was out of power, those who forged the United Front coalition were themselves fighting with each other — the old consensus binding the main partners melted away. The superb anti-Muslim League victory of 1954 became a distant memory. While political instability spiralled in East Pakistan and Pakistan’s federal government, the 1958 martial law dashed the old parties’ hopes for the succeeding election. Neither the competitive parties nor the 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 travesty of devious elections funnelled through an electoral college open to bureaucratic scheming.
On the one hand, Ayub Khan, the Convention (Muslim) League leader and, on the other, the disparate opposition parties that sponsored Fatima Jinnah as Ayub’s challenger in the 1965 presidential race had few mutual grounds. 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 Awami League, steered by populist Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, had won. Triggered by the seismic turns of events and the abortive negotiations trailed by a pitiless crackdown, East Pakistan catapulted into an independence struggle in 1971. Clinched by the Legal Framework Order, the 1970 election came out of an arrangement transacted between General Yahya Khan, Pakistan’s martial law chief, and Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the Awami League chief, which was, of course, accepted by other Pakistani parties, too.
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 the Awami League’s sway with New Delhi’s solid support. A consultative committee of supportive parties had a liaison with the exiled government, but the Awami League 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 Awami League’s single-party hegemony 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 organisation. Most of those steps were the Awami League’s unilateral feats. There was no visible inter-party consultation or compromise then. The 1973 election, the first voting in independent Bangladesh, gave the AwamI League an overpowering victory. Without any momentous challenger, the poll, however, was not above doubts. However, the Jatiya Samajtantrik Dal was the Awami League’s radical offshoot that aggressively countered the post-1971 AL regime. Oddly, the earlier Awami League hegemony resembled the single dominant Muslim League rule from 1947 to 1954 except that the East Pakistan Muslim League 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 members of his family, there was a long spell of military-led civilian regimes when the latest parties included the Bangladesh Nationalist Party — the BNP founded by president General Ziaur Rahman — and later the Jatiya Party, launched by the ousted president General HM Ershad. Through the hiatus, the old Awami League recuperated when Sheikh 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 Khaleda Zia. From 1991, the AL-BNP rivalry escalated which tapered the epicentre between the two major parties. An encouraging institutional development of that period was an effective two-party system alternated between the BNP and the Awami League with minor parties sharing power through electoral compacts. After 26 years since 1975, the Awami League returned to power in 1996 with a coalition of several smaller parties and individuals — a dawning of the Awami League’s prolonged second width of life. But it was also the worst of time for the political parties’ institutional fate in Bangladesh. Combined with a pitiless deadlock, general strike, 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. Worse still, the 2014 election bore the blemishes of non-stop 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 Awami League’s earlier electoral victory overseen by a military-backed caretaker government, indeed, paved the path of the party’s decade-long ascendency. But the BNP and its allies charged that the interim regime contrived a favourable niche for the Awami League to win easily. Since 2008, prime minister Sheikh Hasina won two more divisive elections — 2014 and 2018; her triumphs faced explicit denunciation as the ominously fixed polls abetted by the police, bureaucracy, and the ruling party’s accomplices. Obviously, the Awami League 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 Awami League government. It is a reset of the old and grave impasse. Any way out?
Polarisation 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 over a decade ago. With a burst of enthusiasm, president J Biden, not long ago, called for a global ‘coalition of democracies’ and he has invoked the American ‘soft power’ of sanctions against the anti-democratic proclivities in a swathe of countries. Paradoxically, the United States is one of the polarised democracies in the west. An ‘illiberal democracy’, discounted by indifference and amnesia, is a threat to itself — the parties, even the dominant ones, eventually fall apart when the political outfits and even the government officials become the despised machines for corruption, violence, repression, and horrifying vote swindling. The stand-off between the ruling party and the opposition might suddenly dissolve into general stirke-thumping street stirs 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 institutional norms of parties and seek common grounds amongst themselves and demonstrate regard for free and fair elections towards a peaceful transfer of power.
M Rashiduzzaman is a retired academic. He writes from Glassboro, NJ, USA. In part, this article hauls from his forthcoming book – Parties and Politics in East Pakistan: 1947-71: Political Inheritances of Bangladesh.
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