Daily Times Editorial Jan 8, 2014

Bangladesh in crisis Despite the violence before and on polling day and the controversial outcome of the elections in Bangladesh, Prime Minister (PM) Sheikh Hasina seems defiantly to be digging her heels in. She insists her win in an election boycotted by the opposition is legitimate and lays the blame for the unprecedented bloodshed entirely at the door of the opposition. Nor, she says, is she in any mood to offer an olive branch to her archrival, Begum Khaleda Zia of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP). The opposition meanwhile insists on a fresh election under a neutral caretaker government. The heart of the crisis is the overturning through a constitutional amendment by the Awami League (AL) government in June 2010 of the previous practice since 1991 of holding elections under neutral caretaker governments. That practice owed itself to the controversies that dogged every election in Bangladesh’s history of rigging by incumbent governments. Polarised as Bangladesh’s polity has been since its independence in 1971, the wisdom of all political forces arrived at the conclusion that the only way to establish the legitimacy of any party’s mandate and have the election results accepted by all was to have a neutral caretaker government conduct elections. That system seemed to work and blessed the country with relative stability. In fact we in Pakistan also adopted the practice of neutral caretaker governments conducting elections to avoid precisely the same sort of rigging charges that form part of our history too. The usefulness of that arrangement has once again been thrown up sharply as a result of the controversial 2014 elections. Polling day yielded 26 deaths and attacks on 600 polling stations by the opposition. Turnout too was low, with election officials informally revealing that only one in four people voted in the capital Dhaka. The credibility of the election had been undermined even before the polling day when 153 AL members or allies were declared elected unopposed to the 300-seat parliament. Meanwhile Begum Khaleda Zia was held under de facto house arrest. BNP’s ally, the Jamaat-e-Islami (JI), has been under attack for the past year or so, with the courts finding its religious politics at odds with the secular character of Bangladesh’s constitution and many of its senior leaders being tried for charges relating to the 1971 liberation war for the independence of Bangladesh (Abdul Quader Molla was executed last month after being found guilty of massacres, rapes, etc, during the 1971 war in a flawed trial). PM Sheikh Hasina seems to have been guilty of misreading the situation and acting out of hubris rather than a correct appreciation of the ground realities in her country. A volatile polity such as Bangladesh’s needed a healing touch, not an exacerbation of the divide that has characterised politics in the country for many years. Had Sheikh Hasina handled the opposition BNP and the JI with greater wisdom and circumspection, perhaps things might not have come to the present pass, described by Bangladeshi newspapers the Daily Star and New Age as a hollow victory that does not bestow a mandate nor ethical standing to govern effectively, and as the prime minister leading the country towards disaster, respectively. Recent history and experience have highlighted the different and wiser approach to managing extreme divisions in societies emerging from violent pasts. Nelson Mandela defied the opinion of his own party’s leadership, the African National Congress, the militant mood amongst his people in the streets and the intransigence of the dominant white apartheid practitioners to guide his country through a difficult democratic transition that avoided the widely anticipated bloodbath and peacefully brought about change. Subsequent complaints about economic apartheid persisting notwithstanding, Mr Mandela saw the moment clearer than any of his contemporaries and enemies. That is the essence of great leadership. Sheikh Hasina has not served her own or her country’s interest by a partisan and self-righteous pursuit of her party’s interests at the expense of the credibility and legitimacy of the election process. Defiance notwithstanding, it is difficult to envisage how she will be able to avoid the growing demand for a fresh election under a neutral caretaker government. We hope the people of Bangladesh will in their undoubted political wisdom find a solution acceptable to the polity as a whole and reset the rules of the game to allow Bangladesh to turn the corner from the current extreme polarisation and violence to the stability that has stood the country and its people in such good stead for so long.