Former President General (rtd) HM Ershad
has an interesting record to his name. Once ousted, hardly any military
dictator or his party has ever fared well in a free and fair election across
the world. Ershad is an exception. In the election that was held after his
ouster in a bloody mass upsurge, Ershad's Jatya Party (JP) won 35 seats. The
former dictator, then imprisoned on an array of corruption charges, won all the
five seats he contested, a feat he shared with only Khaleda Zia in the 1991
elections.
I have always been amazed the way Ershad
runs his trade, and during the last caretaker government's term in office I
interviewed the former military strongman. He lamented the fact that his party
MP hopefuls were not allowed to work in the run up to the first election since
the restoration of democracy in 1990. Strange it may sound, his allegations
were true--JP faced an unofficial ban at that time, and Ershad's popularity was
one of the reasons why Khaleda nodded to the idea of amending the constitution
to reintroduce Westminster-style government.
It might be why Bangladesh's new constitution that brought
back parliamentary form of democracy vests the Prime Minister with power that
only a Mughal emperor can outmatch. Add to that is her absolute power in the party
where she handpicks her presidium/central committee members. In the councils of
both the Awami League and Bangladesh Nationalist Party it is Sheikh Hasina and Khaleda
Zia who were 'trusted' by the councillors with the responsibility of choosing
members of both the parties' highest policymaking bodies.
The irony does not escape us: even though
both the parties and their leaders talk about democracy in every breath they
take, at heart and at home they remain all powerful autocrats. In the case of
the BNP, it is not surprising at all for the party was founded at the height of
General Zia's martial law. What is strange is the way the AL, the vanguard of our Liberation War, has started
to entertain undemocratic practises in its fold. There's hardly any difference
left now between the way the AL and the BNP are now run.
There's however now denying that in Bangladesh
politics both the ladies enjoy the status of minor deities. Is it because the
electorate sees some kind of mother figure engrained in their collective
consciousness? Hardly so. Hasina and Khaleda thrive for the same reason Ershad,
after the fall of his autocratic rule, had garnered 11 percent votes. Ordinary
Bangladeshis do not have options, their choice always shuffle back and forth
between the two major parties because they were never presented with a viable
alternative to the duopoly that the two ladies created in local politics.
Politics in Bangladesh has remained a messy affair;
members of the civil society have always shied away from it. To make matters
even more grievous, young leadership that both the parties' quasi-democratic
rule is producing is heavily infected with corruption and gangsterism. Change
is the order of the day. But when, and, more importantly, how?
First published in The Daily Star on June 7, 2013