Bangladesh: Back to democracy

The streets of Dhaka were festooned with buntings and political banners as Bangladeshis enthusiastically crowded the polls last week - with a whopping 70 percent turnout - to elect a new government.

After two years of rule by a military-backed caretaker government, Bangladesh finally voted in a new government with a thumping majority. The Awami League, led by Sheikh Hasina, clinched more than a two-thirds majority in the Bangladeshi Parliament, trouncing her arch-rival, Khaleda Zia's Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP). 

Parliamentary elections, due to take place in January 2007, were suspended after months of political turbulence. Since then, Bangladesh has been ruled by a caretaker government under emergency law. As such, the 29 December polls were hailed by civil rights groups as "Bangladesh's return to democracy."

Political pundits predicted the return of the Awami League, but no one thought they would win with such an overwhelming majority.

Jamaat-e-Islami, the BNP's key ally in the four-party alliance, won only two seats in the election, down from 17 seats in 2001. The public rejection of  Jamaat-e-Islami, a political party denounced by many secular-minded Bangladeshis for festering radical Islamic ideals, sends a strong statement.

Many Bangladeshis repudiate the idea of mixing religion with politics, and in these elections anyone even mildly religious-minded, like Jamaat-e-Islami, was rejected outright by the electorate.

Key challenges

The main task for the new government, experts say, will be reinvigorating the country's flailing economy. Forty percent of Bangladesh's population languishes below the poverty line.

"The key challenge is to bring down inflation which hovers around the 7 percent mark," Professor Mustafizur Rahman, executive director at the Center for Policy Dialogue (CPD), a Dhaka-based think tank, told ISN Security Watch.

"Food prices are currently back-breaking in Bangladesh. Rice per kilo used to cost 17 taka (US$.25) in mid-2006. Now it costs 30 taka.

"Another key challenge will be to create employment," he adds. According to the CPD, the unemployment rate in Bangladesh currently stands at 45 percent, including the unemployed and underemployed population.

Considering the Awami League has won a full majority, and is not answerable to other coalition partners, Rahman says, it will be important to check that this unbridled power does not corrupt the government. Bangladesh is ranked as one of the most corrupt countries in the world by Transparency International. And Sheikh Hasina and Khaleda Zia, who alternated to power between 1991 and 2006, still face corruption charges.

Manik Khan, 20, who works in a bakery in Lalbagh, a grubby suburb in the old town of Dhaka, fears that Bangladesh might see the return of the old graft-ridden politics, and candidates with criminal backgrounds might return to the political fray.

But he says he enthusiastically ambled through the narrow, grimy lanes of Lalbagh to the polling station on Monday, convinced that a government elected by the people was preferable to a non-representative caretaker government. 

"The Awami League says if you vote for them, Bangladesh will be heaven. The BNP says if you vote for them, they'll make Bangladesh heaven," he says. "I don't think either party can make Bangladesh heaven, but a government elected by the people is better than a military-backed dictatorship."

Accepting defeat

The real test now is to see if the BNP supporters will accept its resounding defeat. Bangladesh has witnessed pre- and post-poll violence in previous elections, which paralyzed life in the country, and scared away investors from this impoverished nation of 144 million people.

After Zia's last stint at the helm ended in 2006, her party handed over power to a caretaker government to organize elections, as is the norm. But her archrival, Sheikh Hassina, accused her of loading up the caretaker government with her supporters to manipulate the vote. Campaigners from both sides took to the streets in months of fatal clashes.

This time, after its overwhelming defeat, the BNP filed a complaint with Bangladesh's Election Commission, alleging voting irregularities and ballot rigging in 220 polling stations across 72 constituencies.

But Bangladesh's Chief Election Commissioner Shamsul Huda said the election arrangements were fool-proof, and unlike previous elections, this vote was not marred by fraud, considering they drew up a computerized list of 81 million registered voters for this election, and purged 11 million fake voters from the rolls.

"The voting was arranged in such a way that there is no scope for rejecting the result," he told reporters. "About 1,500 foreign and 200,000 local observers were monitoring the whole election process, and there is no reason for anyone to complain."

Last week's elections were not marred by incidents of violence, unlike previous elections. However, after the election ban on rallies was eased on Thursday last week, two people were killed and more than 20 injured in post-election clashes between Awami League and BNP campaigners across half a dozen districts around Bangladesh.

Given the country's history of political turbulence, many political analysts saw the post-poll violence coming.

Bangladesh's political culture is so blemished, say analysts, that no political party ever graciously accepts defeat.

Return of democracy and crime

After two relatively peaceful years under the caretaker government, the criminals are back.

Visibly shaken, Asmi Mehnaz pointed a trembling finger at the broken shards of glass that littered her front entrance as a policeman took down her complaint in a tattered notebook last week.

"There were at least two dozen men," she said. "Most of them wielded pistols, others brandished butcher knives."

The men demanded that Mehnaz, a 23-year-old entrepreneur who owns two electronics stores in Dhaka, cough up 200,000 takkas in cash. As she hunkered down inside her room, barricading the door with furniture, the men menacingly fired eight rounds in the air. They eventually broke into the living room, assaulting her father and aunt, before fleeing with 50,000 takkas kept inside a steel cabinet.

"They vowed to return again," Mehnaz told ISN Security Watch.

Similar attacks took place last Thursday on five other residences in Mirpur, a shabby suburb in the north of Dhaka, less than a week after the parliamentary vote.

Until two years ago, when the country had a civilian government, extortion and other criminal activities were well ingrained in Bangladesh's social fabric. But the country saw a steady erosion of such activities, locals say, during the iron-fisted rule of the military-backed caretaker government that lasted for two years. After last week's polls, as politicians returned to the corridors of power, notorious criminal elements, most of whom claim allegiance to political parties, began to re-emerge from the woodwork.

"Crime and politics go hand in hand in Bangladesh," Syed Muhammad Ibrahim, a retired army general, told ISN Security Watch.

As Bangladesh's major political heavy weights, including Hasina and Zia, were incarcerated in the two years of caretaker government rule, criminal elements remained low-key and thus, "out of business."  After the elections, he says, it was a matter of time before criminals would return to the political fray.

"This is a very natural deterioration of law and order," Ibrahim says matter-of-factly. "And Bangladeshis are inured to violence."

"Even if you bring Obama to govern Bangladesh, he won't be able to change Bangladesh's flawed political system," Sakiul Millet Morshed, the executive director of Shisuk, a Dhaka-based nongovernmental organization, told ISN Security Watch.

"To manage a country of 144 million people with such limited resources is cumbersome."

These criminal elements, Morshed says, have arisen due to widespread poverty. Nearly 40 percent of Bangladeshis are known to live on less than US$1 per day.

"You solve all these problems, and Bangladesh will not breed criminals any more," he says.

However, analysts are confident that even though the country will see a return of the old violent, graft-ridden politics, it will not corrode the public's faith in the new Hasina-led government.

Until two years ago, politicians in Bangladesh felt they were above the law, but now after hundreds of politicians were tried in courts and jailed during the caretaker government-rule, that feeling of invincibility has subsided.

The Awami League, which has solely assumed power, without any support from coalition partners, is akin to a "sumo wrestler," Ibrahim opines.

"If it flails, it will fall with a huge thud," he said. "It cannot afford to let the post-poll violence spiral out of control considering it will have to bear the entire blame."

However, that view provides little respite to Mehnaz, who has decided to shut down her stores for a few days, fearing another attack by extortionists.

At least six of those who attacked her house, she claims, were recognized as "goons" from the Awami League by her family

They have been attempting to usurp one of her shops for more than two years, she says, but have been  restrained because of the military-controlled regime.

"Now that they are in power," she frets, "the attacks will become more audacious."

Mehnaz belongs to Bangladesh's "Bihari" community, a marginalized group of Urdu-speaking migrants who are derogatorily labeled as "stranded Pakistanis."

Biharis have remained sequestered in refugee camps around the country for more than three decades, but in the recent elections they were granted the right to vote for the first time in Bangladesh's turbulent history.

"We are minorities in Bangladesh," she said. "We are most vulnerable to criminal elements."