It may amount to a pyrrhic victory
I had concluded my previous column with the assessment that the Awami League would in no way countenance a situation where the BNP secured the second highest number of seats so that it could not lay claim to being the opposition in the parliament. And that is exactly what has happened. But despite the huge popularity of the AL, does the result truly reflect the ground reality?
The election has been given a clean chit by a group of foreign observers who were given "a guided tour" of some polling centres in the capital only. One had not heard much of this group before, and some of them had no credentials as international election monitors. Interestingly, this observer group is a part of a larger organisation headed by an AL MP, and at least three of its members belong to the same party, according to its (SAARC Human Rights Foundation) website. It is relevant to remind ourselves that the EC had barred many well-reputed election monitor groups of Bangladesh with established credentials, ostensibly on the grounds that some of their members had political links. So much for fairness and transparency.
The monitors were obviously immensely impressed by how well the election was going that one of the observers, without any previous experience of election monitoring, could hardly hold back herself and announced her verdict before noon. As many newspaper reports suggest many of the voters in the 40,000 polling centres may not necessarily concur with the monitors' impression. The results have generated a debate, not so much in the media as between various groups of people, about the extent or otherwise of rigging in this election. It will go on for a long time one suspects.
AL is very sure that the BNP will not be in position to generate a countrywide public protest protracted enough to cause any concern for the government as was possible in 1996. And this has been amply demonstrated in the last five years in particular. This confidence was demonstrated with unbound gusto in the comments of a senior leader of the AL while talking to a foreign radio the morning after the election. This self-assurance about the capability of a neutered opposition, coupled with the threat of any critique of the government being construed as anti-state, public expression of the real nature of the election has been restricted to plaudits and platitudes by most of the media, and the exceptional few who ventured to be objective and depicted the real picture did so defying the risk of wrath, and perhaps also under the pale of official reprisal, motivated only by their obligation to the readers and to posterity to serve truth and truth only.
Our media has not quite been the acme of objective journalism, and for many journalists, who had openly canvassed for the ruling party, (this was perhaps the first time that we saw such blatant display of partisanship by the journalist community) it was not possible to report any transgressions even if they witnessed those. But there were wrongdoings aplenty, visible to only reporters and journalists who were willing or prepared to notice them.
The Awami League may well bask in the glory of an election which returned it to power for another five years. It has done even better than 2014, when the election was uncontested and the scanty participation was stretched by the imagination of a pliant election commission. And not since the election of 1973 will a party occupy nearly almost all the 300 seats (including those of its coalition partners), in the Jatiyo Sangsad.
It is difficult to take issue with the remarks of the PM that BNP owes its loss to its own follies. She is right, but only partly. Indeed, BNP failed to see through the well-crafted AL strategy. It was taken up with only one issue—release of Khaleda Zia. And one can't expect much from a party that is being backseat-driven by an absentee landlord sitting a thousand kilometres away; and the party continued to carry a political deadweight like Jamaat with it. But how well can a party fare when the entire state machinery is arrayed against it. To carve out an election strategy under these circumstances, particularly when most of their mid and grassroot level workers were constantly on the run, was a tall order.
But how much comfort can or should the AL take in the results that perhaps came as a tsunami to all but the hardcore Awami League members? It certainly was a shocking surprise to 30 or 40 percent of the swing voters. But it was not surprising to those that had studied the political goings on in the last several months and assessed the approach to the vote "war" of the ruling party.
The margin of victory defies even the concept of probability. But in Bangladesh nothing is beyond the realm of possibility; similar margin of victory was witnessed before too. Not only the number of seats but also the difference in the percentage of votes received by the two parties, as well as the turnout percentage in high voltage constituencies, have surpassed some of the controlled elections held under military rulers in Bangladesh.
But I owe it to my readers to justify my warning that the AL victory could prove to be pyrrhic. King Pyrrhus in his war against the Romans between 280-275 BC, referred to in Plutarch's poem, gained victory after an arduous battle and at a very high cost to his own forces. I feel The AL victory has been attained at a great cost. And I am not talking of the 18 lives lost on election day. Painful those deaths are, but equally painful is the potential of a long-lasting adverse consequence on the country's elections and its institutions.
The biggest casualty, regrettably, is the possible loss of integrity of the election process and of the election commission. "Peaceful" and "participatory" has no correlation with fairness of the process. The common refrain of "sporadic incident" cannot wash. Widespread irregularities were observed but there was no means to record those because photography inside those "secret" rooms were barred. It was quite inexplicable why, when there were thousands lined up outside the centre, were the booths nearly empty, and why the line hardly moved, and why many returned without being able to cast their vote.
The ground was prepared well before the election day, in fact well before even the announcement of the election date. The difference between the ruling party and the administrations was blurred completely, and there was a concerted effort to create as much impediment as possible for the opposition through a combined effort of the administration and the ruling party cadres. And that culminated into what we saw on December 30. Even EVM's failed to perform properly. There was total absence of the opposition except for their electoral symbol on the ballot paper.
Unfortunately, human beings suffer from a misplaced euphoria of permanence. And we also often forget that victory is transient, short lived, but institutions outlive governments. It is difficult to retrieve their credibility or restore their character once lost. And thus, it may be apt to end this piece by reminding ourselves of what King Pyrrhus had said after the "victory" … that another similar victory would ruin him.
Brig Gen Shahedul Anam Khan, ndc, psc (retd) is Associate Editor, The Daily Star.
Comments