Desperate Measures

Tension has gripped Bangladesh as the Bangladesh Nationalist Party marks its return to electoral politics with the support of disgruntled freedom fighters

- Rabi Banerjee

A FORTNIGHT before the 11th Bangladesh general election, Mahbub Talukdar, an election commissioner, expressed his concern over the absence of a “level playing field for opposition parties”. Talukdar’s statement drew criticism from his own chief election commissioner. But Talukdar said, “No one can take away my right of telling the truth to the nation.”

With several leaders of the principal opposition party, Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), in jail or in exile, the country’s freedom fighters took it upon themselves to prevent the 2018 election from being one-sided. These are people who were closest to the ‘father of Bangladesh’, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. Today, they are fighting to prevent his daughter, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, from winning the election for the third time in a row. Bangladesh goes to the polls on December 30.

With a 13-party opposition pitted against the eight-party alliance led by Hasina’s Awami League (AL), it would not have been a cakewalk for Hasina. Opposition activists said that worried AL activists were attacking opposition candidates. Buses were torched and roads blocked during their campaign days in Dhaka, opposition politicians said. It showed that the political system in the country continues to struggle since the dark days of Mujibur Rahman’s assassination in 1975 in a bloody coup. In fact, freedom fighters and close associates of Mujibur Rahman, fondly called Bangabandhu, are today allying with an opposition that includes the Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami, which was allegedly behind Rahman’s death and had opposed the formation of Bangladesh.

Freedom fighters opposing Hasina include Dr Kamal Hossain, who drafted the Bangladesh constitution, and Abdul Kader Siddique, the guerrilla leader who captured vast parts of central Bangladesh in 1971 with the help of the Indian Army.