Khaleda With Baggage Of Cases

Election conundrum - To be or not to be, that is the question

- Reaz Ahmad

Within a year or so over 100 million voters in Bangladesh will be seeking to exercise their right to franchise in a fashion that they have long been eagerly waiting. What they are looking forward to is essentially a participatory election to the national parliament and a more functional democracy.

Last time Bangladesh saw a participatory national election was December 29, 2008. The9th version of the Jatiya Sangsad polls was held under a military-aided quasi-caretaker government. That was a special situation; a creation of the country’s then failing politics. Messing up with the hitherto established norms of caretaker formation and spoiling of the electoral roll through inclusion of fictitious names and omission of genuine voters’ names had made the political situation all the more complicated. Subsequent street violence involving activists belonging to the opposing political camps made prospect of a fair election totally bleak. The rest is history. Two top leaders of the country, who head two of the country’s biggest political parties, had to endure jail life in makeshift prisons, face cases filed against them. In exchange, then eligible 80 million voters got for the first time photovoter IDs and a fairly held election.

Awami League, the party which had an emphatic return to the power, courtesy December 29, 2008 election held under the 1/11 government, has been ruling the country since. It got the people’s mandate to run the country a year after the global economic meltdown.

It was definitely not best of the time to rekindle hope among the people, who were yet to come into term after the triple shocks of a devastating flood, world financial crises and democracy deficit. However, AL did reasonably well in bringing back the institutions into democratic political gear after a two-year lapse and tried best building public confidence in political system.