CONFIGURATIONS of political parties in Bangladesh now carry multiple drifts — they are still inchoate after a long hiatus under an authoritarian stretch of 15 plus years. But the parties got a new lease of life since a populist revolt ousted prime minister Sheikh Hasina’s repressive regime. Now, they are optimistic, alive and thrusting. The expected contestants are mobilising resources for the future electoral race. Bangladeshis love politics even though their success in institution-building fell short of expectations on multiple occasions. Historically, parties ‘formed’ with a great ease in colonial and post-colonial Bengal; then, bulk of the outfits did not grow for long. Factional and personal rivalries are still so strong in Bengali political culture. Single-party domination, personalistic hegemony and the familiar dynastic claims characterised the rise and fall of parties in the past.
Among the squirming parties in the post-Hasina Bangladesh, I sense an ideological jolt. The Awami League-centric secular-liberal nationalism, with Sheikh Mujibur Rahman as the ‘jatir pita’ has lost its pitch since the July-August tectonic discontent. A fresh sense of patriotism is, however, yet to come out lucidly. It is even short of catchy slogans and rhetoric to attract public attention. Anti-Indian and anti-Awami League postures are the twins in the new mood in Bangladesh, which, of course, have their challengers — both internal and external. India is important to Bangladesh; on the other side, Bangladesh is too crucial for Indian security in the northeastern states. So, New Delhi might try to reinstate Hasina or her Awami League allies back in Bangladesh. Nostalgia for the bygone Hasina regime among her surviving beneficiaries is still amongst the Awami League leftovers, anxious to return to power by hook or by crook. The troubled Awami League will really have its own existential crisis if a band of its leaders, not directly associated with Hasina’s tyrannical regime, would jettison the old guards — the Mujib family — and recycle themselves as the new-fangled Awami League. Neither the caretaker regime nor the Bangladesh Nationalist party or Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami is ruling out such possibilities. The Awami League gained its historic thrust in 1971, which, of course, went adrift after the 1975 violent coup. Much later, it regained vigorously first since the 1996 election victory and then more solidly after the 2008 electoral triumph. Has the one-time mighty Awami League lost its previous momentum? Hasina’s prolonged autocracy destroyed a large and established party from within itself. Neither Mujib nor Hasina fully trusted the party although both used the party to climb the ladder of power. Mujib stabbed the party in the back by creating the BKSAL single-party system and Hasina preferred to rule by creating an oligarchy of corrupt businesspeople, crony politicians, sycophants, politicians, politicised bureaucrats, the police and henchmen.
Will post-Hasina Bangladesh wipe out the Mujib-Hasina brand of politics? In that case, the Awami League might lose its deceptive Indian patronage. India is the dominant power in the region and the regional actors are careful in dealing with the neighbourhood juggernaut. The Bangladesh Nationalist Party, now buoyant about its impending return to power, would avoid any direct confrontation with the next-door giant. Even the Jamaat-e-Islami has sent ‘soft’ messages to India. None of the leaders of those two major parties aggressively demanded the Awami League’s ban. Rumours floated that the Awami League leadership would change and it was willing to connect with the Bangladesh Nationalist Party for certain areas of common concerns. The Bangladesh Nationalist Party wanted legal actions and punishment for Hasina and her associates for their tyrannical intransigence and wanton deaths and destruction in July–August. So far, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party did not strongly demand the Awami League’s ban, but the leaders of the unbridled civil unrest denounced the Awami League as a fascist outfit that did not deserve a slot in a democracy.
A disconnect exists between the majority Bangladeshi parties and the student leaders who steered the furious anti-Hasina crusade. They want a radical change with a ‘revolutionary’ zeal by upending the entire post-1971 political narrative, including its historiography and the sense of identity. They condemn the Awami League’s exclusionary path and its alleged collusion with New Delhi to turn Bangladesh into a ‘vassal state’ of India. The time-worn Bangladeshi consensus, so long defined by the Awami League-delineated post-1971 chetana that deified the late Sheikh Mujib and sustained Sheikh Hasina’s prolonged tyranny is all but shattered since the July-August revolt. The conventional parties, including the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, the Jamaat and the lessor parties, would prefer to return to power soon by a majoritarian party rule or by sharing power by a coalition of like-minded parties. The smaller parties, however, want a proportional representation, which ordinarily gives better power-sharing opportunities to minor parties. The protest leaders and the smaller parties also want the proportional representation as a tool to fight against the single-party hegemony in Bangladesh. But the larger parties, both the Bangladesh Nationalist Party and the Awami League, are reluctant to give up the existing majority-style voting system. If Bangladesh switches to a proportional representation, the world of political parties will change substantially.
The student leaders of the July-August upheavals opposed the main parties’ dynastic leadership, which turned them against both the ousted Awami League and the Bangladesh Nationalist Party. Both the parties carry the family names at their highest echelon. The simmering encounter between the Bangladesh Nationalist Party and the protest leaders was clear recently when the Bangladesh Nationalist Party turned down the student leaders’ demand for the Bangladesh president’s immediate resignation. Senior BNP leaders are trying to establish the party’s relevance to post-Hasina Bangladesh politics. BNP front runners are active in the media. Out of her contrived jail sentence, Khaleda Zia is looking for a better health care abroad and Tareque Zia, the BNP’s president-in-charge, is more visible on social media. More prospective candidates are lobbying for BNP tickets in the next election, for which no date came out so far.
Will the samanwaykari (coordinating) student leaders float a party, as the rumour goes on? Neither the student campaigners nor Mohammad Yunus’s cabinet, so far, produced a clear political vision about their future. Spectacular political changes resulted from the student-led protests in the bygone. I remember the massive events that goaded East Pakistan chief minister Abu Hossain Sarker’s government to resign in 1956. it was the Awami League leader Ataur Rahman Khan who headed the succeeding government. Now, the caretaker authority is running the administration until the next election.
There was a time when the digits of ‘1971’ carried the ‘short-handed’ message for pruning Jamaat out of politics, as I read this in the past. Now, Jamaat’s greatest achievement is that the party, as a movement, could survive undercover, when necessary, and still explode as a big blow to its political adversaries. Jamaat’s student front, the Shibir, has a place in the student samanway committee that has worked with Dr Yunus. The Bangladesh Nationalist Party has maintained its unity during its trying times. And now, it is the largest party in Bangladesh with bright electoral prospects ahead. No longer, dependent on the Bangladesh Nationalist Party’s mercy, Jamaat has moved from the periphery to the centre of Bangladesh politics. Islamic politics is not the monopoly of Jamaat although it is the largest party upholding political Islam in Bangladesh. A few can predict now if Jamaat will go to the poll alone or as a coalition of the Islamic parties. Smaller parties also hope for its share in the Bangladeshi arena of politics. The evolving configuration of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party and Jamaat will substantively impact the future Bangladeshi party politics.
What happened earlier this year ripped through the Bangladeshi psyche while people feel empowered by the populist stump that ejected the Hasina rule. That colossal uprising worked like a referendum against Hasina’s unbending authoritarianism and crimes against humanity. But the main discourse of the revolt is yet to appear as a coherent institutional expression. Which of the established parties would embrace the July-August protest’s counter-narrative? The perceived relief is that the Awami League’s archaic single-party ascendency is not on its brutal rampage in Bangladesh now. And the rhetorical temperature against the Jamaat and the old fear-mongering about Islamic terrorism have significantly subsided. Bangladeshis, however, still acknowledge that parties are the essential vehicles for the parliamentary democracy that they cherish so much. The lingering polarisation, periodic lawlessness, disagreements and discontent over constitutional and institutional reforms and the absence of a road map for the next election are creating a chasm between the parties and the interim regime. The fear of internal instability and external interference on different pretexts wrestles a necessary consensus before the return of an elected and stable governance.
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M Rashiduzzaman, a retired academic in the United States, occasionally writes on Bangladesh politics and history. Parts of this essay draw from his forthcoming ‘Parties and Politics in East Pakistan 1947-1971: The Political Inheritances of Bangladesh’, Peter Lang, 2024.
