Early election: Why? Why not?

Shahid Islam

Sound bites are sweeter when they denote something in substance.  Recent utterances of some of the ruling party leaders, and the BNP’s reactive response relating to an early election, are brewing sweeter sound bites. The reality may be that these are empty talks to keep the otherwise vacuous political horizon splattered with some colours and coatings.

Then again, it may not just be a floating detraction to keep the public psyche engaged in an illusion. Let’s examine the pros and cons of this dangling dilemma.

Constitutional exigency

Elusive or not, the government is not constitutionally beholden to have an early election which can occur as late as the penultimate days of 2018. But, based on a rampart of tactical calculus, it may be wiser to have the electoral show staged earlier due to reasons that have turned somewhat imposing and unavoidable in recent days.

Foremost, the performance index of the ruling AL in governance within, diplomacy abroad, and in reining in intra-party bloodletting is showing an inexorable downward trend. Macro and micro economic indices are flip-flopping too. Ordinary people find it extremely harder to cope with the rising prices of electricity, food, house rents, and other indispensable chores of life.

Add to this the lingering stigma of the nation’s parliament not being a representational one, and, the ‘image crisis’ it sprouts almost daily when the nation’s diplomats wage their battle to pull the world to our side on a human carnage occurring across the border in Myanmar; resulting in huge influx of refugees into a land that is the most populated one on earth, based on the number of inhabitants sprawled per sq. km.

What an early election can do to ameliorate the above is an unknown of quantum perplexity. Yet, it can shift the agenda from the existential deadlock characterized by the domestic and global perceptions that the incumbent AL will keep ruling the nation by force; with backing of an external power that even does not vote in Bangladesh’s favour in the global podiums, on crucial matters like the Rohingya crisis.

BNP’s betting

The BNP and its electoral-political allies have been expecting an election within a year or so of the botched 2014 electoral fiasco; hoping that the government had—as pronounced and reiterated repeatedly—held the poll without participation of the other major political parties only to preserve the constitutional sanctity, as the BNP itself did in 1996, and a new election would put democracy to its deserved locomotive to pull the nation ahead.

Since that didn’t happen, and, the government managed to tighten its stranglehold on the labyrinth of the state apparatuses to cling onto power without a fresh mandate of the people, it should happen sooner, so believed, and do believe, the nation’s well-wishers at home and abroad.

Since the 2014 election, the EU, the USA, and almost all other external partners had advised and vouched time and again for an early election that the government managed to wriggle off and defer until now. This stands at the crux of Bangladesh’s stumbled political crisis; deterring domestic and international investments on pretexts that the political climate of the nation lacks signs of profound stability.

It may be time, given the way the geopolitics of the Bay of Bengal region is transforming to suck in global powers to the festering Rohingya crisis (see last issue of the weekly Holiday), that the government should seek a fresh mandate from the people to shore up the dearth of legitimacy that is bottlenecking the diplomatic efforts to cull the support of some UNSC members like China and Russia to compel Myanmar to take back its driven-out people, numbering almost a million, from the soil of our over-populated nation.

Indo-US complexity

The crisis is climaxing toward dreadful danger, and reasons are laced with external complexities. There’re many who believe India can impress upon this reality on the government to arrange a fresh election in Bangladesh sooner, to fix the domestic drags.

Another school of thought thinks India is unlikely to do that due to fear that the BNP and its Islamist allies will overwhelm in the electoral race. They think the USA, as the strategic pivot in the Indo-China power imbalance, can convince India to allow true democracy to flourish in Bangladesh so as to blunt the sharpness and the sanguinity of the Islamists who’re deemed as a common threat to liberal democracy.

The Bangladesh factor, based on such rationales and realities, has become an irritation to the USA and its NATO allies who are finding it hard to pull Delhi to their side to implement two things simultaneously: ensure representational democracy in Bangladesh, and, resolving the Rohingya crisis peacefully to stave off the ducked-in danger of an Islamic revival and armed militancy that poses potent danger to peace and security of the entire region.

Paving the way

Being mindful of such dangers, the regime of Sheikh Hasina may serve itself and the nation better by realizing the reality of its dwindling popularity, and the compulsiveness imposed by the external factors, to opt for an early election. For that to happen, dialogue must kick off sooner with the BNP to reset the so called rules of the electoral games, as well as to pave the ways, to ensure participation of all stakeholders in the upcoming electoral fray.

Failing to do so will compel external powers to set the agenda, change the goalpost, and score as many goals as they wish; without much deference to the will of what they think a ‘deficit regime’ in power.  This will also compromise the nation’s sovereignty in a manner that may engrave irreversibly into the minds of the posterity, while undoing everything our predecessors and we achieved together through diligence and inexplicable dedications.