On 10 January 1972, my father came home to his
country for the first time. It was three weeks
after the end of the Bangladesh war, and he was
making his way back from India, where he had
enlisted with the newly formed Bangladesh army.
When I think about that day, I always wonder what
country my father thought he was returning to.
Surely it was a thing of his imagination, born
out of the years marching against the Pakistani
occupation, the months touring India to gain
support for the war, the gruelling training at
the officers’ camp in West Bengal. I can picture
the shock that he and his fellow freedom fighters
must have felt when they finally did cross that
border, seeing their imagined country and their
real country meet for the first time.
The Bengali phrase desh-prem means "love for the
country". Like many expatriate Bangladeshis, my
desh-prem makes me believe there will come a day
when I pack my bags and leave London for good. My
desh-prem is a long-distance affair, full of
passion and misunderstanding; often, my heart is
broken. Many Bangladeshis never actually return
home; it is more of an idea, something to turn
over in our hearts before we go to sleep, but for
me the prospect of returning is real. In 1990,
after 14 years abroad, my parents left their jobs
with the United Nations and moved back to
Bangladesh. So many of their friends told them
they were foolish to return to a country that had
so little to offer, but in the latter months of
that year, Hossain Mohammad Ershad’s military
dictatorship was toppled by massive public action
of a kind not seen since the days of the
independence movement. So the country my family
returned to was bathed in hope, and, almost two
decades after the birth of Bangladesh, we finally
seemed on the brink of becoming a functioning
democracy.
Sixteen years after Ershad’s dramatic fall,
Bangladesh is a very different place. We have had
three national elections, and our two main
political parties, the Bangladesh Nationalist
Party (BNP) and the Awami League, have handed
power back and forth to each other like a baton
in a relay, each election becoming successively
more bitter, and each five-year term bringing
dramatic increases in corruption and partisan
politics. Amazingly, when the Awami League was in
power, the BNP refused to attend parliament; when
the BNP was in power, the Awami League refused to
attend. As a result, the people we mandated to
represent us in government failed to discharge
their responsibilities, instead taking to the
streets and announcing that their defeat was
engineered and not willed by the voting public.
In Bangladesh, elections come hand in hand with
claims of vote-rigging. Where there is an
election and a transfer of power, there will
inevitably be rumours of conspiracy, of stolen
ballot boxes and hijacked polling stations.
Whether and to what degree these rumours are true
is almost less important than the assumption that
a sitting government cannot hold a fair election.
Therefore, in 1995, the constitution was amended
to include a peculiar and rather clever system of
handing power to a caretaker government that is
responsible for holding a fair election.
According to the constitution, the last retired
chief justice of the Bangladesh Supreme Court
becomes chief adviser to the caretaker
government. He has the authority of a prime
minister, and is given the responsibility of
appointing a cabinet, together with which he will
govern the country for no more than 90 days.
During this time his main tasks will be to
oversee fair and non-partisan elections and to
hand over power to the newly elected government.
So far, so good. But as plans go, this one is not
foolproof. Although the arrangement worked on the
first two occasions, this time around the BNP
felt it could not afford to lose the election.
All the signs indicated that if the election was
free and fair, the BNP would be defeated by the
Awami League. After five years of alleged
corruption, theft and autocracy, it was faced
with the possibility that it would actually have
to be accountable for the crimes it had committed
during its tenure. The excesses of previous
regimes were mild compared with those perpetrated
during those five years, which saw an alliance
between the BNP and the most powerful of the
Islamic parties, the Jamaat-e-Islami. The BNP
formed this strategic partnership in 2001, and
over the past five years the Jamaat’s influence
has spread throughout the bureaucracy and
district governments, enabling the party to build
grass-roots support and gain crucial political
and public recognition.
As well as giving power and legitimacy to the
Islamic right, the BNP alliance committed severe
abuses of power. It politicised the police force
and formed the Rapid Action Battalion (RAB), a
special branch that was responsible for hundreds
of killings in the name of “law and order”. This
force signed contracts for bridges that were
never built, bought television channels,
appointed biased judges, jailed and harassed the
opposition, and placed RAB people into every post
that might influence the election. The alliance
invented 14 million false voters. By the same
stroke, it wiped most Bangladeshis from a
religious or ethnic minority from the electoral
register.
Popular opposition to the BNP’s blatant attempts
at manipulating the election has made it
terrified of losing power, and so, instead of
allowing the caretaker government to fall into
the hands of a neutral chief adviser, it
encouraged the BNP-appointed president, Iajuddin
Ahmed, to take the post. When we first saw the
ageing Iajuddin taking the oath to become chief
adviser, he appeared harmless enough. People,
including the opposition, decided to give him a
chance to show his neutrality - his desh-prem.
But he proved to be easily manipulated, and after
a few weeks he became a hated figure.
In the meantime, the beleaguered Awami League has
committed its fair share of mistakes. In order to
press its demands it called an indefinite series
of strikes, bringing the economy to a halt while
it conducted its campaigns of civil disobedience.
No one went to work; the classrooms emptied out,
the ships were marooned at Chittagong port, and
the price of dhal tripled in a matter of months.
But by far the most un forgivable blunder it
committed was to sign a deal with the far-right
Khilafat-e-Majlish. The Awami League has long
claimed an ideological advantage over the BNP,
branding itself the more secular, progressive
party, so for those of us who believed there was
a significant difference between the two parties,
this was a cynical and heartbreaking manœuvre.
Under the terms of the deal, the Awami League
will assist the Khilafat-e-Majlish in legalising
fatwas and challenging any laws that contradict
“Koranic values”. Whether the Islamic right will
really gain a foothold in mainstream politics -
and the hearts of the public - in Bangladesh
remains to be seen; however, that both parties
believe they cannot win an election without the
endorsement of the right is sign enough that
Bangladesh’s identity as a moderate Muslim
country is under threat.
When I landed in Dhaka a few days ago, the city
looked as it so often does in January. The fog
was low and woolly on the ground; people were
huddled under their shawls; the smell of oranges
and roasted peanuts lingered in the air. But, of
course, I knew that all was not as it seemed. In
these past few months my desh-prem has been under
siege, and this time, I arrived in Dhaka in
bitter spirits. I had planned this trip so that I
would be able to vote; I had spent months looking
forward to returning to Bangladesh to exercise my
democratic right. Yet as the day drew near, I
realised I wouldn’t be going home to vote, but
rather to witness a sham election. With the Awami
League boycotting the elections, and talk of a
constitutional crisis, we all began to worry that
this year could mark the death of democracy in
Bangladesh. The mood was sombre and people seemed
resigned; it appeared there was nothing anyone
could do to prevent this political charade from
going ahead.
But then, just as it appeared there was no
solution in sight, the president suddenly
declared a state of emergency and postponed the
elections indefinitely. He resigned as chief
adviser and dissolved the caretaker cabinet. The
exact reasons for his about-face are still
opaque, but we do know that it happened through a
combination of international pressure and army
intervention. To what degree the army is now
running things is unclear; vague and ominous
ordinances have been proposed, some of which hint
at restrictions on personal freedom and on the
media.
Walter Benjamin famously said that a state of
emergency is also always a state of emergence.
Can we take this literally in Bangladesh? Will
the emergency see us through to a fair election,
or will the army consolidate its power and wrest
democracy from us indefinitely? And what would
happen to my desh-prem then? Could it survive
another onslaught?
Whenever I imagine returning to Bangladesh for
good, I wonder what kind of country I want to
return to. I want, more than anything, to have
that feeling of protean possibility that my
father must have had when he crossed the border
into his new country. I want a country where my
gender does not preclude me from being an equal
citizen. Where corruption has not touched every
facet of public life. Where the children don’t
sell popcorn on street corners or work in
matchstick factories. I want to know that I’m
going to show up on polling day and see my name
on the voter registration list. I want to stand
in a queue, press my thumb into a pad of ink, and
put my mark wherever I like. I want my
politicians to stop courting the Islamic right. I
want the water table to stop rising. I want the
government to stop driving the Hindus and the
Chakmas and the Santals out of this country. I
want someone to count my vote. I want a halt to
the steady erosion of civil liberties. I want a
country where the army cannot arrest anyone
without a warrant. I want our political parties
to be democratic, transparent and accountable. I
want fair and neutral judges. I want the right to
vote. I want there to be no such thing as a legal
fatwa. I want the war criminals of the 1971
genocide to be tried, condemned and jailed. I
want to vote. I want a country worthy of my
desh-prem. I want a country.