South Asia Faces the Future: Back and Forth in Bangladesh

On 1 October 2001 Bangladeshis went to the polls to elect the country's eighth postindependence National Parliament (Jatiya Sangsad). In the third contested race under the democratic political system established in 1990 with the overthrow of General H.M. Ershad's authoritarian, army-led regime, voters once again turned out in large numbers after a bitter campaign marred by violence. Women, who in Muslim Bangladesh vote at separate polling stations, were prominent among them. Many waited for hours in the hot sun dressed in their best saris to mark and cast their paper ballots. Overall, some 75 percent of registered voters turned out, about the same proportion as in the last general election, which was held in 1996.

Despite dire forecasts of further violent clashes and predictions of large-scale electoral malpractice, a peaceful atmosphere generally prevailed on election day in the cities as well as in the countryside, where most Bangladeshis live. The 50,000 troops deployed on election duty helped ensure this, as did the zealous work of the country's nonpartisan Election Commission, which is directly responsible for running an operation involving almost 60 million voters. At only about a hundred of the 30,000 voting stations did officials find it necessary to halt the process and order repolling. Both foreign observers and monitors from Bangladeshi NGOs called the elections fundamentally free and fair.

Most commentators had predicted a close contest similar to the 1991 and 1996 races. Once again, the principal contenders were the Awami League (AL), led by Sheikh Hasina, and the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), headed by Khaleda Zia. The two women, bitter political and personal antagonists, had successively ruled the country over the preceding ten years. Zia, the widow of a head of state slain in an abortive military coup in the early 1980s, was prime minister from 1991 to 1996. Hasina, the daughter of the country's assassinated founder, held power from 1996 to July 2001, some three months before the election. Her government left office under a constitutional provision stipulating that general elections are to be run by a neutral caretaker administration led by the country's most recently retired chief justice. The provision, unique to Bangladesh, reflects the lack of confidence that the political parties have in the willingness of their rivals to administer elections in an acceptable way.

As the results trickled in to the Election Commission's Dhaka headquarters on election night, the country quickly recognized that an unexpected landslide was in the making. The BNP and its three coalition partners swept urban and rural districts alike, winning even in constituencies considered to be AL strongholds. The final tally gave the BNP 191 out of a total of 300 elected seats. Its allies, two Islamic parties and a dissident faction of the secular Jatiya Party, won another 24, giving the victorious coalition an unprecedented majority. The AL took only 62 seats, a far cry from the 146 it had won in its 1996 triumph. Most of the remainder went to the main Jatiya Party faction, headed by General Ershad.

Campaign Issues

The main issue in the tumultuous campaign was the performance of Sheikh Hasina's AL government, the first in the history of democratic Bangladesh to have completed a full five-year term. The BNP and its partners highlighted the organized crime, violence, corruption, and rampant administrative partisanship that had risen to new heights under AL rule. Their message was a familiar one in Bangladeshi politics--"Throw the rascals out!" The AL, for its part, defended its record and pointed to Bangladesh's solid economic performance during its years in office. Although the contenders also raised other issues, these seemed to attract comparatively little attention. This may have reflected the increasing similarity of the main parties' policies on domestic affairs and foreign relations, despite their claims to the contrary.

This narrowing of policy differences did not deter the contenders from engaging in the mud-slinging invective...