Mostafa Kamal Majumder
With the government saying it has got the people’s mandate to run the country for another term, calling the activists opposing the January-5 election as miscreants and anti-liberation forces to be punished and eliminated; and the opposition terming the election farce and the newly elected ones illegal – the political system is feared by average people to have turned more volatile and unsustainable than ever before.The reasons behind the fear of instability are manifold. The basic factors include: a) questions raised about the credibility of the election and of those elected through the process even before they have taken oaths of office. This point is very fundamental because in the absence of universal acceptance of election results no government in Bangladesh could finish its full term before the restoration of democracy in 1991.
One may argue that the government of General HM Ershad lasted nine years before its collapse in December 1990. But it was under three unstable segments. After promulgation of Martial Law in March 1982 HM Ershad ruled the country first fours under martial law till May 1996 when he called elections. But the Parliament elected that year amid boycott by the BNP-led 7-party alliance and the 5-party left alliance lasted less than two years. The subsequent parliament elected in March 1988 amid boycott by almost all opposition parties except the Jatiya Samajtantrik Dal (JSD) and the Bangladesh Muslim League lasted two years and nine months.
However parliaments elected since 1991 lasted full five years each. The lone exception was the one elected in February 1996 in the face of boycott by the Awami League-led opposition to press the demand for caretaker government. Political observers see the February 1996 to have been a constitutional compulsion, because after the resignation of the Awami League, the Jaitya Party and the Jamaat-e-Islami in support of the caretaker demand, the BNP government of the time was not left with an adequate number of MPs to pass a constitution amendment bill. The then government also did not have constitutional power to prolong the life of the Parliament to incorporate the provision for caretaker government. Viewed against this perspective the Parliament which remains operational even now after the just concluded elections boycotted by all opposition parties except Jatiya Party (Ershad) and JSD (Inu) had scope to take up any legislation as the government has support of nine-tenth of its members.
The point here is that once doubts about the credibility of elections disappeared since 1991 – first election being overseen by an unanimously selected Acting President Justice Shahabuddin Ahmed – the electorate never bothered about what the opposition said about the election results. This is one reason why the first BNP government led by Begum Khaleda Zia did succeed to run the country for more than a year even after the resignation of the opposition in December 1995. This time even stalwarts in the government are hesitant about asserting that they been elected for five years. The low-attendance of voters, rejection of the election by the opposition, and questions about its credibility raised by local as well as international election observer groups have together put a question mark on its acceptance.
Finally, the failure of the government and the opposition to come under the roof of the Parliament makes it crystal clear that the vital circuit in the body politic remains broken and more fragile than before. Activities in the Parliament the highest elected organ of the government will not make a complete circuit till this mutual accommodation of the government and opposition is achieved. Fact remains that based on the power derived from Parliament all activities of the state get legitimacy and legal sanction under the prevailing system.
One fundamental element of stability of the system is unanimity about the fundamental law of the land – the Constitution – which is absent now. Consensus on the Constitution was the hallmark of the relative stability that had increasingly been becoming pronounced from 1991 onwards. The danger of overstay of the caretaker government as was seen in 2007 could have been eliminated by making suitable provisions in the Constitution. Even without a stringent legal barrier it would have been difficult for the caretaker government of 2007 even to intervene not to talk about its pronged stay in power, had there not been the serious divide in the political landscape one side standing for the election, another side boycotting the same at the last moment.
So apart from the legal or constitutional safeguards, political consensus and popular support together create the guarantee of political stability. Political consensus can last among political parties that have mutual respect for each other. In fact mutual faith in the goodness of each other is the basis of democracy. There can be no democracy in its absence. The perception of eternal enmity would never bring democracy. If our political parties cannot develop respect for and tolerance of each other now, and feel this would take time, they should accept this reality, and agree on the minimum basis on which their interests can be mutually protected at least in respect of election. If peaceful and credible elections are restored, the parties would also start learning to start tolerating and respecting each other.
The alternative to this is dictatorship which is difficult to sustain in the present days of information and communication technology that has turned the world into a global village. This is an age of information. Not even the US has succeeded to conceal its National Security Agency’s surveillance of citizens’ private life. Secrecy breeds secrecy, and to quote a former Bangladeshi minister, ‘absolute secrecy corrupts absolutely.’ So instead of pretending that the political parties and their leaders have faith in and respect and trust for each other, the modes of their handling of the affairs of the state should be clearly written down in the Constitution instead of leaving those to chances of human error and frailty as did the realist framers of the American Constitutions. Only by doing this our leader would be able to give the people a lasting solution – a sustainable political order which will have a complete circuit to go round smoothly without periodic disruptions.
(Mostafa Kamal Majumder is the editor of GreenWatch Dhaka)
