The BNP, a year into democratic renewal

A year into the Awami League government, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party ought to do better than act as petulant as ever. Its grandees, none of whom made us happy in their days of power and glory, are these days the very emblems of stubbornness. In politics, if not anywhere else, stubbornness does not pay. More to the point, being stubborn does not help political parties which have lost elections badly. In politics, being sore losers is almost always counter-productive. And yet that is not what the BNP appears ready to accept twelve months after it saw its hold on the electorate loosen dramatically, for all the right reasons.
In simple terms, what the electorate did in December 2008 was to put the party out to pasture. That should have been a moment, a very long moment, for the leading lights of the BNP to reflect on the blunders they made, the mistakes they committed and the dysfunctional administration they ran when they found themselves in office between 2001 and 2006.
But reflection is not what Begum Khaleda Zia and her associates opted for. They have chosen to portray themselves as victims of a situation where everything was stacked against them. Note the irony here. It was the millions of Bengalis yearning for change in October 2006 who, before they knew what was happening, found themselves prey to a political charade perpetrated when the BNP loyalist president Iajuddin Ahmed swiftly took charge of the caretaker government in flagrant disregard of the constitution. It was a government formed without shame. And it left us all feeling ashamed.
The shame took on ever more gigantic proportions when four of Iajuddin's advisors walked out, thereby convincing the nation that Iajuddin's was a corrupt regime intent on ensuring a return of the president's political masters to power through a dubious election. Remember the tens of thousands of fictitious voters the Election Commission led by M.A. Aziz brought to life to see the conspiracy through to fulfilment? Ah, that reminds us. Remember the wily manner in which the BNP-led government called a halt to the Bangabandhu murder trial and also ensured a quick, unconvincing end to proceedings in the jail killing case?
Let there be no economy with the truth, even if Begum Zia and her friends would like to think that we the people have forgotten the darkness and the corruption that stalked us in their years in office. The explosions which took the lives of twenty-two people at an Awami League rally, the coordinated blasts engineered by religious extremists in all but one district of the country, the repression let loose on Awami League supporters and members of the religious minority community hours after the elections of October 2001 -- all of these and more will remain the enduring legacy bequeathed to the country by those who today stay away from Parliament.
Moudud Ahmed, whose politics has veered from the BNP to the Jatiyo Party and back to the BNP, now tells us that even if Speaker Abdul Hamid gives his rump parliamentary party one more seat on the front row, it will not go back to the House. There are other issues to be resolved! See the absolute absence of embarrassment on Moudud Ahmed's part here? And see how the BNP keeps moving the goal post? We would not like to think that the party is deliberately engaged in the task of undermining democracy. But your pious wishes may not quite tally with the facts on the ground.
A year after the elections, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party should have reinvented itself. That is what losing parties always do. But then, those who happen to lead the BNP have never believed that they did not win the 2008 elections. Back in 1996, they held similar feelings. It is an unhealthy attitude. And beyond that there is the unfortunate.
The BNP has always had the misfortune of exiting from power in a blaze of controversy. In March 1982, General Ershad, with his own axe to grind, found it rather easy to dislodge a wobbly, corrupt and pusillanimous administration headed by Justice Abdus Sattar. In 1996, the party went ahead with holding a questionable election in February, which "returned" it to power. In slightly over a month, everything came crashing down. One need hardly repeat the story of 2006.
The BNP, if it means to be a positive presence on the national scene, will need to take a hard look at itself. It does itself no favours through keeping on its councils men today legally charged with criminal conduct; it invites ridicule when it restores party membership to a former minister of state now under a cloud over the August 21 blasts. Begum Khaleda Zia does not exactly inspire the nation when she threatens street agitation against the government rather than present her case in Parliament.
In Bangladesh today, politics of the modern, twenty-first century variety is called for. And that kind of politics necessarily abjures things of a hereditary, parochial and fawning nature. It asserts the primacy of intellect and the preponderance of introspection. Overall, it drives home the lesson that humility in pursuit of a political goal does wonders. Arrogance reduces everything to shreds.

Syed Badrul Ahsan is Editor, Current Affairs, The Daily Star.
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