Test of hope as polls today after 7 years

A new dawn beacons as some eight crore voters walk down to polling centres today to elect a new government, a democratic one after seven years -- five years in political quandary and two years in a reverse reconnaissance and correction bid that many may find not up to the mark, but a worthwhile try.
By tomorrow morning, either of the two political alliances -- one led by Awami League and the other by BNP -- will walk victorious. But that will only be the beginning of a new journey to the searching question of how the body politics wants Bangladesh to be propped on the world map as a piece of land with the proud people who hold their heads high with justifiable cultural, economic and social achievements.
It is a difficult time for any political party to take over for many practical reasons of national and international origins.
The country today faces an ever-yawning gap between the rich and the poor, with the top 5 percent of the society taking a stake in 26 percent of the wealth and the bottom 5 percent trying to hold on to their dear 0.77 percent of the pie. A society that splits deeply in wealth and education, in culture and values, in logic and reasoning, poses a high danger of going astray if not led to the right lighthouse. A society of divide and high contempt for pluralism soon finds itself in a dungeon. A country that cannot find its own breadth and depth -- that cannot find its treasure trove of history and valour -- will only swivel off the road into the wilderness.
Only a worthy leadership of honest and capable men and women, of visionaries and doers, can see the risks of staying too long on such a perilous edge and value the worth of going forward, pushing away all the inert inwardness of the dragging force. It is truly a time for political correctness.
It is also a time for going beyond one's self into the far-flung horizon of global affairs to fathom the depth of the challenges of a new leadership and brace for the future -- plan and execute, watch and chart routes. It is a time that the world did not see after the 1930s -- a time of great recession when all economies are slumping one after another like a pack of falling cards. It is a time when one can only boast if one is fool enough, and then find the carpet being whisked away from under your feet. It is a time when great economies are in recession and the corporate world is bottoming out.
It is then a great challenge and also a time for great acumen for leaderships to take over power after a fresh election. Barack Obama has taken the risk and poured out his wisdom by taking in the wise men and women under his fold and reeled out his job-creating schemes. Still the year 2009 is deemed to be a lost year for him and others around the globe. For Bangladesh, even with a small export dependency for growth -- only 20 percent of its GDP relies on selling goods outward -- and a near zero foreign portfolio investment, the incoming leadership needs to have the veracity, insightfulness and modernity to outlast this depression. Bangladesh waits for such a leadership today.
The records are poor for Bangladesh and so are their outcomes. A sharply divided and bickering political leadership could breed in fractious policies and corruption. Despite the over 6 percent GDP growth for a few straight years, the sunshine could not reaped at its best and many more growth numbers just slipped through the fingers. Seventeen years into the restoration of democracy, Bangladesh remains pathetically spread-eagled on institutions that could sprout effective good governance, and create infrastructure for development -- ports, power stations, communication backbone. Corrupt practices became the name of the game. And power of the powerful created a vicious cobweb of lawlessness.
But there are also reasons for good cheers today. One may differ, but the last two years were not all that wasted -- we need a break from all this to reflect on what went wrong and take a headlong dive to correct them. The elections slated for today was actually scheduled for January 22, 2007, but that could not be held as we saw a great marshalling of the judiciary to get to the top of the caretaker government a person desired by the BNP and its allies. We saw how the puppet of a president in Iajuddin Ahmed who assumed the position of the chief adviser of the caretaker government and toed the line of the BNP and its allies.
We saw a chief election commissioner in MA Aziz who could at best match a joker in a movie by his action. We saw a great ploy to doctor the results as the bureaucracy was joggled up and down, and sideways. Then we saw the horrid lash-out from the AL and its allies. The violence and the deaths. The brutally ferocious speech-making.
We saw how every institution was being toppled, one after another. Every reasoning tarnished. Every hope put down quickly.
When it was the end of line, the emergency was declared and a new caretaker government came to power. The military took a deeper control and backed the government. A task was initiated to correct the wrong, to stop the rotting.
We have achieved only a minuscule of the task, but we did accomplish something. Today, we have a voter list that has shed 1.3 crore fake voters that were enlisted by the last ruling government to doctor the election results. The list also carries photos of voters to minimise the risk of false voting, translucent ballot boxes have been introduced to bring more transparency in the process. Good sides to the massive electoral reforms are already shown in the campaigning that everybody would agree differs by miles from any before. Most voters today know who they are voting for, they know their track records and can decide whether they want a man or woman like them to be elected.
Yet there are people with shady track records running in the elections, but the difference from before is that we all know who they are. And we hope the voters will remember their past when exercising their franchise. These are the people who cannot keep their stinky past buried under the carpet. And the rest depends on the voters -- whether they want to elect them or not, whether they want to aspire for a leadership that can scale the mountainous challenge ahead will be decided today as they parties go for the test of popularity. Testing popularity is an easy task, but making it last on an arduous political journey is all that matters and a task of an old hand in politics.
The nation today searches itself for an answer to the ricocheting question of whether it wants the same old culture to continue -- a culture that bred in protecting the killers and murderers by the power holders for handsome bribes, a practice that led to skewing of procurement process to favour the ones that walk the corridors of power, a culture that lived on lies and rhetoric, a sub-culture of vice and protectionism and militancy and false notions. And the answers will be given today when the about eight crore voters will walk down to the polling stations from 8 in the morning until 4 in the afternoon.
A bright hope is that the correct answer will be found at the end of the voting session -- not one by the hackneyed olds conditioned by the age-old cultures and sub-cultures but by a huge 31 percent youths who would take up a ballot paper for the first time. The youth dream of a globalised future in its all-hued prosperity. They have little care for the narrowness of political tunnel vision, and they want to bloom into a society of greater tolerance.
The dawn that beacons today will be shaped by a great extent by these youths. This election, this new journey into democracy after two years of mouth-stifling emergency by a military-backed government pushed upon the country after 15 years of restoration of democracy in 1990, this whole new set-up of institutions and the wishes of getting more will usher in that childhood beginning. We hope. Amen.