The priorities before Sheikh Hasina

NOW that the people of Bangladesh have spoken, and spoken loudly, it remains for the incoming government of Sheikh Hasina to get its priorities right and go about putting them in implementation mode. The electoral triumph of the Awami League and its allies in the grand alliance has been on a monumental scale.
The sheer magnitude and historical dimensions of it can only compare with the victory the Awami League clinched under the leadership of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman in December 1970. In that long-ago time, the party made new history, through charting the national course of freedom in an epic armed struggle for liberation.
Today, it is a new struggle that Sheikh Hasina must undertake as prime minister of Bangladesh. If her first stint in power between 1996 and 2001 was an exercise in rolling back such manifest injustice as the assassinations of Bangabandhu and the four national leaders in the bloody summer of 1975, her second this time around must focus on the expectations the nation has placed in her and her colleagues for at least the next five years.
It is, once again, priorities that we speak of. And on an outlining and meeting of those priorities will depend the matter of whether the Awami League can truly transform itself into a natural party of government over the longer term. Which, therefore, means the new government will need to handle the issues from two perspectives.
In the short term, or beginning on day one of its taking charge, the government must have in place strategies on handling such issues as prices in the market, the economy, education, healthcare and employment. It needs to get down swiftly into the job of devising coherent policies on agriculture and industry. There is the all-important matter of law and order, of coming down hard on religious extremism, that certainly deserves the highest priority at this stage, a point that the government must make unequivocally clear before the police department and other security forces.
It will be naïve to expect these problems to be tackled and neutralised in weeks or even months. But in the period of transition between now and their induction into office, the prime minister-elect and her cabinet will need to concentrate on a judicious selection of advisors, both from within and outside the party, who will not only have unfettered loyalty to the principles of the War of Liberation but will also have proven track records in doing their jobs well.
These men and women will be people of unquestioned integrity and unflinching moral purpose, able to distinguish between service to the state and sycophantic service to the party, willing to stand up for their principles when compromise appears before them as an option.
The new government will be expected to go for a reinvention of diplomacy for Bangladesh after years of a stultified and outmoded practice of foreign policy. Good, articulate, and urbane individuals should be sent abroad to speak for the country. In defence, the professionalism that has so happily come into the armed forces will need to be reinforced. Human rights, so often ignored or suppressed in the past, call for a quick restoration.
The corrupt must be identified, marginalised and penalised for all their sins in these past many years. And yet, care must be taken that retribution against the political rivals of the Awami League, against its detractors, does not come in, does not mar the new era of democracy we believe we have just set in motion.
Absolute probity and tested ability must underline the functioning of the cabinet that Sheikh Hasina will preside over. Partisanship must be kept at bay; and policy-making will call for transparency and academic debate in Parliament. The principle of cabinet government must come in where prime ministerial rule has been the bad norm for years on end. Nothing could be healthier than collegial administration; and nothing is more enervating than a concentration of power in one individual.
Those are the requirements in the weeks and months ahead; and on the acts of the new government on these issues will depend the course the country will take over the next five years. But along with them come the longer-term issues, those that have been responsible for keeping this nation fractured right down the middle since the tragic happenings of August and November 1975.
With the huge mandate the Awami League and its allies have come by, the opportunity for a restoration of the nation's secular moorings, those that were instrumental in guiding Bengalis to freedom, is now at hand. By careful but sure degrees, the mistakes, blunders and chicanery that have laid Bangladesh low since the forces of counter-revolution commandeered the state in the aftermath of the murder of the Father of the Nation must be rolled back, to a point where the constitution as adopted in 1972 will once more be the cornerstone of politics in this country.
The elections on Monday demonstrated conclusively the idea that the call for a trial of the war criminals of 1971 has resonated with the nation. Sheikh Hasina and her administration must heed that call. Any failure to do so could well cause a repeat of 1975.
The triumph of the Awami League is in essence a victory of the people. It is a reassertion of secular politics. It straddles generations and classes and gender and age. It is, we cheerfully note, our second coming home, after December 1970.
It is time once more to be proud of ourselves, of our legacy. It is that shining moment in history when the old battle cry of Joi Bangla stirs our emotions once again and points to the brilliance beyond the darkness that has long hung low over our dreams.

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