Bangladesh Election: Same Old Bargain Endures Despite Power Shift

While power may shift in the South Asian nation, the entrenched bargain - "cheap labour, hollow institutions, money siphoned abroad, dissent managed" - will endure, a report said on Wednesday.

"From afar, Bangladesh's upcoming election appears as an old morality play, staging Sensible Centrism against Unhinged Islamism - the dependable binary that reappears time and again along the crescent from Morocco to Malaysia. Some 128 million voters are expected to trudge to polling stations tomorrow, two in five of whom have never experienced anything resembling a free and fair vote. Some 150 parties have registered, with the predictable result that ballot papers are long enough to double as picnic rugs," British media outlet UnHerd highlighted.

"Yet in Bangladesh itself, the prevailing mood is not anticipation but ennui, as voters contemplate a Hobson's choice dressed up as pluralism. This is democracy as pageant: grand, noisy, faintly impressive - and entirely beside the point. Nothing, in truth, is at stake," it stated.

According to the report, the likely winner is the centre-right Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), comfortably polling above 50 per cent and now led by Tarique Rahman, who returned to Bangladesh in December last year after 17 years of self-imposed exile.

"His admirers both at home and abroad cast him as a chastened liberal: a steady pair of hands, sobered by history and burnished by absence. His voters, who will back him faute de mieux, remember rather more. During the BNP's spells in office in the Nineties and 2000s, power rested with his mother, Khaleda Zia - the formidable widow of the soldier-president Ziaur Rahman, assassinated in a failed putsch in 1981. She broke the glass ceiling as Bangladesh's first female Prime Minister and broke records soon after, presiding over a country that managed the rare feat of being ranked the world's most corrupt for four consecutive years by Transparency International," it detailed

"Rahman himself was later described in leaked diplomatic cables as a walking emblem of kleptocracy. Memory, however, is a luxury in Bangladeshi politics," it further stated.

The report highlighted that the main challenger is the Jamaat-e-Islami, the once-banned Islamist party now enjoying a brisk revival under the leadership of Shafiqur Rahman, a "solemn scold, skull-capped and maned". With a disciplined grassroots machine and an electorate "weary of secular strongmen", the party polls at around 30 per cent.

"The Jamaat insists it has reformed - no theocracy, no Taliban theatrics - yet urban liberals rightly remain unconvinced. It is surely no coincidence that the party of the mullahs has not fielded a single female candidate, while also flirting with limiting women's working hours. Then there is the amateurism: hardly surprising for a party that has never run anything larger than a student union," it noted

- IANS