A clear victory for BNP in Bangladesh

The parliamentary election in Bangladesh after the violent political convulsion of July 2024 when then prime minister Hasina Wajed’s Awami League government was thrown out by people’s anger has given a clear and decisive victory to the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) led by Tarique Rehman, son of late former prime minister Khaleda Zia.

The BNP has won 212 of the 299 seats in the national legislature.

The Jamaat-i-Islami-led coalition of 11 parties including the National Citizens Party (NCP) of the July 2024 protesting students managed to get 77 seats. The Awami League was disqualified and banned by the interim government led by Nobel Laureate and economist Muhammad Yunus.

The election is also a major victory for Bangladesh democracy. There were apprehensions after the fall of the Hasina Wajed government that the army would take over and impose martial law. It did not happen. The promise that elections would be held was kept. So, the greater victory of this election is that of the people of Bangladesh. They have voted with their feet for democracy.

Experts inside Bangladesh are sounding the cautionary note even as there is jubilation in the country over the election. The political and economic challenges facing the country remain to be tackled. The political challenge is how the victorious BNP would be treating the political rivals, including the banned Awami League. Sooner or later, the Awami League would have to become part of the Bangladesh political scene.

The party which represents the spirit of 1971 or the fight for freedom is more than relevant for the country’s politics. One of the arguments put forward is that in this election the Jamaat-i-Islami, which had once supported the Pakistan army during 1971, has been denied the opportunity to govern the country, and that this is an affirmation of the spirit of Bangladesh. It has to be noted that despite its extremely conservative position, the Jamaat had struck a conciliatory and moderate note. One of the reasons that the Jamaat had emerged as the major opposition party in this election is due to the absence of the Awami League.

The BNP leaders too are adopting a moderate stance, and it is quite likely that they would not persecute the Awami League leaders because of their landslide victory. The BNP wants to heal the rift that has emerged in the country’s politics between the two major parties, the BNP and its rival, the Awami League.

Bangladesh has emerged as a strong developing economy with successful market characteristics. It has become a leading exporter of textiles and apparel to the United States and European Union (EU) countries. It was poised to become a prosperous economy, leaving behind decades of poverty, natural disasters of the first few decades of its independent existence.

The BNP has now an opportunity to build on the economic successes the country had achieved since the 1990s. To sustain its economic growth, Bangladesh needs to remain a democracy, where political differences are sorted through the battle of the ballot and not through violent disruptions of the July 2024 kind.

The new leader of the victorious BNP, Tarique Rehman, has the responsibility to navigate the country back to democratic normalcy where people elect governments of their choice. There is much that the BNP can learn from the mistakes of the Awami League. One of the major lessons is that of never pushing the political opposition to the margins. When there is no viable opposition, there develops a dangerous vacuum, and people are deprived of the channel of expressing their dissatisfaction. The BNP faces an opposition in the Jamaat, and the two will have to maintain the democratic balance.