Hasina fields family, Khaleda unleashes burqas

Abhijit Dasgupta

It’s a strange election which is to be fought in Bangladesh on Monday, point to note is the various ways that the three top leaders are conducting their respective campaigns.

Sheikh Hasina of the Awami League has fielded her entire family and a famous yesteryear actress in the elections with members flying down from London to Dhaka to help her as well as campaign in their constituencies, Begum Khaleda Zia has fanned out 5,000 burqa-clad women of her ally, the Jamaat, to campaign in the various districts while former president, H.M. Ershad is singing the only tune that he is left with after years in jail, joining hands with Hasina’s mahajot and saying she is his “sister”.

They, to these elections, however, lie with the youth with 30 per cent of the voters below 30 years. For this reason chiefly, there is an abundance of young candidates, the main draw being Hasina’s 18-year -old niece, Rehana.

Of course, there is not much talk of the country’s help to foment terrorism in India and local issues are centre stage. The ninth general elections to elect 300 members to Jatiya Samsad (National Assembly) on December 29 in Bangladesh will, however, be a test of whether minorities (read Hindus) will be allowed to vote freely. All the three leaders have made election promises saying the minorities have nothing to fear but the real picture is quite different.

The Sampreeti Mancha (Harmony Platform) in a 30-page booklet – Nirvachan O Sankhyalaghu Sampraday: Poriprekshit Bangladesh (Election and minorities – A Bangladeshi Perspective), authored by Saurabh Sikdar, Chiraranjan Sarkar and Robayat Ferdousi, has said, “Minorities in our country are far from well looked after. Aside from being ignored, neglected and humiliated, various tactics of mental torture and other forms of oppression are being unleashed on them. The 20 million minorities in our country are being humiliated at every step in life,” it said.

A leading intellectual of Bangladesh who has been jailed twice for his radical views on minorities, Shahriar Kabir, has said, "This government is a Taliban government. It is a great shame that conservative, anti-liberation elements are carrying the national flag in their cars and moving around freely espousing Begum Khaleda’s cause."

In a video cassette Ei Simana Manchhina (We Don’t Recognise This Border), Kabir made it clear that even after all these years, the Partition of India continued to be at the centre of all trouble. "Communal partition was the original sin.” Kabir has time and again fought against the anti-India stance of Begum Khaleda.

Distinguished intellectual Ajoy Roy, who lives in Bangladesh, told India Today that the Awami League was with the Hindus as always. “The vote share of Awami League-led 14-party alliance is between 38 and 40 per cent as opposed to BNP’s four-party combine’s 25 per cent. If the minorities are allowed to vote freely, there is a possibility of Hasina returning to power.”

In 2001, only a small fraction of Hindu voters – accounting for eight per cent of the electorate could reach polling booths. They were threatened by BNP and Jamaat hoodlums.

Says Shahriar, “A decade back, leading dailies published series of news about Harkatul Jihad’s activities. It was reported that there are more than 15,000 militant workers belonging to Harkatul Jihad; a few of them were also government officials. According to a leading English daily, the Jihad has trained 25,000 youths during the last 14 years in Chittagong alone.”

After the four-party alliance of Begum Khaleda came to power in October 2001, the activities of the militants have been on the rise. Now the number of these groups is as many as five times more than during the earlier regime. Earlier there were only two or three militant groups known to be active in Bangladesh.”

Everybody is now wooing the Bihari voters who are mostly the Bihari Muslims who lived on after the liberation of Bangladesh. The government had to grant them citizenship, following a court order in May this year. And for the first time, some of them are in the contest. The vote bank consisting of about 40,000 votes is concentrated in Mirpur, Pallabi and Mohammadpur areas: another segment of minorities, looked down upon by the Bengali-speaking Muslim majority.

The Awami League is focusing on Khaleda’s corruption, nepotism and the taka 200 billion power sector scam. Dhaka-watchers feel that the minorities hold the key and a last-minute swing may get Hasina back her prime ministership. Khaleda’s worst enemy is the charges of corruption against her and family members. Her son Tareq Rahman has become her Achilles Heel having managed to gain extra-constitutional power and alleged to have siphoned off millions to a Singapore bank.

indiatoday