Muslims and Liberals

Dawn
January 8, 2009

`UNPRECEDENTED election!` The headline in the Bengali-language newspaper

Jugantar aptly described Bangladesh`s parliamentary election.

Thanks largely to the deployment of 600,000 security personnel, the voting passed off without violence, which had marred most of the previous elections.

Unprecedented, too, was the level of political consciousness revealed by the Dec 29 event. The voter turnout was a record 87 per cent. In my otherwise blissfully quiet home in the northeastern district of Sylhet, deafening campaign vows, attacks, counterattacks and songs carried over microphones kept me awake until midnight. The Awami League party`s victory was also very impressive. It has captured three-fourths of the 300 parliamentary seats.

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And never before in this South Asian nation were women so excited about an election. In many polling stations in Sylhet, male voters were outnumbered by females, who made up 51 per cent of the country`s 81 million registered voters.

Because of the League`s secular tradition, the party is being courted by the US and India. In return, the League has vowed to fight terrorism in Bangladesh. The League leader Sheikh Hasina, the new prime minister, also has called for an “Asian task force” to combat terrorism throughout the region. One wonders what all this would actually mean for America.

But the most intriguing question of this election was why a society witnessing an Islamic upsurge handed a huge electoral victory to the once staunchly secularist League, while dealing a humiliating defeat to the Jamaat-i-Islami party, which bagged only three seats.

The vote cast by Zulekha, who works for me as a maid, gave a clue. She voted for my old friend A.M. Abdul Muhith, a former finance minister who ran as a League candidate. I asked the mother of seven children why she had preferred the League candidate to his rival, the nominee of the centre-right Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), which is allied with the Jamaat. The illiterate woman said she liked seeing the League leader Hasina on TV “praying at the dargah, the shrine, of the local Muslim saint Shah Jalal. “They are saying,” she added, “Hasina will also give us rice for 10 taka per kilo” — seven cents, instead of the current 19 cents per kilogram.

Hasina had kicked off the League`s election campaign on Dec 11 with prayers at the shrines of three Islamic saints. Earlier, she had performed the Haj pilgrimage. A picture, widely publicised by the League, showed her returning from the Haj in head-to-toe veils and praying with a rosary of big, glittery beads. The League`s election manifesto proposes legislation to bring any “anti-Islamic” laws into conformity with Islam. And most of the party`s candidates appeared to be competing with the Jamaat in using Islamic symbols. One League poster pasted on a tree in my village, Polashpur, warned that those who would vote for “looters, extremists”, meaning candidates from the BNP and Jamaat, “will have to answer to Allah”.

That reminded me of my interview with Hasina`s father, then League leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, 15 months before Bangladesh`s independence from Pakistan in December 1971. Mujib was also facing Islam-oriented parties in an election that would lead to the birth of Bangladesh. “Mind you,” said the would-be father of the nation, reclining on his bed with his head held up awkwardly by his right palm, “Our people are not foolish. They will not trust Islam merchants with government. They are good Muslims … but they don`t want their country and society to be wearing a sherwani.”

Mujib`s first point has been proven true. In Bangladesh, as in many other countries, Muslims prefer not to vote diehard Islamists to power. But he was wrong in assuming that Bangladeshis, 90 per cent of them Muslim, would want Islamic values and idiom rinsed out of their social and political life. Based on his belief in European-style secularism, Mujib gave a constitution that enunciated “secularism, socialism, nationalism and democracy” as Bangladesh`s foundational principles.

League leaders` robustly secularist rhetoric and policies, coupled with the Mujib government`s misrule and corruption, rapidly alienated Bangladeshis. They plunged into a breathtaking campaign to build Islamic institutions mosques; madressahs; Islamic charities, endowments, banks and insurance companies; Islamic publications; and myriad Islamic outreach (da`wa`) campaigns, public forums, retreats and Internet sites.

Between 1975, when the Mujib regime was overthrown in a military coup, and 2000, 13 mosques and five madressahs were built in my native union, or county, against only two new secular high schools. Responding to this surging Islamic tide, the governments that succeeded Mujib`s amended the constitution to drop “secularism” and “socialism” as state principles and declare Bangladesh an “Islamic state.”

Having languished in the political wilderness for two decades, the post-Mujib League realised that adaptation to Islamic culture was a precondition for success in Bangladeshi politics. More and more League leaders and activists began attending prayer congregations, performing pilgrimage to Islamic shrines, supporting Islamic institutions and couching their public rhetoric with Islamic phrases and idiom. The League`s acculturation to Bangladesh`s Islamic values and lifestyle reached a new peak during this election, enabling the party to earn the trust of the largest percentage of voters since Mujib.

Islam wasn`t an issue in this

election. Good government, corruption and price hikes were. The BNP, which had formed the last elected government, had become embroiled in a string of high-profile corruption cases involving, among others, two sons of the party chief, Khaleda Zia. The League ran an effective campaign hammering on BNP corruption and pledging low food prices, adequate power supply, trial of the opponents of Bangladesh`s independence and so forth. These were widely popular, if hard to fulfill, promises, and they have catapulted the party to power.

The Hasina government is likely to go through the motion of an anti-terror campaign, mainly to placate America and India. Bangladesh has long been plagued by Islamist and secularist violence directed against domestic, and occasionally, Indian forces. Even though anti-American sentiments are widespread in this country because of America`s support for Israel and invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and other reasons, Muslim militants have rarely attacked American targets inside Bangladesh. They could be doing so if America gets involved in a League government campaign against “terrorism”, a label the League often uses to describe its legitimate opposition.