All Talk?

As the newly appointed Election Commission, under Chief Election Commissioner KM Nurul Huda, wrapped up a series of dialogues with different stakeholders - touted as an early confidence-building measure ahead of the all-important 11th parliamentary elections that it will be organizing in a little over a year from now - one question predominated above all others in the minds of Bangladeshis: did it work?

It’s useful to just break that down a bit. What we’re really asking of course, is whether Bangladeshis came away from the nearly 2-month dialogue phase, more confident than they were going into it, that they will get the opportunity to exercise their all-important right to franchise in the next election, and meaningfully participate in the process of electing their representatives for the 11th Jatiya Sangshad. Without pointing the finger of blame at anyone, what is inarguable is that this is the fundamental right that was denied to the vast majority of the electorate when it came to electing the 10th Jatiya Sangshad. By now, no-one wants to belabour all the different points anymore. The most telling statistic, by which one can grasp the worth of the electoral exercise that produced it, is that on Election Day - January 5, 2014 - voting was not even held in what amounted to a majority of the 300 constituencies, with 153 candidates already elected unopposed.

The parliament that we got, the one we still have today, in the course of four years has not failed to reflect this disquieting genesis. One of the better pieces of advice you may have heard over the last four years is to not pay it much mind. In 2015, the local chapter of Transparency International actually had to abandon its regular review of parliamentary activity, ‘Parliamentary Watch’, as its findings became too embarrassing for sitting MPs, who started issuing threats to cancel their NGO license. Thankfully though, after a gap of 18 months, and presumably things deemed to have cooled down a bit, Parliamentary Watch returned with its 13th volume in April 2017.

By now though, even conscientious, politically engaged citizens probably prefer not to dwell on it all that much anymore. They want to look forward, with the hope and the belief that what happened in 2014 was just a one-off, that couldn’t possibly repeat itself. Could it?