—Syed Badrul Ahsan—

For my generation, politics has been a staple of conversation down the years. Elections have been an integral part of those conversations for the good reason that in our boyhood and youth it was always a struggle we experienced in defence of democracy in our part of the world. We speak, of course, of our subcontinent. Break the idea down and what we have is largely a reflection on how elections in Pakistan and Bangladesh, and to a certain extent India, have informed our endeavours toward political enlightenment.

A crucial election, indeed a seminal one, we recall is that of December 1970 in what was yet a united Pakistan. Indeed, it was an election that was supposed to provide Pakistan with its first elected government, given that it was the first election on a nationwide level in both the wings of the country. Circumstances took a tragic turn when the Yahya Khan junta repudiated the election results, thereby preventing the newly elected national and provincial assemblies from being convened.

Worse, an election which threw up results that gave the Awami League a clear majority in Pakistan and where Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman would have taken charge as Prime Minister on the basis of a constitution resting on the Six Point programme of autonomy for the federating units of Pakistan was simply jettisoned. What followed was a genocide in Bangladesh and a Bengali guerrilla war for liberation.

Travelling back to the 1950s, the rout of the Muslim League by the Jukto Front at the East Bengal provincial assembly election in March 1954 remains a significant point in the history of both Pakistan and Bangladesh. The Jukto Front, with the Awami League forming its core, waged a resolute struggle to convince the Bengali masses that the Muslim League, instrumental in the creation of Pakistan, needed to be shown the door.

The Muslim League had become mired in sloth and inefficiency, to say nothing of insensitivity to popular aspirations. Besides, the administration headed by Chief Minister Nurul Amin had lost its ability to govern owing to the harsh measures it adopted against the Language Movement in 1952. March 1954 sounded the death knell of the Muslim League. It was never to regain any credibility in Pakistan despite Field Marshal Ayub Khan’s move to slice away part of it and bring it under his control in the shape of the Convention Muslim League in 1963.

Speaking of elections in India, the huge majority won by the Indian National Congress at the vote in early 1971 clearly established Prime Minister Indira Gandhi as a formidable spokeswoman for the country. The election effectively put paid to the efforts of the Syndicate of elderly politicians to exercise control over national politics. Mrs Gandhi of course freed herself of the grip of the Syndicate in 1969 when she had her candidate V.V. Giri defeat Neelam Sanjiva Reddy for the country’s presidency in the aftermath of the death of President Zakir Hussain. In 1971, she cemented her hold on the Indian polity.

If the Congress triumph in 1971 consolidated Indira Gandhi’s leadership of the country, the election of 1977 was a disaster for her and for her party. It goes to Mrs Gandhi’s credit that she lifted the Emergency she had imposed on India in June 1975 and opted for a new election, though there have been the many reports that she was apprehensive of what kind of results might turn up at the ballot box. Her government’s excesses during the Emergency had not been forgotten by citizens.

The opposition Janata coalition rapidly organised its campaign against the Congress and marvellously succeeded in ascending to power. For the very first time in independent India’s history, the Congress was ejected from office and Indira Gandhi was left facing prosecution by the new government. And yet politics was to take a new turn again owing largely to the squabbling politicians of the Janata government. Mrs Gandhi and the Congress simply roared back to power in 1980 as the Janata administration unravelled.

In simple terms, Indian democracy once more was proved to be resilient and a permanent fixture of politics. The Indian electorate informed the world of their ability to judge politicians with wisdom and express their points of view at the ballot box. In the year when the Congress was put out to pasture in India, and that was 1977, Pakistan’s Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto decided that under his country’s new constitution as it had been adopted in 1973 an election had become a priority.

The Bhutto government had been in power since the defeat of the Pakistan army in Bangladesh in December 1971 had led to the departure of the Yahya Khan junta from office. From a historical perspective, Bhutto took charge of Pakistan in December 1971 by default since the Awami League, having been thwarted from forming a government for Pakistan, had led a guerrilla war against Pakistan that culminated in the transformation of East Pakistan into the sovereign republic of Bangladesh.

The March 1977 election in Pakistan ought to have been an exercise enabling Bhutto’s People’s Party to retain power, albeit with a reduced majority. Spoiling the exercise was the massive rigging resorted to by party activists and supporters throughout the country, leaving, according to reports, even Bhutto surprised. The outcome of the vote galvanised the opposition Pakistan National Alliance (PNA) into action on the streets.

Violence took over the streets and no security measures undertaken by the Bhutto government helped. By the time the government and the opposition reached an agreement on a fresh election — and that was in early July 1977 — it was too late. Waiting in the wings to strike was General Ziaul Haq, Bhutto’s handpicked chief of army staff who had by then made plans to dislodge the government. The Zia coup of July 5, 1977 was to plunge Pakistan into darkness for the eleven years in which the army held on to power.

For scholars and researchers of history, elections in countries where democracy is tentative or is yet to dig deep roots have generally been difficult exercises. In Bangladesh, the nine years of the regime of General Hussein Muhammad Ershad quite undermined the concept of government by the consent of the governed.

Not until a popular movement against the regime and in defence of a democratic restoration spearheaded by a fifteen-party alliance led by the Awami League and a seven-party combine headed by the Bangladesh Nationalist Party forced the regime from power in December 1990 was hope for a revival of political pluralism rekindled among citizens.

What followed was a free and fair election on the watch of the caretaker administration headed by the acting President, Justice Shahabuddin Ahmed, in February 1991.

That hope of course ran into a squall in 1994. In June 1996, the general election supervised by the caretaker administration of Justice Habibur Rahman led to the return to power of the Awami League twenty-one years after the assassination of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and almost his entire family in August 1975. The 1996 election was of critical importance in another sense.

It marked the revival of authentic national history. It erased all earlier attempts to dilute accounts of the War of Liberation and the contributions of the national leadership to the attainment of battlefield victory in December 1971. The return of the Awami League to power under Sheikh Hasina would be a catalyst in the repeal of such odious measures as the Indemnity Ordinance that had till that point of time given the assassins of the Father of the Nation immunity from prosecution.

Elections are a means for nations to produce governments they feel will generate for them the best in terms of politics, society, economy, diplomacy and human rights. Which is why elections that lack transparency, that give space to chicanery, that stray from the principle of a free, fair and inclusive exercise of the vote push the future of the struggling, huddled masses into grave uncertainty.

Elections are always about a preservation of history, about the need for constant research on history, about ensuring that accounts of past greatness are not trifled with by philistines for whom ignorance or a recourse to anti-history is a way of life.

Elections test the ability of nations to shape dreams of a happier future. They refine the qualities of men and women who would presume to govern. Every election is an opportunity for politicians to pave the path to a decent, meaningful future for their people.

Elections often transform politicians into statesmen and stateswomen and in the process show demagogues and charlatans and anarchists the door. And rightly too.

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Syed Badrul Ahsan writes on politics, diplomacy and history