Jalal Alamgir
Pulished in the Daily Star on 11 July 2009.
BANGLADESH’S democratic deficit looms large at the local level. Elected union and upazila councils have little power against top-down political and fiscal decisions. In its election manifesto, Awami League wisely promised to empower local-level decision-making. But unwisely, party MPs have moved away from empowering local communities either financially or politically.
Jyoti Rahman
Published in the Daily Star Forum, March 2009.
This piece examines the benefits of spreading out political power.
Categories: Government · Politics · Reform
Jalal Alamgir
Published in the Nation, 26 February 2009.
Elections have always been a tumultuous affair in Bangladesh. December 29, 2008, was no different. On that sunny winter day, more than 70 million lined up to vote, and heartily replaced a two-year-long state of emergency with a parliamentary government.
Jalal Alamgir
Published by openDemocracy on 13 Feb 2009.
The homegrown embrace of democracy in Bangladesh represents both a historic demonstration of its people’s will and an injunction to the west.
Categories: Foreign Matters · Politics
Rumi Ahmed
Published in the Forum on February 2009
This is not an anniversary piece on the events that took place in Bangladesh on January 11, 2007. Rather, this is an obituary of a thing called 1/11. And unfortunately this obituary does not have much good to say about 1/11.
As a political-national event, 1/11 has not been clearly defined yet. There has not been any consensus about what to call the events of January 11, 2007. It was definitely not a popular mass uprising like 1969 or 1990. Whatever it is, the event was definitely a result of violent street agitations by Awami League or deceitful dialog by BNP. (more…)
Categories: Politics
THE ninth parliamentary elections in Bangladesh saw a landslide victory for the Awami League. The high-turnout election also saw Bangladeshi voters turn away from the BNP and its alliance partner, Jamaat-e-Islami.
The Jamaat, which had captured 17 seats in the 2001 parliamentary elections, was reduced to 2 seats in the 300-seat parliament in the 2008 elections. For Jamaat in particular and religion-based politics in general, it was a resounding electoral defeat. (more…)
Jyoti Rahman
Published in the Forum on January 2009
In the election of December 29, 2008, voters unequivocally rejected nationalist politics — the BNP-led alliance garnered around 37 per cent of the votes cast, against the Grand Alliance’s approximately 57 per cent. But what caused the collapse in the nationalist alliance’s support? Most post-election analysis of the BNP politics explores this question. Another question speculates on what will the BNP leadership do after this debacle?
The focus of this piece is broader than just this election, the recent past, or the near future. The aim is to explore what might happen to nationalist politics — by which I mean the political coalition put together by Ziaur Rahman in the 1970s, and its successors in the subsequent decades — over the coming years. (more…)
Syeed Ahamed
Published in the Forum on January 2009
The Awami League has won the National Election 2008 by a stunning landslide for many solid reasons including some indefensible faults of its opponent. In a pre-election analysis Jyoti Rahman and I identified five decisive factors which were likely to determine the results of this election.1
In the absence of a credible exit-poll, this article revaluates those determinants and correlates them with the final election results to see exactly what happened on December 29, 2008. (more…)
Rumi Ahmed
Published in the Forum on January 2009
If the event of January 11, 2007 is the beginning of a popular reprisal against the pathetic record of Khaleda Zia’s government of 2001 to 2006, the election of December 29, 2008 is climax of that reprisal of the people.
 Munir Uz Zaman/ AFP |
Mrs. Zia led her party to a substantial victory in the parliamentary election of 2001. Even during the election prior to that, in 1996, her party, although losing, won a substantial number of seats.
The result of this election was worse than the wildest nightmare scenario BNP leaders ever could imagine of. Yes, BNP leaders including Khaleda Zia has complained of massive scale rigging. But there is definitely a consensus level acceptance of an Awami League victory, even within the BNP leadership. (more…)
Categories: Politics
Mridul Chowdhury
Publised in the Daily Star on 31 Dec 2008.
WE have made history! Not only in the national context, but also in the global context. Just when many were thinking that our country was increasingly falling within the grip of Islamic fundamentalists and that their religion-based fear-mongering campaigning was working, the people of this nation have spoken with decisiveness.
(more…)
Categories: Election · Politics · Reform · Secularism
