WHEN Iajuddin Ahmed, Bangladesh’s president, declared an army-backed
state of emergency on January 11th and cancelled the election due on
January 22nd, neither he nor the foreign governments quietly cheering
him on used the word “coup”. Yet that is what it looks like. The
army, in the tradition of “guardian coups” from Fiji to Thailand, has
stepped in with the usual list of apparently noble goals. The interim
government it is backing will enable credible elections, clean up the
country’s extremely politicised civil service, fight corruption, fix
the country’s power crisis and keep food prices in check-and then
return to the barracks.
The president stood down as head of the caretaker government that had
been supposed to oversee the elections. He was replaced by Fakhruddin
Ahmed, a former central-bank governor and World Bank official. The
technocratic administration he heads has so far sent the right
signals. A drive against corruption-in which Bangladesh regularly
nears the top of world league tables-is under way. The
national-security chief, the top civil servant in the power ministry
and the attorney-general have all been ousted. A start has been made
in separating the judiciary from the executive.
But restoring democracy remains a tall order. The political system
has collapsed. The army insisted the president step in before the
Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), which headed a coalition
government for the past five years, could rig the election and secure
itself another term.
Delaying the vote averted a possible bloodbath. Allegations of
election-rigging levelled by an alliance led by the other big party,
the Awami League, had led to weeks of often violent protests and
strikes. Their charges were, in effect, backed by foreign observers.
Both the European Union and the UN withdrew their support for the
election. The UN also warned the army against partisan intervention
in politics, adding that this might jeopardise its lucrative role in
UN peacekeeping operations. This threat helped sever an alliance
between the army and the BNP.
The BNP’s leader, the previous prime minister, Khaleda Zia, is
reported to have been taken aback by the state of emergency and
disappointed in the generals. But the BNP is unlikely to go quietly,
raising fears that the administration might be forced to make fuller
use of its wide-ranging emergency powers, which it has so far used
with restraint.
Unless something extraordinary happens to make the parties behave,
there will be no return soon to two-party politics. It will take time
to fix a voter list bloated with millions of extra names, to issue
voter-identity cards, to set up a new independent election
commission, and to purge the bureaucracy. It seems unachievable
before the July monsoon, which pushes polls back to the final quarter
of 2007. Indeed, what would be the fourth electoral battle between
Mrs Zia and the League’s Sheikh Hasina Wajed may never happen.
Arguing in favour of the state of emergency, Bangladesh’s
largest-selling newspaper, Prothom Alo, has exposed the practice of
parties’ auctioning off parliamentary seats for money. Matiur Rahman,
the editor, also alleges that both big parties entered a bidding war
to lure the Jatiya Party of the former dictator, Hossain Mohammad
Ershad, into their alliance. Jatiya has asked the army to shut the
paper down.
Although the state of emergency has supporters even among some
liberal democrats, it is a high-stakes gamble. Authoritarian rule is
unlikely to appeal for long, however fed up voters are with the two
big parties and their mutually-loathing leaders. The main beneficiary
from the failure of mainstream politics is an extremist Islamist
fringe.
Internationally, the stakes are highest for neighbouring India. It
accuses Bangladesh of harbouring insurgent groups from its
north-east, and is home, claim politicians, to some 20m Bangladeshi
migrants. By 2050 Bangladesh, only twice as big as Ireland, will have
about 250m people. In the short term the only voting on offer to
Bangladesh’s people, half of whom live in abject poverty, is with
their feet.