Change is not a luxury, desired only by residents of the developed world. It animates citizens of less fortunate nations, whose democratic institutions might be disparaged as fledgling, but whose enthusiastic aspirations would be harder to dismiss. For the eight crore voters of Bangladesh — our poverty-stricken, corruption-ridden, cyclone-ravaged eastern neighbour — it is this infectious desire for corrective action that has spurred them on to elect the Awami League’s Sheikh Hasina with a historic, landslide majority.

The elections of December 29, 2008 and the spectacular results they threw up are enough to satisfy the subcontinent’s appetite for larger-than-life myths. After two years of army-backed rule, political purges and stifling emergency provisions, people voted for a return to the chaotic normality of the democratic system, clearly rejecting certain negative mores and positing their faith in the daughter of the iconic Sheikh Mujibur Rehman. Hasina’s AL-led Grand Alliance won 262 of the 299 seats that went to the polls; Hasina, herself not beyond reproach, was yet thought capable of being offered a second chance (she had been prime minister from 1996 to 2001). What was punctured in the process was the region’s favourite and most carefully nurtured myth: that all societal and political evil resides within the corporeal dimensions of the politician and the solution lies in banishing them from the system.

That the idea (of banishing politicians) did not have very deep roots was evident in the overcrowding of buses and stations as people struggled to reach their home constituencies. On days immediately preceding the election, an estimated 1500 people were going back into Bangladesh to cast their vote across the Petrapole border in West Bengal. One of the opinion polls conducted by The Daily Star-Nielsen had shown that 95 per cent of the voters believed that they would be able to cast their votes without coercion, while a majority also believed that the country’s political culture — shackled by corruption, inefficiency and violence — would improve after the election. Clearly, the detailed, rigorous arrangement by the caretaker administration to depoliticise the process — the “minus-two” formula that sought the political liquidation of Hasina and BNP’s Khaleda Zia — and “cleanse” the system had failed to convince people; even a spartan poll campaign, shorn of all ostentation, could not stem the tide of around 85 per cent of the electorate turning up to vote, the highest ever according to Election Commission estimates.

... contd.