There’ll be an election for mayor in Chittagong on June 17th and already the BNP has announced ultimatums should any so-called vote rigging occur. This is a two candidate race now that the major candidates who might have otherwise split the right and left tickets have pulled out of the electoral contest.
Instead of placing the blame on any potential rigging on the Awami League, the BNP has claimed that it will blamed the Electoral Commission. This is a test, then of the EC’s neutrality in dealing with the two major parties.
More interestingly, she has pointed to television stations and Bangladesh’s intelligence agencies as relevant culprits in BNP’s narrative of democracy deferred since the AL took power in December 2008. Whatever currency of blame she had got spent on human rights organizations as well. The Army and the last Care Taker Government got pushed into this all out assault on Bangladeshi institutions.
And that may well be the point. Driving down an argument akin to the Tea Party in the United States that every institution in government, that government itself, in toto is to blame for all of the country’s woes. Today and tomorrow, everything turns on how the government has turned away from “the people.”
This is a convenient narrative, though an entirely negative one. The BNP’s recent budget proposals were a helpful turn. I’m afraid, however, that her present dark argument against the sitting government cannot help all those in need and all those others in distress. Help if you can; otherwise, get out of the way. Ah, yes, my interlocutor answers, “But this is politics.”
