AL's strategy of intimidation may no longer be working
Aasha Mehreen Amin
Traffic is always a little light on Saturday mornings, with schools, universities and most offices being closed. Last Saturday morning, however, the empty streets had an ominous air. Strategic roads were cordoned off and the presence of police at numerous points was eerily similar to the days of political confrontation of the past.
People have been apprehensive of what would happen on December 10 ever since the BNP announced it would hold its rally in Dhaka on that day and indicated that it would be their biggest one so far. But the ruling party's aggressive suppression of opposition party members in all other rallies and pre-rallies (including the killing of a BNP activist by police firing on December 7), and BNP's apparent determination to carry on no matter what repercussions they face have led to the fear that Dhaka's rally will spawn unprecedented violence. By the time of writing this piece (4pm on December 10), no such fighting has been reported.
Of course, all that could change in an instant. The police are ready to take action at the slightest provocation and the same goes for the Chhatra League, who have assembled at various points, including at their home turf – the Dhaka University campus.
With two of its stalwarts, BNP secretary general Mirza Fakhrul Islam Alamgir and standing committee member Mirza Abbas, being sent to jail, the BNP has enough fodder to create a real ruckus. In fact, seven BNP members of parliament have announced their resignations from a parliament where they were "barred from speaking time and time again," according to BNP MP Rumeen Farhana (though this was clearly part of the party's strategy).
Indiscriminate arrests of hundreds of BNP members and supporters on the flimsiest or obviously false grounds, sending them to jail, attacking the rallies, deploying excessive police action on rally participants, engineering transport strikes wherever BNP rallies were due, and going through the mobile phones of people coming out on the streets before the Dhaka rally – these acts of unnecessary aggression have proved to be counterproductive to AL's goal of proving BNP to be a weak and unpopular political force. Instead, the ruling party has revealed its own weakness of taking too many extreme steps to crush its opponents.
AL's strategy towards the opposition may well have landed it into quicksand, something that it is finding increasingly difficult to come out of. The more repressive the means it adopts to neutralise the BNP, the more sympathy the BNP gains.
Indiscriminate arrests of hundreds of BNP members and supporters on the flimsiest or obviously false grounds, sending them to jail, attacking the rallies, deploying excessive police action on rally participants, engineering transport strikes wherever BNP rallies were due, and going through the mobile phones of people coming out on the streets before the Dhaka rally – these acts of unnecessary aggression have proved to be counterproductive to AL's goal of proving BNP to be a weak and unpopular political force. Instead, the ruling party has revealed its own weakness of taking too many extreme steps to crush its opponents.
AL's strategy towards the opposition may well have landed it into quicksand, something that it is finding increasingly difficult to come out of. The more repressive the means it adopts to neutralise the BNP, the more sympathy the BNP gains.
The AL is therefore in an uncomfortable position of its own making. The year ahead looks uncertain, ominous, and difficult for the ordinary citizen as the economy is expected to continue to take hard hits and the politics of violence is expected to escalate around the national election.
It is high time the AL abandoned its losing strategy of force, intimidation, and the politicisation of public institutions. While it focuses on bolstering the economy, it must stop the financial haemorrhaging of political cronies.
By forgoing the strategy of violently suppressing its opponents and instead concentrating on supporting the public in every way possible during the ongoing financial crisis, the AL can show itself to be a mature political party that is confident enough to compete, and maybe even win, fair and square.
Aasha Mehreen Amin is joint editor at The Daily Star.
The AL is therefore in an uncomfortable position of its own making. The year ahead looks uncertain, ominous, and difficult for the ordinary citizen as the economy is expected to continue to take hard hits and the politics of violence is expected to escalate around the national election.
It is high time the AL abandoned its losing strategy of force, intimidation, and the politicisation of public institutions. While it focuses on bolstering the economy, it must stop the financial haemorrhaging of political cronies.
By forgoing the strategy of violently suppressing its opponents and instead concentrating on supporting the public in every way possible during the ongoing financial crisis, the AL can show itself to be a mature political party that is confident enough to compete, and maybe even win, fair and square.
Aasha Mehreen Amin is joint editor at The Daily Star.
So far, whatever the ruling party has been doing is going in favour of the BNP.
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