Good News from Bangladesh -Editorial

If there is anything more heartening than the landslide victory scored by Bangladesh’s principal secular-democratic formation, the Awami 

League-led grand alliance, in the elections to the country’s Parliament, it is the decimation of the fundamentalist Jamaat-e-Islami, together with the rout of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party-led rightwing coalition of which it has been a key constituent. 

This development bodes well not only for Bangladeshi society but also for south Asia. The political legitimacy that a pernicious Islamist outfit such as the Jamaat had acquired, thanks to its participation in the BNP-led regime that lorded over Bangladesh till a military-backed caretaker government displaced it two years ago, had triggered a process of creeping talibanisation in the rural hinterland of Bangladesh. 

That, in turn, resulted in the creation of an environment hostile to India. The survival and growth of pan-Islamist militant groups such as the Harkut-ul-Jihad-e-Islami (HuJI), which has played a crucial role in various terror attacks in India, and the safe sanctuary that Bangladesh has covertly been providing to such anti-India criminal-chauvinist outfits as the United Liberation Front of Asom (Ulfa) are largely on account of the regressive consensus the previous BNP-led regime both consolidated and thrived on. 

Given that Awami League has historically been more pro-India than any other political party in Bangladesh, New Delhi has reason to be relieved. It should, however, guard against the temptation of going on a triumphalist overdrive. It must realise the preponderant aspiration for secular democracy in Bangladesh is bound to prove salutary for India, too. 

Any attempt by New Delhi to push its case too aggressively with the new dispensation in Dhaka would only undermine the Awami League. After all, the agenda of Islamist conservativeness chimed with the deprived sections of Bangladeshi society — leading to the rise of the BNP-Jamaat coalition — because pro-Liberation parties such as the Awami League had failed to fulfil the promise of social transformation embedded in the cultural-linguistic nationalism of the Liberation project. 

It is this gap the victorious secular-democratic forces would now have to fill. And the only course before New Delhi is to aid this political process.