Votes & Violence

The just concluded parliamentary election in Bangladesh has produced a stunning reversal of fortunes. The Awami League (AL), which commanded a majority in the previous parliament, has been reduced to just 58 seats. The four-party alliance led by the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNI'), the main opposition in the dissolved house, has secured 214 Of the seats garnered by the alliance the controversial Jammat-e-Islami, which elicits extreme reactions because of its support to the Pakistan army in 1971, got 17 seats. Of the smaller parties which fought the election independently, former president, General Mohammad Ershad's Jatiyo Party, now just one among the three splinters that the parent party broke up into, has 14 legislators.

Whole numbers, real numbers

The political arithmetic that has yielded this parliamentary configuration is indeed striking. The most obvious anomaly of the result is that the single largest party in terms of the share of popular vote has been reduced to a pathetic minority in parliament. The Awami League garnered more than 40 per cent of the votes cast in the current election, which is a significant improvement on its performance in 1996, when it secured 37 per cent of the vote to form a government on its own steam. The BNP-led alliance has accounted for nearly 47 per cent of the votes. It is, of course, impossible to calculate from this combined figure the distributed share of the support that each individual constituent of the alliance got from the electorate, though it is a plausible that the BNI' too has increased its share of the vote. But it is evident enough that under the existing rules of the political game, a difference of just 7 percent of the national vote has upset the apple-cart in as many as 156 constituencies.