On January 7, 2024, when most people around me had abstained from voting in the Awami League’s staged national election, I had swallowed self-judgement and stamped the first ballot of my life. It was the first election I was witnessing since becoming a journalist, and I wanted to experience the process of voting and write about it. “When will I ever get the chance again?” I had thought. At that time, all signs indicated that every future election held under the Awami League government would be more restrictive than the one before it. By the next election, I had assumed, the autocratic regime would not even bother to put up an act of being “democratic.”
As Prof Ali Riaz had estimated in an op-ed centring on the 2024 election, “After January 7, theoretically, the government will have two options: 1) to scale back and return to past practices; or 2) to double down in its persecution and attempt to rule with an iron fist.” Awami League took the latter course. But, only months later, the party’s firm iron fist made it all the simpler for Bangladesh to make a choice of its own.
More than a decade of repression had been knocked off our backs, and we found ourselves in an inevitable vacuum.
In the 18 months since then, politicians new and old tried their best to seem democratic, journalists had to unlearn one type of self-censorship and learn a few new ones, and citizens could only trust that the interim government would do a decent job of 1) ensuring justice for the victims and survivors of the July mass uprising and 2) delivering a credible, participatory national election.
As of writing this article, votes are being counted and we are now hours away from learning the outcome. And while there have been reports and allegations of riggings, irregularities, already cast votes, and even a crude bomb blast, the country’s 13th parliamentary election has concluded in a largely positive way.
In comparison to the scenes of deserted polling centres in 2024, almost all polling centres this time saw steady, even overwhelming, flows of enthusiastic voters. Across the country, we noted a large turnout of the youngest of young and the frailest of elderly voters. This was also the first time many young adults voted, to the point where a lot of them had not even learnt the basics of the electoral process itself until this election. What was only rhetoric, even propaganda, for so many years became reality: voters cast their ballots in a festive electoral environment.
Yet, I hesitate to assign finality to that sentiment. All my life, I have only seen polls that were marred by conflict, violence, and autocratic opacity. And while this is the most participatory election we have had in a long time, no matter which way the results go, we cannot be expected to shed the fear of facing another government that tries to erase our individualities and deny us our rights.
When we think of July-August 2024 now, we subconsciously choose to think only of August 5. We generally shudder away from the flashbacks of protesters being shot at with clear intent to kill. We often shake off reminders of innocent, battered, killed bodies being laid over the footrest of a rickshaw or shoved off the side of a police vehicle; of law enforcers’ vehicles reversing directly into and over a crowd of protesters. Most of us understandably don’t go back to the footage of Abu Sayeed’s killing—which has been meticulously analysed as evidence by open-source investigators globally—for fear of feeling shocked and numbed again.
After casting his own vote on Thursday morning, Chief Adviser Prof Muhammad Yunus said, “Through today’s process, people have rejected the past. Whatever nightmarish past existed, we have completely discarded it.”
In speaking of a new Bangladesh, Yunus likely meant one that is democratic in practice. However, we need to be careful about which aspects of the old Bangladesh we choose to reject and discard. Our collective trauma surrounding the July uprising is one that we must overcome, not avoid acknowledging altogether. And we must overcome it by sparing no opportunity of speaking truth to power and challenging any move or declaration that toes the line drawn 18 months ago in the blood of our martyrs.
Afia Jahin is a member of the Editorial team at The Daily Star.
Views expressed in this article are the author's own.
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