The Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), the country’s largest opposition party, has recently overhauled its important committees which drew a bit of surprise and a huge public attention. More importantly, the institutional refitting that suddenly fell from the top of the party surely cautioned those who hastily diagnosed that the BNP was in a terminal decline! To go for a fixed poll that the BNP would surely lose or to continue anti-government street rallies is at the heart of the opposition parties’ dilemma in making their realistic choices. But the BNP and its allies could learn from such predicaments in South Asian political history, as well.
Majority of the British Indian politicians skillfully waded through two opposing drifts —(a) institutional politics through the limited legislative privileges and (b) the extra-constitutional knocks which, from time to time, went over the heads of the quasi-parliamentary bodies that the British Raj incrementally offered to the colonized Indians. Except the historically known anti-British non-co-operators, the Indian politicians—both Hindus and Muslims, shrewdly used those colonial assemblies for whatever the political worth they carried. Gazing at our past, Muslim politics in British India did not evolve into stable parties until the 1940s when the refurbished Muslim League led by M.A. Jinnah came to the forefront. Two examples of the Muslim-braced political agitations were the Khilafat and Non-co-operation protests of the 1920s and the Pakistan movements of the 1940s.
Neither the BNP nor its cohorts have any visible standing in the Jatiya Sangshad at this moment. Steady street campaigns are too occasional now. But even a dozen or more BNP members or their allies in the Sangshad could have boosted the opposition on the legislative floor. They could have hauled their grievances more dramatically to the parliamentary sessions; they could distribute a measure of patronage to their constituents and expose the government’s systemic failures that clouded the country’s horizon. A flaunting executive could dwarf the legislature, at a given time, as we know. Then the bristling lawmakers, from the opposition benches, could still shake the authorities with their thundering discourses, investigative questions, embarrassing........