Mir Ashfaquzzaman

The Awami League and the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, it seems, have stolen a few leafs out of the recent US presidential elections. At least that’s what the way they have named their manifestos for the December 29 elections to the ninth Jatiya Sangsad. The AL president, Sheikh Hasina, unveiled on December 11 her party’s manifesto, ‘Charter for Change’. Detailed in the charter is the party’s ‘Vision 2021’, which has been dedicated to the young generation. The next day, the BNP chairperson, Khaleda Zia, released her party’s manifesto, ‘Save the Country, Save the People’.

Wondering why the titles of the AL and BNP manifestos ring so familiar? Rewind to the campaigns that the Democrats and the Republicans ran for the US presidency earlier this year. While John McCain, the Republican nominee and senator from Arizona, put ‘Country First’ as his campaign theme, Barack Obama, his Democratic counterpart and fellow senator from Illinois, harped on the tested and trusted theme of ‘change’. ‘Change we can’, Obama assured and reassured the American people. He targeted the first-time voters, the ‘young generation’.

The mantra of change worked wonders for Obama, as he virtually had a cakewalk in the November 4 elections. Not only the young generation, a sizeable section of the not-so-young Americans also voted for him. McCain was in a losing battle right from the start. At pains to dissociate himself from the policies of President George W Bush, McCain had the odds heavily stacked against him. The financial meltdown tolled the death knell for the Republican hopeful. That and the rest is history.

The AL policymakers could be thinking that the ‘change’ mantra would work for Hasina in Bangladesh just as it did for Obama in the United States. As such, one might wonder why the BNP chose a theme that did not work for McCain. In any case, the analogy drawn between the US and Bangladesh election campaign could be far-fetched.

On the other hand, it is entirely likely that the Awami League and the BNP have not really given the manifestos, especially their titles, any serious thought; after all, manifestos do not win elections in Bangladesh, do they?