Voters can defy conventional wisdom, but can they have the last word in the post-election period?

    The question, being raised in the US of President-elect Barack Obama, is equally if not even more relevant in South Asia. Pundits and ordinary people are posing the question now in and about Bangladesh of Prime Minister-designate Sheikh Hasina Wajed as well.

    The voters proved even veteran psephologists seriously wrong in Pakistan and Nepal in February and April 2008 respectively. Few media and other analysts expected the Maoists to end up first in the race to the Constituent Assembly in the Himalayan state. And not many observers predicted the popular mandate, particularly in the tribal areas of Pakistan.

    But it is in Bangladesh that the electorate has disproved the experts in the most dramatic manner. The results here mark so radical a departure from the past that pollsters deemed it prudent not to predict it, even when opinion surveys appeared to point to it unmistakably. Will the verdict spell the post-election change the Bangladeshi voters believe in?

    The verdict, to sum it up, consisted in an unprecedented victory for former Prime Minister Hasina and her Awami League (AL). The party won 230 parliamentary seats on its own, with its allies adding another 32 to ensure a three-fourths majority in a House of 300. As against this, the four-party alliance of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) of two-time Prime Minister Begum Khaleda Zia could muster only 32 seats, a sheer drop from its two-thirds dominance in the previous House.

    The most important gain for democracy in Bangladesh was the humiliating debacle suffered by the BNP's most notorious ally, the fundamentalist Jamaat-e-Islami (JeI). As the BNP's partner in power, the JeI had brought much discredit to Khaleda during her 2001-06 term that witnessed several anti-minority offensives and terrorist strikes.

    The JeI contested the elections on a platform that promised blasphemy laws and military training in madrassas or religious schools. Under its baneful influence, the BNP conducted what proved to be a counterproductive campaign, asking people to vote for it in order to "save Islam" and "save the country."

    The campaign turned out to be counterproductive because, as the results show, these slogans found few takers among the first- and second-time voters that make up more than 50 percent of the electorate. The bigger turnout of the minority voters, who were kept away from the polling booths earlier by bullies, also made the slogans politically suicidal. Women, who used to vote once for Khaleda, would seem to have been scared off by the association of terrorism with her party in popular perception.

    All this made Hasina's a victory for what is widely seen in Bangladesh as the secular heritage of its liberation struggle. As eminent Bangladeshi journalist Mahfuz Anam puts it, "While Khaleda campaigned on 'Islam being in danger' and Bangladesh's sovereignty and independence being under threat, Hasina's election campaign significantly put great emphasis on the country's secular traditions and pledged to build a democratic society with rights of all religious and ethnic minorities protected, including land rights for the hill people, a major issue as their lands are coming under pressure from population rise."

    Anam adds: "Hasina appeared to have made a deliberate choice of not pandering to religious and obscurantist forces and clearly positioning herself with what are known in Bangladesh as pro-liberation forces." This refers to the AL's campaign promise of punishment for "war criminals" or those who helped the hordes of Pakistan's General Yahya Khan during the Bangladesh War of 1971, By endorsing this proposal, the voters were also eschewing fundamentalism.

    The similarity between the voters' verdicts in Pakistan and Bangladesh is striking on this score, The victory of Benazir Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party (PPP) was also recognized worldwide as one for secularism. This particular result was reinforced by the rout of religious parties, especially in frontier areas where they were believed to be a formidable force.

    The voters, however, have not had the last word in Pakistan in this respect so far. Fundamentalism would still seem to be a strong, if not the ruling, force in the frontier areas. The elected civilian government in Islamabad suffers from a serious loss of credibility when it threatens a grim war on terrorism. Hasina can face a comparable situation, too, if her regime does not handle the terrorism problem with the firmness and finesse required.

    What complicates the situation for her is the compulsion to seek and secure the cooperation of the BNP in the special context of Bangladesh, where a parliamentary majority for the rulers alone does not spell political stability. Hasina has made welcome offers of constitutional offices to the opposition. She - and Khaleda, cannot forget that the army - under the command of Gen. Moeen U Ahmed, who not long ago ruled out a "return to elective democracy" - is waiting in the wings and watching.

    Striking, too, have been the democratic advances of Pakistan and Bangladesh. Did terrorist threats have a connection to the contras between the voter turnouts in both - about 40 percent in Pakistan and over 87 percent in Bangladesh? It was only during the final stage of the campaign, when the voter preference was becoming visible, that we heard about an assassination plot against Hasina.

    The PPP's return to power in Pakistan was a posthumous victory for Benazir. Hasina, on the other hand, has survived threats to lead her party to a landslide. The threats to Hasina and to Bangladesh will not cease with her swearing-in, scheduled next week.

    Defense of hard-regained democracy in Bangladesh will demand more than protection of the new prime minister, on whom the new hopes of a nation rest. Popular vigilance alone can ensure that the voters are not denied their due.