NEW DELHI: To the surprise of nearly everyone, the mighty appear to be falling fast in Bangladesh, where power and impunity have long gone hand-in-hand.

A military-backed government is trying to stamp out the corruption that permeates nearly every layer of Bangladeshi society — from getting a hospital bill (a few dollars) to opening a factory (millions) — and, in the process, undermine the two politicians whose rivalry many blame for the country’s ills.

It moved a step closer to that goal on Monday with the arrest of former Prime Minister Begum Khaleda Zia, picked up nearly two months after her rival, former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina Wazed, was jailed.

Both — along with the more than 200 former government ministers, politicians, businessmen and bureaucrats imprisoned since the soldiers and technocrats assumed power nine months ago — face corruption charges that carry heavy terms.

It’s a turn of events that many in the grindingly poor and densely populated country had hoped for, but few believed they would actually see.

“These people are our Al Capone, people you would never have imagined being taken to task,” said Sara Hossain, a Supreme Court lawyer in Bangladesh.

For Bangladesh’s 150 million people, the stakes are clear. Bringing graft under control would go a long way to solving the country’s myriad problems, especially its poverty — two per cent to three per cent of its economy, or $1.5 billion, is estimated to be lost to corruption each year.

For the rest of the world, Zia and Hasina’s rivalry has left a country the size of New York state but with more than seven times as many people barely governed in some parts, raising concerns about instability in a largely Muslim corner of Asia already contending with Islamic militancy.

“We all know that they did it. But can a convincing case be made?” asked Nazim Kamran Chowdhury, a former lawmaker from Zia’s party.

“If not, everything that is going on now, the crackdown on corruption, the promise of effective government, goes down the drain,” he adds. “We could easily go back to where we were a year ago.”

That is, back to a democracy so riddled with problems that many in Bangladesh — with its history of brutal military rule — cheered when the military-backed interim government cancelled January’s elections and imposed emergency rule after months of street violence between supporters of Zia’s Bangladesh Nationalist Party and Hasina’s Awami League.

Bangladesh’s problems existed before and after 1971, when it became independent from Pakistan. It was political instability that led to the assassinations and coups which brought Zia, 62, and Hasina, 59, to prominence.

But their rivalry, which emerged after democracy was restored in 1991, has done nothing to improve things. It runs so deep that no one has seen the two women speak — not even a hello — in years.

Zia was elected in 1991, Hasina in 1996, and Zia again in 2001. With each election, a well-worn pattern emerged: the winning party would distribute plum jobs and lucrative contracts to supporters; the other would do its best to make the country ungovernable through strikes and protests that shut down everything from urban markets to the garment factories that churn out J. Crew and Banana Republic shirts.

Only the most die-hard Zia and Hasina supporters are sorry to see those days go.

But with the initial euphoria that accompanied the imposition of emergency rule wearing off, concerns are growing about what the generals plan to put in the place of the political elite that it’s working so hard to discredit.

A brief foray into politics by Muhammad Yunus, an economist who last year won the Nobel Peace Prize, quickly foundered. And with the soldiers not saying much publicly, a number of theories, most based on nothing more than rumour, abound.

But there are two heard most often — and given the most credence by experts.

The first, usually offered by optimists, is that the authorities are hoping reformists in Zia’s and Hasina’s parties will take over. “If the reformists are successful in taking over the parties, I think we could be on the road to elections in 2008,” as the government has promised, said Chowdhury, the former lawmaker.

The more pessimistic theory sees the generals trying to draw politicians from the two parties to form a third front closely tied to the military.

Most, however, agree corruption is easing.

A French businessman who runs garment factories in Bangladesh said that while he still has to offer small bribes to low-level customs officials and other bureaucrats to get his goods out of the country, “we’re not sending envelopes of cash to Dhaka right now”.

He asked not to be identified because passing bribes is a crime — and “one never knows who can come back to power”.—AP