In Bangladesh, an Anti-Ershad Tide : South Asia: The dictator may have been deposed, but his system is still largely intact. The people have been promised a parliamentary election in March.

Young co-eds wearing bright saris and victory smiles marched stridently outside Dhaka University, banging drums and shouting deliriously, “We want Ershad to hang!”

Tens of thousands of others marched alongside them, some carrying bloodied portraits of martyrs who had fallen during the past two months of Bangladesh’s student-led “anti-autocracy” demonstrations. Others wore hats proclaiming, “Happy Birthday, Democracy,” and still others literally danced in the street around cartoons picturing former President Hussain Mohammed Ershad naked and hanging by his feet from a noose beside the words, “Save me!”

But throughout the celebrations last weekend, the culmination of the world’s latest apparent triumph of populist democracy over military dictatorship, the fallen dictator sat comfortably at home in Dhaka’s military cantonment, writing poetry, practicing golf on a back yard chipping green and plotting his return to power.

“No, no apologies,” a calm and relaxed Ershad told a British journalist who managed to reach him by telephone in the study of his heavily fortified home Sunday, as much of his nation was still outside the military camp demanding either his exile or his head. “My future will be decided by the people of Bangladesh.”

On Wednesday, it was Ershad’s army that decided his immediate future. Facing mounting pressure from student groups and idealistic junior officers, a team of police and soldiers bundled Ershad and his wife, Raushan, into a sedan and moved them into a civilian home in Dhaka’s posh Gulshan neighborhood, where he is now under house arrest.

Officially, Ershad has not been charged with any crimes, although a private civil suit filed the same day charged the fallen autocrat with corruption and murder. Bangladesh’s military leaders publicly pledged that Ershad will be tried for his crimes against the nation, despite persistent reports that his testimony could destroy many of his fellow officers.

And the army has consistently promised that the Bangladeshi people who rose up in revolt against Ershad’s regime will have a chance to vote in national elections within 90 days. On Friday, acting President Shahabuddin Ahmed set March 2 as the date for parliamentary voting.

After 19 years of assassinations, executions and military coups in the brief history of this impoverished nation, a March election would give its 110 million people a voice in choosing their future leader.

“We have had 20 years of bloodshed, violence and instability,” said A. R. Shamsud Doha, a former foreign minister and prominent Bangladeshi analyst. “This is a unique opportunity.”

As the weekend demonstrations swirled around his campus, Dhaka University Vice Chancellor Maniruzzaman Mia added hopefully: “This is probably the last chance for democracy to come in this country. These chances don’t come very often, and we have already had so many chances in the past.”

But the recent euphoria was tempered by skepticism and fear for the future of Bangladesh. Behind that anxiety is the fact that there has been no revolution in Bangladesh. For many, democracy still seems as remote as it was before Bangladesh’s former military ruler was driven aground by the popular storm.

After weeks of rioting and bloodshed that left at least 100 dead, thousands injured and Ershad in disgrace, the former president’s system remains largely intact. His key military aides still hold their positions, although they are now assigned to acting President Shahabuddin, chief justice of the Supreme Court. Shahabuddin was hurriedly sworn in Dec. 6 in a successful, last-ditch effort to put down popular rebellion. Shahabuddin says he cannot legally banish Ershad or prevent him from running in the scheduled March 2 elections.

“I am very pessimistic about the future,” Doha, a personal friend of Ershad, said before Friday’s election announcement. “It’s going to be a colossal task for the interim government to run free and fair elections. In fact, I don’t think there will be elections.”

To understand such cynicism is to understand the brutal and contentious political landscape that continues to haunt Bangladesh, one of the world’s largest recipients of international aid, a nation so poor that the average annual income is equal to the cost of a single night’s stay in a downtown Dhaka hotel.

Only once in Bangladesh’s history has a popularly elected leader come to power. He was Sheik Mujibur Rahman, father of the nation, elected in 1973, two years after he helped lead the movement to secede from Pakistan. He was killed in a 1975 military coup along with his wife, three sons and 14 other members of his family.

Mujib’s eldest daughter, Hasina Wajed, who was in West Germany at the time of the killings, has been fighting the powerful Bangladeshi army ever since, and she remains the leader of the opposition Awami League party that will be one of three principal political forces in the coming elections.

The second political force, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, is headed by Khaleda Zia, whose husband, then army Chief of Staff Ziaur Rahman, took power after Mujib’s assassination.

As a result, “the two ladies,” as they are known in Dhaka political circles, mistrust and dislike each other, one convinced that her father was slain by the husband of the other.

Throughout his eight years and eight months of rule, Ershad, who also came to power in a military coup, shrewdly manipulated that hatred to remain in office. It was only through the intervention of Dhaka’s student groups and intellectuals that Wajed and Zia agreed last October to work together and ultimately drive Ershad out.

But politics in Bangladesh is complicated by the continuing presence of Ershad, who attempted to transform himself from a military dictator into a political leader when he resigned as army chief and created a new party, the Jatiya Dal (National Party). The party kept him in power through a rigged presidential election in 1987, in which only 3% of the nation’s registered voters actually cast ballots.

“Ershad’s major mistake was to raise a political party,” said Doha, who left the Cabinet soon after. “Within his vision of politics--he was an infantry officer--he firmly believed he could do better for Bangladesh than anyone else around him, and he was encouraged by many army officers and civil servants who had been rejected in the past.”

So discredited has Ershad’s party become in recent weeks that its members have feared to venture out since Ershad stepped down Dec. 6.

But Doha and others close to Ershad said the fallen president believes the popular hatred and clamor for revenge will die down in a few weeks, and they insisted that he plans to fight any attempt to banish him from Bangladesh.

“Why?” Ershad asked a British Broadcasting Corp. reporter who asked him by telephone whether he plans to flee the country. “It’s my country. What have I done wrong?”

Plenty, according to the student and political leaders who braved tear gas and police bullets on Dhaka’s streets for weeks. There are accusations of widespread corruption and, in the words of one prominent analyst, “debauchery.” The accusations include charges that Ershad siphoned off millions of dollars from the international aid that Bangladesh receives each year and that he had at least 10 mistresses, who exerted increasing control over the government. Ershad denies all of the accusations.

“There’s a court in the country,” Ershad said, when asked about the charges. “There are normal laws.” He added that he expects the opposition to use the charges to keep him from contesting the election. But he added, “We should be allowed.”

Analysts such as Doha maintain that Ershad may well be down, but certainly not yet out of his nation’s future.

“If you think that Ershad and his support in the army and his political party vanished overnight, you are sadly mistaken,” Doha said, adding that he has spoken to the former dictator since the latter’s fall. “They will vanish altogether only if the (opposition) parties can stay together until elections.”

Given the hatred between “the two ladies” leading the opposition and the vows of Ershad supporters to launch their campaign at a public rally this weekend, most analysts conclude that Bangladesh’s celebrations may be short-lived.

“Our biggest concern is that Ershad unleashed dozens of goons--criminals he ordered released from Dhaka’s prisons--in his final days, and we suspect they already are infiltrating the ranks of the political parties,” one of Hasina Wajed’s top aides said. “When the campaign starts, we fear a blood bath.”

If such outbreaks occur, few doubt that the army again will step in as the final arbiter of Bangladeshi politics, despite the belief of most senior and junior officers that the military no longer should play such a role.

Meeting last weekend with several foreign journalists in the same house where her father and family were slain in a coup 15 years ago, Hasina Wajed clearly echoed those fears.

Asked if she is concerned that while Ershad is now out, his regime remains in place, she replied: “This is a very delicate situation. . . . After 15 years, our people got a chance to bring back the democracy. We must move very cautiously, very calculatedly. That is what I feel. I can say only that much.”