Mass Resignation in Bangladesh Is Bid to Force Premier From Office : Politics: Strike shuts down capital after 147 opposition lawmakers quit. Standoff has paralyzed Parliament.

This week, reborn parliamentary democracy in Bangladesh, one of the world’s poorest and most densely populated countries, has been plunged into crisis by the mass resignation of the opposition from Parliament.

It was the latest, most desperate bid by hostile lawmakers to force Prime Minister Khaleda Zia from office. For 10 months, opposition parties had been boycotting proceedings in the chamber, accusing Zia and her Bangladesh Nationalist Party of vote-rigging and corruption, and demanding that she quit.

On Thursday, an anti-government strike virtually shut down the major cities of the low-lying country on the Bay of Bengal. Militants marched by the thousands through the streets of the capital, Dhaka, to demand Zia’s ouster. Shops and banks closed for eight hours, and cars, trucks and rickshaws stayed off the roads.

It was a manifestation of an increasingly common style of political struggle that Bangladesh can ill afford. Each day of a general strike costs the country an estimated $50 million in lost production--equivalent to the annual wages of 250,000 Bangladeshis.

Like most of the rest of the Indian subcontinent, Bangladesh, home to 122 million people, is in the throes of economic reforms that include the liberalization of government regulations and the energetic wooing of foreign capital. Zia, elected in 1991, has voiced fears that the persistent political turmoil is torpedoing her government’s plans.

“This is a classic no-win situation for the country,” Mahfuz Anam, editor of the Dhaka-based Daily Star newspaper, said. “Right now, the people are despondent.”

On Wednesday night, in an attempt to force the 50-year-old Zia’s hand, 147 of the 154 opposition members resigned from the 330-seat Parliament. Their supporters plan three more nationwide strikes next week, further imperiling the economy and the legitimacy of Zia, the second leader in Bangladesh’s brief but tumultuous history to have been elected freely and fairly.

“This is very unfortunate and shows the failure of both government and opposition,” said Serajul Islam Choudhury, a professor at the University of Dhaka. “The government has failed to govern the country. . . . But the opposition also has not behaved in a very responsible manner.”

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But opposition leader Hasina Wajed of the Awami League claims it is the prime minister who constitutes the danger. “Our struggle is a fundamental one,” she said recently. “We want to restore the people’s right to choose a government by free exercise of franchise.”

Some observers think the struggle has become first and foremost a clash of the steel wills of Zia--widow of a Bangladeshi military ruler and president--and of the fiery-tongued Wajed--daughter of the country’s first president.

Though the opposition began boycotting Parliament on March 1, when a minister made a crack impugning their Muslim credentials, the breach became irreparable when the government apparently used vote-rigging to win a parliamentary by-election. Zia’s enemies demanded that she step down.

The standoff has paralyzed the Parliament, leading to the delay of important laws. The economic impact has been calamitous, with the Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce and Industry estimating that political strife since Zia came to office has cost the nation’s business community more than $250 million.

A 40-day mediation mission to the former British possession by a Commonwealth mediator, Sir Ninian Stephen, flopped last month. Stephen, an Australian, left Dhaka saying the suspicion and mistrust were too intense.

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Since winning independence from Pakistan in a 1971 blood bath, overwhelmingly Muslim Bangladesh has experienced two military takeovers, 19 reported coup attempts and two assassinations of supreme leaders. Parliamentary democracy was restored in 1991.

In an eleventh-hour search for a compromise on Wednesday, the government and the loose opposition coalition of Wajed’s Awami League, the fundamentalist Jamaat-e-Islami and the Jatiya Party almost closed a deal.

Zia drastically altered her stance to say she was ready to step down 30 days before the next scheduled election in 1996, sources in Dhaka said. Power would have been vested in the hands of a temporary caretaker government.

However, Zia reportedly balked when her opponents refused to accept an additional demand that they promise not to organize strikes or other forms of political protest before people go to the polls. The opposition lawmakers then tendered their resignations.

Bangladesh’s government now faces a tough choice upon which its survival may depend. Zia’s party, which controls 54% of the parliamentary seats, is entitled by law to remain in office until the lawmakers’ five-year terms expire in 1996. So Zia is not obligated to call an early general election, as the opposition now is demanding.

But if she does not, she would have to hold 147 partial elections within the next three months to replace the legislators who resigned. If she does that, the opposition has made it clear that it will try to disrupt them.

Zia publicly repeated on Thursday the offer to leave office a month early. In exchange, she asked opposition lawmakers to reconsider their resignations. But Wajed insisted that the president dissolve Parliament immediately to prepare for elections.