by There is no doubt that Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina will win a fourth consecutive term when Bangladesh goes to the polls on Sunday. The most important question is what will remain of the country’s democracy.
The main opposition party, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, has been crushed and left with little capacity to mobilize. Their leaders who are not yet in jail are either stuck with endless judicial appointments or are in hiding with the police hot on their heels. Hasina’s Awami League, in power since 2009, has paved the way for a race so one-sided that the party urged its own contenders to support fictitious candidates so it would not appear they won unopposed.
The BNP boycotted the vote, after Ms Hasina rejected its demand to step aside during the campaign period so that the elections could be held under a neutral administration. Although Bangladesh appears to be finding a path to prosperity and shaking off a legacy of coups and assassinations, the uncontested elections show how politics in this country of 170 million people remains hostage to decades of bad blood between the two main parties.
The possibility of violence hangs in the air. The opposition’s effort to protest the vote, with repeated calls for nationwide strikes and civil disobedience, has been met with intensified repression. More than 20,000 BNP members and leaders have been arrested since the party’s last major rally in October, according to party leaders and lawyers.
Diplomats in Dhaka said they had received reports of appalling conditions inside overcrowded prisons. At least nine opposition leaders and members have died in prison since the October 28 crackdown, according to human rights organizations and local media reports.
As the BNP made another call for a nationwide strike, this time on the eve of the election, security has been increased, with the army deployed in the capital Dhaka and other regions.
“There is a risk of increased violence after the elections, from both sides,” said Pierre Prakash, Asia director for Asia. the international crisis group. “If the BNP feels that the largely non-violent strategy it deployed in the run-up to the 2024 election has failed, leaders could come under pressure to return to the more overt violence of the past.”
And if the BNP resorts to widespread violence, Prakash said, it will be walking straight into a trap. Hasina’s party has been laying the groundwork for an even broader crackdown while pushing a narrative that the opposition is full of “terrorists” and “murderers.”
During Hasina’s 15 years of rule, her second term in power, the country has been something of a paradox.
As investments in the garment export industry began to bear fruit, the economy experienced such impressive growth that average income levels at one point surpassed those of India. Bangladesh has also shown significant progress in other areas of development, from education and health to female labor force participation and climate disaster preparedness.
But, critics say, Hasina, 76, has always tried to turn the country into a one-party state. From security agencies to the courts, he has captured government institutions and unleashed them on anyone who doesn’t fall in line.
In the latest example, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Muhammad Yunus was sentenced to six months in prison in what he described as a political vendetta. Yunus is free on bail and is appealing the verdict in a case that government officials say is non-political and involves violations of labor laws.
Hasina’s campaign to dismantle the BNP often appears to be a personal campaign of revenge.
For most of the time since Bangladesh’s creation in 1971 – when it broke away from Pakistan after a bloody campaign of cultural oppression against Bengalis – the country has been ruled by the two parties.
The Awami League was the party of Hasina’s father, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the country’s independence leader and founding president. After waging a campaign to centralize power, he was assassinated in a military coup that also left much of his young family dead.
The BNP was formed by General Ziaur Rahman, the army chief who came to power after a bloody phase of coups and counter-coups following the assassination of Sheikh Mujib. Mr. Zia, as he was known, was also later killed in a military coup.
While Hasina sees the BNP as the creation of the same military cadre that sheltered her father’s killers, her drive to destroy the party is even more personal, her aides say. When the BNP, led by Zia’s widow Khaleda Zia, was in power in the early 2000s, one of Hasina’s rallies as opposition leader was attacked with dozens of grenades. She survived a close call, but more than 20 of her party’s leaders and supporters died.
Over the past two years, Hasina’s repression has become particularly severe as the shine of the story of economic progress has faded.
The successive blows of the pandemic and the war in Ukraine, which drove up fuel and food prices, have reduced Bangladesh’s foreign exchange reserves to dangerous lows. The crisis has exposed not only Bangladesh’s over-reliance on the textile industry, but also what Western diplomats in Dhaka say are kleptocratic practices hidden beneath the country’s economic growth.
The ruling elite, diplomats say, accesses the nation’s banks and wealth without accountability. With about 60 percent of Parliament made up of businessmen, economic interests and political power have become deeply intertwined, impeding economic reform, analysts say.
The opposition attempted to capitalize on public anger over rising prices and held its first large demonstrations in years. But their momentum was short-lived as government repression deepened.
The BNP says its demand for elections under a neutral caretaker government was nothing new: Hasina called for the same thing when she was in the opposition and came to power in an election administered by a caretaker government. Bangladesh’s institutions are so vulnerable to abuse by the ruling party that no opposition has won an election when the vote was not held under a caretaker’s rule.
But Hasina believes the BNP’s demand is a violation of the constitution because, after coming to power, it amended the statutes to declare the practice illegal and a disruption to the democratic cycle.
To avoid a repeat of the 2014 vote, in which Hasina’s party won more than half of the seats unopposed, the Awami League has been singling out smaller parties still contesting this year’s election. But analysts say the party has designed a new symbolic opposition. Some of these candidates made their position clear on campaign posters: “Supported by the Awami League.”
BNP leader Mrs Zia, a former prime minister, remains under house arrest. Her son, acting president of the party, is in exile in London. Many of the party’s leaders are in prison.
In the weeks leading up to Sunday’s vote, the party’s visibility was largely reduced to virtual press conferences by Ruhul Kabir Rizvi, one of the few senior BNP leaders not in prison.
Mr. Rizvi himself faces 180 court cases and for months remained locked in his office, sleeping on a small bed in the corner, as he risked arrest if he ventured out. He walks with a cane due to a gunshot wound he received while protesting against a military dictator in the late 1980s.
“We and other like-minded parties have boycotted these elections,” Rizvi said in a virtual press conference on Thursday, announcing a new strike that will begin on Saturday. “The political parties and people of the country have already realized that these elections will be a rehearsal of the Awami League’s anarchy. “It’s going to be a unilateral election.”
Obaidul Quader, general secretary of the Awami League, regrets the absence of the main opposition.
“If the BNP had been there,” he added, “the elections would have been more competitive.”
