Player is loading
Bangladesh will vote on Sunday to renew seats in the National Assembly, the country's only parliament building. The main opposition parties have told their voters not to vote in protest: many of their leaders are in prison and the Awami League, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina's party, is almost certain to win the election for the fourth time in a row.
Hasina is the longest-serving prime minister in Bangladesh's history. Over time, his character became very controversial. Although she has always fought against military dictatorships and has always worked to promote policies favorable to women and the poorest sections of the population, according to the opposition and also according to various international organizations, in her fifteen years in power Hasina has slowly turned away from being a leader of the Fight for democracy in one of its greatest threats.
There were outbreaks of violence in the days before the elections. At least 14 polling stations were set on fire while a passenger train entering the capital Dhaka caught fire on Friday, with police suspecting arson. Four people died, including two children, and eight others were injured. Anwar Hossain, a police officer, told AFP there was suspicion that it was an “act of sabotage” but it was not yet clear who might have committed it.
Sheikh Hasina is 76 years old, the eldest daughter of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the politician who declared Bangladesh's independence from Pakistan in 1971. After founding the progressive-inspired Awami League (LA), Sheikh Mujibur Rahman served as Prime Minister, then President, and in August 1975, he was deposed and killed along with part of his family during a coup organized by the army, concerned about his increasing authoritarianism was.
On the night of the coup, when a group of army officers killed her two parents, three of her brothers and the household staff, Hasina was 28 and in Germany with her younger sister. This was the episode that motivated her political career from then on: “Hasina has a very strong quality as a politician, which is knowing how to use trauma as a weapon in her favor,” said Avinash Paliwal, a professor of international relations in South Asia SOAS University of London. Central to Hasina's ambitions was the creation of the nation her father had envisioned.
After the death of her parents, Hasina lived in exile in India for several years, while in her country a series of coups brought to the presidency Ziaur Rahman, the founder of the Bangladesh National Party (BNP), who abolished the secular state of her father Hasina, who made loyalty to Islam one of the basic principles of the new constitution (Bangladesh is a Muslim-majority country). Ziaur Rahman was also killed during the 1981 coup attempt.
At that time, Hasina married a nuclear scientist from Bangladesh and had two children. She was politically active at the university in the student movements and their women's departments.
A supporter of Sheikh Hasina, Dhaka, Bangladesh, December 27, 2018 (AP Photo/Anupam Nath)
After returning to Bangladesh, Hasina was elected president of the Awami League. He was in and out of prison in the 1980s, a time of great political instability and ongoing military-backed coups. After the return to constitutional legality, the 1990s were marked by a bitter rivalry between Hasina and the new BNP leader Khaleda Zia: the two ruled alternately, contributing to the polarization of the country's politics.
Hasina, moderate and secular, has often accused the BNP, an ally of Islamic parties, of extremism; while Zia's BNP (which was the wife of Ziaur Rahman, the man who took power after the assassination of Hasina's father) has always claimed that the Awami League used repression to return to power.
Khaleda Zia won in 1991, Hasina in 1996 and Zia again in 2011. The following years were marked by great political instability with dozens of general strikes and attacks. When it came time for another vote, the military-backed provisional government ordered a raid on Hasina's home and her arrest on extortion charges. The Awani League leader called the allegations a conspiracy to stop her from running. Between the option of leaving the country or going to prison, he chose the latter: to fight for democracy and the rights of his people, he said at the time.
– Also read: The major protests in the textile sector in Bangladesh
She was released eleven months later and re-elected prime minister in 2008. Then she was confirmed in 2014, at a time of severe unrest and despite widespread allegations of voter fraud; and again in December 2018, when opposition parties decided to boycott the elections. At that time, voter turnout was only 22 percent and the absolute majority of seats went to the prime minister's party, after an election campaign that took place in a climate of violence and intimidation in which 19 people were killed and several were arbitrarily arrested by police.
Over the last fifteen years, Hasina has contributed to great economic development in Bangladesh: major infrastructures such as highways, railway lines and ports have been built; the power grid was expanded and relocated to the most remote centers; The clothing industry has become one of the most competitive in the world and in the last decade per capita income has tripled. Development progress has in turn triggered other progress: women's education is equal to that of men, women's working conditions have improved and the World Bank estimates that more than 25 million people out of a population of more than 170 million have left the country in the last twenty years Poverty emerged.
According to analysts, Hasina has also moved skillfully on the international stage. It has maintained relations with powerful and adversarial countries while maintaining a good balance: it firmly supports both India and China, even as the two countries have an ongoing territorial dispute over several border areas. He has maintained Bangladesh's historic ties with Russia but also with Western leaders even as they condemned Russia's invasion of Ukraine. And at least initially, she was appreciated internationally when she gave refuge to Rohingya Muslims fleeing persecution and violence in neighboring Myanmar in 2017, although her government made some fairly radical proposals at the time that were also contested.
However, critics argue that Bangladesh's success has come at the expense of democracy and human rights, and argue that Hasina's government has become increasingly authoritarian and repressive: it has intervened to silence dissent and restrict press freedom. In recent months, many senior BNP leaders have been arrested on fictitious and fabricated charges, as have thousands of opposition supporters following anti-government protests they organized.
Although Bangladeshi Justice Minister Anisul Huq says his government has nothing to do with the courts (“The judiciary is absolutely independent”), data shows that arrests, disappearances, killings and other political-related abuses increased with Hasina have significant.
Anti-government demonstration by the opposition party BHP, Dhaka, Bangladesh, October 28, 2023 (AP Photo/Mahmud Hossain Opu)
In recent weeks, the main opposition party, the BNP, has held several demonstrations across Bangladesh to demand the appointment of a non-partisan caretaker government to ensure elections. However, the protests were violently suppressed and the application was rejected.
Human Rights Watch recently described the arrests of opposition supporters as a “violent autocratic crackdown” by the government. “It looks like a much broader crackdown on the opposition rather than a targeted response to any violence,” said Rory Mungoven, who is responsible for Asia in the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. And another group of UN special rapporteurs confirmed these concerns last November: “Using the justice system as a weapon to attack journalists, human rights defenders and civil society leaders diminishes the independence of the judiciary and undermines fundamental human rights.”
Khaleda Zia, the only politician who can challenge Hasina for power, has been under house arrest for years (she was sentenced to 17 years in prison for embezzling funds to build an orphanage). The other party leaders are in prison or exile and observers say a new mandate for Hasina is virtually guaranteed: “Democracy is dead in Bangladesh.” “What we will see in January will be fake elections,” said Abdul Moyeen Khan , a BNP leader, told the BBC. And for Avinash Paliwal, the next elections could be “the final seal of a full-blown one-party state”: a form of dictatorship.