Voting in Bangladesh marred by crackdowns and boycotts

The polls opened in Bangladesh on Sunday for parliamentary elections, with Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina all but guaranteeing a fourth consecutive term in office, in a vote marred by a widespread repression on the opposition.

Security remained tight and the mood among 170 million people across the country was tense as the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, the main opposition party, boycotted the election. unfair, urged a nationwide strike. With the party in disarray and a large number of leaders and members in prison, it is unclear how successful efforts to organize the strike have been. Four people were killed in a fire on a train in the capital Dhaka late Thursday, which police are investigating as arson. At least 16 polling stations were set on fire on the eve of the election, the country’s fire brigade said.

Ms Hasina, 76, who cast her vote in Dhaka soon after polls opened at 8am local time, urged people to come out in large numbers.

During her campaign, she has called for political stability and continuity, often pointing to the country’s violent history of coups and counter-coups, including the coup that killed her father, Bangladesh’s founder, in the 1970s. She has highlighted her efforts to promote economic development and her secular party’s opposition to the rise of Islamist militants as reasons why voters should and will give her another term.

“We fought a lot for this right to vote: prison, oppression, grenades, bombs,” Ms. Hasina told reporters after casting her vote. “These elections will be free and fair.”

But with the results predicted and the election largely a one-sided affair, there seemed to be little excitement about the mood on the streets. Morning visits to polling stations in Dhaka showed that voting was getting off to a slow start. Members of the ruling party, the Awami League, milled around outside voting centers, but voters were a trickle.

“I didn’t vote in my hometown because what difference would my vote make?” said Mominul Islam Islam, a rickshaw puller in Dhaka.

With the main opposition boycotting, the competition – still tense and marked by violence in many constituencies – is largely between members of Ms Hasina’s own party.

After winning competitive elections under a neutral interim government in 2009, Ms. Hasina set out to turn Bangladesh into a one-party state, analysts and critics say. She changed the constitution to make the practice of holding elections under neutral rule illegal, and won two additional terms — in 2014 and 2018 — in votes marked by boycotts and opposition irregularities.

Ms. Hasina initially tried to crush the Jamaat-e-Islami, Bangladesh’s largest Islamist party. She effectively banned her political work and prosecuted some of her senior leaders for violence and treason during Bangladesh’s 1971 war of independence. More recently, her efforts have focused on the BNP, the main opposition party, which has now become so hollowed out that it remains has little mobilization capacity. The country’s leaders, who are not yet in prison, are stuck with endless court appointments.

For much of the past 15 years, as Ms. Hasina came to power for a second time after a five-year term that ended in 2001, an economic success story distracted from her autocratic turn.

Thanks to investments in the garment industry, Bangladesh experienced such impressive growth that its average income level at one point surpassed that of India. The country also saw major improvements in education, healthcare, women’s labor force participation and climate disaster preparedness.

But as Ms Hasina prepared for a fourth consecutive term in office, the luster of the economic success story faded, with the population struggling with rising prices.

The back-to-back blows of the pandemic and the war in Ukraine, which have pushed up fuel and food prices, have exposed Bangladesh’s over-reliance on one industry. The country’s foreign reserves have shrunk, forcing it to apply for emergency loans from the International Monetary Fund.

Opposition leaders tried to stoke public anger over the economy by holding their first major rallies in years, prompting Ms Hasina to intensify the crackdown. The BNP says more than 20,000 of its members have been arrested since the last major rally in October, during which police batons and tear gas were used.