A one-sided affair now that the ailing democracy in Bangladesh goes to the polls

There is little doubt that Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina will seize a fourth consecutive term when Bangladesh goes to the polls on Sunday. The bigger question is what will remain of the country’s democracy.

The main opposition party, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, has been crushed and has little mobilization capacity. The country’s leaders, who are not yet in prison, are inundated with endless court appointments or in hiding with the police on their heels. Ms. Hasina’s Awami League, in power since 2009, paved the way for a race so one-sided that the party urged its own participants to back bogus candidates so it would not appear as if they won uncontested.

The BNP boycotted the vote after Ms Hasina rejected her demand to step aside during the campaign period so the election could take place under a neutral government. Even as Bangladesh appears to find a path to prosperity and sheds a legacy of coups and assassinations, the uncontested election shows how politics in this country of 170 million remains hostage to decades of bad blood between the two major parties.

The possibility of violence hangs in the air. The opposition’s attempts to protest the elections, with repeated calls for nationwide strikes and civil disobedience, have been met with intensified crackdowns. More than 20,000 BNP members and leaders have been arrested since the party’s last major meeting in October, according to party leaders and lawyers.

Diplomats in Dhaka said they had received reports of dire conditions in overcrowded prisons. At least nine opposition leaders and members have been killed in prison since the October 28 crackdown, according to human rights groups and local news media reports.

Now that the BNP has called for another national strike on the eve of the elections, security has been increased, with the army deployed in the capital Dhaka and other regions.

“There is a risk of increased violence after the polls, from both sides,” said Pierre Prakash, Asia director the International Crisis Group. “If the BNP finds that the largely non-violent strategy it deployed in the run-up to the 2024 elections has failed, leaders may come under pressure to return to the more overt violence of the past.”

And if the BNP resorts to widespread violence, Mr Prakash said, it will fall straight into a trap. Ms. Hasina’s party has laid the groundwork for an even broader crackdown as it pushes the narrative that the opposition is filled with “terrorists” and “murderers.”

During Ms. Hasina’s 15-year rule, her second stint in power, the country was something of a paradox.

As investments in the garment export industry began to pay off, the economy experienced such impressive growth that at one point the average income level surpassed that of India. Bangladesh has also made great progress in other areas of development, from education and healthcare to women’s participation in the labor market and preparedness against climate disasters.

But critics say Ms Hasina, 76, has been trying all along to turn the country into a one-party state. From the security services to the courts, it has captured government institutions and unleashed them on anyone who doesn’t follow the rules.

In the latest example, Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus was given a six-month prison sentence in what he described as a political vendetta. Mr Yunus is out on bail and is appealing the verdict in a case that government officials say is not political and involves violations of labor laws.

Ms Hasina’s drive 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 seceded 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 Ms. Hasina’s father, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the country’s independence leader and founder and president. After beginning a campaign to centralize power, he was killed in a military coup that also killed much of his young family.

The BNP was formed by General Ziaur Rahman, the army chief who came to power after a bloody phase of coups and counter-coups in the aftermath of Sheikh Mujib’s assassination. Mr Zia, as he was known, was also later killed in a military coup.

Although Ms Hasina sees the BNP as the creation of the same military cadre that protected her father’s killers, her drive to destroy the party is even more personal, her aides say. When the BNP, led by Mr Zia’s widow, Khaleda Zia, was in power in the early 2000s, one of Ms Hasina’s rallies as opposition leader was attacked by dozens of grenades. She survived a close call, but more than twenty of her party’s leaders and supporters were killed.

Over the past few years, Ms. Hasina’s crackdown has become particularly severe as the luster has faded from the story of economic progress.

The successive blows of the pandemic and the war in Ukraine, which have pushed up fuel and food prices, have shrunk Bangladesh’s foreign reserves to dangerous lows. The crisis has exposed not only Bangladesh’s over-reliance on the garment industry, but also what Western diplomats in Dhaka say are kleptocratic practices hidden beneath the country’s economic growth.

The ruling elite, diplomats say, uses the country’s banks and wealth without any responsibility. With businessmen making up around 60 percent of Parliament, economic interests and political power have become deeply intertwined, hampering economic reforms, analysts say.

The opposition sought to capitalize on public anger over rising prices and held major rallies for the first time in years. But the momentum was short-lived as the government crackdown deepened.

The BNP says its demand for elections under a neutral interim government was nothing new. Ms Hasina called for the same when she was in opposition, coming to power in elections organized by an interim government. Bangladesh’s institutions are so vulnerable to abuse by the ruling party that no opposition would have won the election unless the vote was conducted under the leadership of an interim commissioner.

But Ms Hasina sees the BNP’s demand as a violation of the constitution – because after coming to power she amended the charter to declare the practice illegal and a disruption of the democratic cycle.

In a bid to avoid a repeat of the 2014 elections, in which Ms Hasina’s party won more than half of the uncontested seats, the Awami League has pointed to the smaller parties still contesting this year’s elections. But analysts say the party has created a new symbolic opposition. Some of these candidates made it clear on campaign posters where they stood: “Backed by the Awami League.”

BNP leader Ms Zia, a former prime minister, remains under house arrest. Her son, acting chairman of the party, is in exile in London. A large part of the party leadership is in prison.

In the weeks leading up to Sunday’s vote, the party’s visibility was largely limited to virtual press conferences by Ruhul Kabir Rizvi, one of the few senior BNP leaders not in jail.

Mr. Rizvi himself faces 180 lawsuits, and for months he remained locked in his office, sleeping in a small corner bed, because he risked arrest if he ventured outside. He walks with a cane because of a gunshot wound he suffered during his protest against a military dictator in the late 1980s.

“We and other like-minded parties have boycotted these elections,” Rizvi said at a virtual press conference on Thursday, announcing a new strike starting on Saturday. “The political parties and people of the country have already understood that these elections will be a rehearsal of the Awami League’s anarchy. It will be a one-sided election.”

Awami League general secretary Obaidul Quader said he regretted the absence of the main opposition.

“If BNP had been there,” he added, “the elections would have been more competitive.”