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Bangladesh voted on Sunday to renew seats in the National Assembly, the country’s only house of parliament. The main opposition parties have told their voters not to go to vote in protest: many of their leaders are in prison and the Awami League, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s party, will almost certainly win the elections for the fourth consecutive time.
Hasina is the longest-serving prime minister in the history of Bangladesh. In her time her figure has become very controversial. Although she has always fought military dictatorships and has always been committed to promoting policies in favor of women and the poorest sections of the population, according to the opposition and also according to various international organizations in the fifteen years of her government, Hasina it would slowly transform as a leader of the struggle for democracy in one of its main threats.
In the days preceding the elections there were episodes of violence. At least 14 polling stations were set on fire on Friday it caught fire a passenger train, which was entering the capital Dhaka, in what police suspect was an arson attack. Four people died, including two children, and eight others were injured. Anwar Hossain, a police official, told ad AFP that the suspicion is that it was “an act of sabotage”, but for now it is not clear who could have done 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 was prime minister, then president and in August 1975 he was deposed and killed together with part of his family during a coup d’état organized by the army, concerned by his growing authoritarianism.
On the night of the coup, when a group of army officers killed both her parents, three of her brothers and the household staff, Hasina was 28 years old and in Germany with her younger sister. That was the episode that motivated her political career from then on: «Hasina has a very powerful quality as a politician, that of knowing how to use trauma as a weapon in her favor», he said Avinash Paliwal, professor of South Asian international relations at SOAS University of London. At the heart of Hasina’s ambitions would be the creation of the nation his father envisioned.
After the death of her parents, Hasina lived in exile in India for several years while in her country a series of coups d’état brought Ziaur Rahman, founder of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) to the presidency, who abolished the secular state proclaimed by her father. Hasina and who made loyalty to Islam one of the key principles of the new Constitution (Bangladesh is a Muslim majority country). Ziaur Rahman was also killed during the 1981 coup.
Around that time, Hasina married a Bangladeshi nuclear scientist and had two children. She was involved in politics at university in the student movements and their women’s sections.
A supporter of Sheikh Hasina, Dhaka, Bangladesh, December 27, 2018 (AP Photo/Anupam Nath)
Once she returned to Bangladesh, Hasina was elected president of the Awami League. Throughout the 1980s, during a period of great political instability and continuous military-backed coups, she was in and out of prison. After the return to constitutional legality, the 1990s were characterized by a bitter rivalry between Hasina and the new leader of the BNP, Khaleda Zia: the two governed alternately, contributing to polarizing the country’s politics.
Hasina, moderate and secular, has often accused the BNP, an ally of Islamic parties, of extremism; while Zia’s BNP (who was the wife of Ziaur Rahman, the man who took power after Hasina’s father was assassinated) has always maintained that the Awami League used repression to return to power.
Khaleda Zia won in 1991, Hasina in 1996 and Zia again in 2001. The following years were characterized by great political instability, with dozens of general strikes and attacks. When the time came to vote again, the provisional government that took office with the support of the military ordered a raid on Hasina’s house and his arrest for extortion. The Awani League leader called the accusations a conspiracy to prevent her from running for office. Between the options of leaving the country or going to prison, she chose the latter: to fight for democracy and the rights of her people, she said at the time.
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Eleven months later she was released and in 2008 she was re-elected prime minister. She was then confirmed in 2014, at a time of serious unrest and despite widespread accusations of electoral fraud; and again in December 2018, when opposition parties decided to boycott the elections. On that occasion the turnout was only 22 percent and the absolute majority of seats went to the prime minister’s party, after an electoral campaign that was held in a climate of violence and intimidation, in which 19 people were killed and several had been injured and arbitrarily detained by the police.
In the last fifteen years Hasina has contributed to a great economic development of Bangladesh: large infrastructures have been built, such as highways, railway lines and ports; the electricity grid was expanded and brought to the most remote centers; the clothing industry has become one of the most competitive in the world and in the last ten years per capita income has tripled. Progress in terms of development has in turn triggered other progress: female education has been equal to that of men, the working conditions of women have improved and the World Bank has estimated that more than 25 million people out of more than 170 million of inhabitants, have emerged from poverty in the last twenty years.
Even on the international scene, Hasina has moved skillfully, according to analysts. You have cultivated ties with powerful and opposing countries, managing to maintain a good balance: you firmly support both India and China, even if the two countries have an ongoing territorial dispute over several border areas. She has cultivated Bangladesh’s historic ties with Russia, but also with Western leaders, despite the latter’s condemnation of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. And, at least initially, she was appreciated internationally when in 2017 she gave refuge to Rohingya Muslims fleeing persecution and violence in neighboring Myanmar, although her government then made some rather radical proposals that were also contested.
Critics, however, argue that Bangladesh’s success has come at the expense of democracy and human rights and argue that Hasina’s government has become progressively more authoritarian and repressive: it has intervened to silence dissent and reduce press freedom . In recent months many senior BNP leaders have been arrested on fictitious and trumped-up charges, as have thousands of opposition supporters following anti-government protests they organised.
Despite the Bangladeshi Minister of Justice Anisul Huq tip that her government has nothing to do with the courts (“The judiciary is absolutely independent”), the data shows that arrests, disappearances, killings and other politically motivated abuses have increased significantly under Hasina.
Anti-government demonstration by the opposition party BNP, 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 guarantee elections, but the protests were violently repressed and the request rejected.
Human Rights Watch ha recentemente defined the arrests of opposition supporters a “violent autocratic repression” by the government. “It seems like a much broader crackdown on the opposition rather than a targeted response to any violence,” he has declared Rory Mungoven, who covers Asia at the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. And another group of UN special rapporteurs has 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 erodes fundamental human rights.”
Khaleda Zia, the only politician capable of challenging Hasina for power, has been under house arrest for years (she was sentenced to 17 years in prison on charges of having embezzled funds intended for the construction of an orphanage). The other party leaders are in prison or in exile and observers say that a new mandate for Hasina is practically guaranteed: «Democracy is dead in Bangladesh. What we will see in January will be fake elections.” he said a BBC Abdul Moyeen Khan, one of the leaders of the BNP. And for Avinash Paliwal the next elections “could represent the definitive seal on a full-blown one-party state”: that is, on a form of dictatorship.