Bangladesh Elections: Battle of Begums

For the last three decades, the politics of Bangladesh have been the story of the two biggest political parties – Awami League and Bangladesh Nationalist Party – both headed by begums.

Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina leads the Awami League, a party founded by her father and Bangladesh’s first president Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. The Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) is headed by Khaleda Zia, the country’s first woman prime minister.

The electoral politics in Bangladesh since 1991 has mostly been a Hasina versus Zia story. The two have served as the prime minister, in phases, since the last two decades.

Just ahead of the 2018 polls, Khaleda Zia was convicted in corruption cases and barred from contesting elections. The BNP, which contested the election after forming an alliance, won just seven seats, while the Awami League won 302 of the 350 seats.

Khaleda Zia, who was sentenced to 17 years in prison in 2018, was released from jail in 2020 and is under house arrest. The Bangladesh government hasn’t allowed her to fly out for medical treatment despite claims that she was at high risk of death.

The elections of 2014 and 2018 have been called out by opposition parties and the western media for not being free and fair. The same aspersions are being cast this time too.

“The January 2024 election in Bangladesh is going to take place without any credible opposition and with the predictable outcome that Sheikh Hasina will win for the fourth consecutive term and the Awami League will form the government. Top leaders of the major opposition BNP are in jail and hundreds and thousands of their activists are in prison,” Mubashar Hasan, an author and expert on Bangladesh politics, tells IndiaToday.In.

“The BNP is set to boycott the election as it is demanding an election under a neutral caretaker government. However, Hasina dismissed that demand, and she is going to organize an election under her administration. Against this backdrop, the next election will push Bangladesh firmly into an authoritarian trajectory,” says Hasan, a post-doctoral research fellow at the University of Oslo, Norway.

The BNP is demanding that Sheikh Hasina step down and a caretaker government be installed for the general election to be a free and fair exercise. It has taken to the streets and Bangladesh has seen large-scale violent protests in recent weeks.

Some 10,000 people, mostly opposition activists, have been arrested since October 28. Thousands of grassroots leaders have fled to remote corners of the country to avoid arrest.

Mubashar Hasan says millions of people who support the BNP are feeling disenchanted and deprived of their political rights. “There is a real worry that radical Islamist and militant Islamist outfits could manipulate such mindsets to recruit would-be jihadists,” says the Bangladesh expert.