Bangladesh on The Election Train!

SALEEM SAMAD

After 18 months, the nation will go for an election in February 2026. Since the Nobel laureate Prof Muhammad Yunus took charge of the Interim Government last August, he faced several hiccups in running the administration. One of the challenges he faced was when his government announced a road map for a free, fair, and credible election. In this election, people would be able to express their wish to elect a party that would form a legitimate political government.

The other challenge was stabilizing the situation of law and order. Most of the police forces have fled their ranks in fear of retaliation by protesters for killing thousands of students and protesters. The understaffed police forces are inadequate to restore law and order in the country.

However, law enforcement has been supplemented by the Bangladesh Army in every city and town. Initiate the trial of leaders of Awami League, including former prime minister Sheikh Hasina, for crimes against humanity for ordering to opening fire upon thousands of protesters.

During the bloody July-August anti-government street protests known as the Monsoon Revolution, Hasina was forced to quit and flee to India, where she is living in exile for the second time in her political career. Meanwhile, in a typical political development, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party’s (BNP’s) supremo Tarique Rahman, acting Chairman, held a parley with visiting Prof Yunus in London, where he was living in exile.

The hour-long parley thawed a couple of crucial political discontentment with the new government. Yunus repeatedly said the election should be held before June next year. But BNP, a rightist democratic party, demanded that the election be held at the end of December. Or else there will political and economic crisis, which may cause a law and order situation.

Yunus is determined that the election should be held after the crucial reforms are agreed upon with the political parties. However, BNP and its like-minded fringe politics did not give any specific reason for demanding the election to be held at the end of this year. Political circles said that the high school final exam, the month of fasting in Ramadan from mid-February, Eid ul Fitr in mid-March 2026, the advent of monsoon, etc., were not favorable for a general election.

Earlier on the eve of Eid ul-Adha, Yunus announced that the election would be held in April 2026. Well, the Islamist party Jamaat-e-Islami’s chief, Dr. Shafiqur Rahman, has said the chief advisor’s announcement has reassured the nation of the transition to democracy. The National Citizens’ Party (NCP) stated that steps should be taken to implement the July Charter (Monsoon Revolution), and the proposed reforms; they have no objection to elections being held within the announced timeframe.

BNP rejected the election announcement and declared street protests against the government to hold polls by the end of December. BNP supremo Rahman, after the parley in London, agreed that the deadline for the political parties to commit to the reforms in the judiciary, the election commission, the bureaucracy, police administration, the anti-corruption commission, and others.

Yunus wants the political parties to agree to the reform proposals to ensure transparency, accountability, and public social responsibility of elected leaders. The politicians to keep their party supporters loyal to them, and ensure that the henchmen enjoy impunity for the crimes, they need to influence the police, judiciary, and civil administration.

Therefore, it is understood that the politicians oppose reforms. They have been arguing that the Interim Government does not have the jurisdiction to conduct any reforms. Like the howls of jackals, the parties want the elected parliament should endorse the reforms and make them public laws for the benefit of the people.

Meanwhile, BNP’s high command has refused to ally with Jamaat-e-Islami or any Islamist party. BNP is confident that it will win the majority to form a government. BNP also has also problem with the newly formed King’s party – the National Citizens Party (NCP) by the student leaders who have spearheaded the Monsoon Revolution, which toppled the iron lady Hasina last August.

The NCP blames BNP’s inherent weakness for failing to topple the autocratic regime, which ruled Bangladesh for more than 15 years. Hasina intermittently hunted and haunted the opposition. Her government arrested tens of thousands of BNP leaders, activists and supporters and threw them in prisons on terrorism charges, damaging government properties, and attacking police.

BNP and other opposition leaders were immobilized. The opposition was neutralized after several brutal crackdowns by the law enforcement agencies and henchmen of the ruling Awami League. The opposition was unable to organize effective anti-government street protests to block the elections, which were boycotted.

The elections of 2014, 2018, and 2024 were held sans the opposition and the poll results were doctored, according to national and international election observers, which echoed the media coverage of the election ballot box stuffing, henchmen taking possession of polling stations, and widespread vote buying.

Hasina never bothered to hold free, fair, and inclusive elections. She deliberately ignored the media feedback, human rights organizations’ statements, and the poll observers’ report. She took the senior journalists into her confidence with lucrative benefits. She split the journalists’ union among pro-government loyalists and pushed others to join the opposition union.

Hundreds of journalists faced legal harassment, intimidation and were jailed under repressive cybercrime laws. The draconian cyber laws targeted opposition, critics, dissidents and especially the “delinquent” journalists who refused to be loyal to Hasina.

The media landscape has changed. Most media cannot publish/broadcast news, which hurts the feelings of the student leaders of NCP. Often, they barge into the newsroom when they are dissatisfied with certain news outlets critiquing their source of funding for holding massive rallies and a lavish lifestyle.

In most cases, they intimidate news organizations to delete the story or headlines that are deemed inappropriate and tarnish their image as revolutionaries. Scores of journalists were terminated or asked to resign in the face of the NCP’s threats. They forced the National Press Club in Dhaka to cancel more than a hundred veteran journalists and senior members of the club.

Dr Rakib Al Hasan, Executive Director of the Center for Partnership Initiative, a research office, said NCP failed to gather moss from rolling stones. The new party does not believe in pluralism and secularism. They have been engaged in witch-hunting against professionals, and bureaucrats, including journalists, professors of state universities, and teachers of several educational institutions.

The television and stage actors were banned from shows. Several of the plays were postponed until the drama producers got rid of the actors. The student leaders have lost credibility among the mainstream journalists, intellectuals, and the military hierarchy, which still remains steadfast behind Prof Yunus, remarked Hasan.

What is disliked by the sympathizers of student leaders for appeasing Jamaat-e-Islami and other radicalized Islamic groups, who are cut off from the masses, said the young researcher.

It will be difficult for NCP to muster the support of the millions who also joined the Monsoon Revolution to vote for them in the upcoming election, which is now scheduled to be held eight months from now, predicts the private research organization.

First published in the Stratheia Policy Journal, Islamabad, Pakistan, on 14 June 2025 

Saleem Samad is an award-winning independent journalist based in Bangladesh. A media rights defender with the Reporters Without Borders (@RSF_inter). Recipient of Ashoka Fellowship and Hellman-Hammett Award. He could be reached at saleemsamad@hotmail.com; Twitter (X): @saleemsamad

Crime and politics in Bangladesh: Bang bang club

More trials for Bangladesh’s deflated opposition

TEN years after they arrived, the weapons have found their victims. In April 2004 police in Chittagong, the main port city of Bangladesh, intercepted a shipment of rifles, submachine guns with silencers, 25,000 hand grenades and more, worth some $5m. Made in China, the arms may have been shipped with help from Pakistani spies set on causing trouble for India. The weapons were intended for rebels in Assam state in India’s north-east, where insurgencies rumble on.

For years in Bangladesh the legal case went nowhere. Those involved in the arms shipment were ignored. The Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), under Khaleda Zia, then prime minister, showed no interest in prosecutions. Only after the Awami League, the current government, took office in 2009 did prosecutors begin to consider the crime seriously. On January 30th a trial court sentenced 14 men—most of them from or affiliated to opposition parties—to death on smuggling charges related to the arms haul.

Assuming the sentences are upheld by the higher courts, they carry great political as well as legal weight. By implication, they embroil Mrs Zia’s son, Tarique Rahman. He is judged by many to be the BNP’s next leader—though he is living in London while corruption cases pile up against him at home. Among those sentenced to hang is Lutfuzzaman Babar, a long-time flunky of Mr Rahman’s. This week the prime minister, Sheikh Hasina, vowed that her government would work to prove that, in the light of Mr Rahman’s influence at the time, he knew all about the weapons.

Others sentenced to death include a former head of Bangladesh’s military intelligence, another high-ranking Bangladeshi spy, plus (in absentia) a leader of an Assamese insurgent group who is on India’s most-wanted list. Of major political significance, the court also found guilty Motiur Rahman Nizami, who leads Jamaat-e-Islami, Bangladesh’s largest Islamist party and a close ally of the BNP. He has already been indicted by a separate court, looking at war crimes committed in Bangladesh’s war of secession from Pakistan in 1971. He faces the prospect of being sentenced to death twice over.

Jamaat has promised protests against the smuggling verdicts. Though the party has a reputation for street violence, its capacity to create trouble seems diminished in recent months. Many Jamaat activists have either been arrested or shot dead. The BNP also looks utterly broken, unable to persuade followers to return to disruptive street protests against Sheikh Hasina, whether over court cases or elections.

By contrast, the prime minister looks increasingly content. Her Awami League won a general election on January 5th that was boycotted by the BNP and Jamaat. Aid donors and other observers who worried about the poll’s credibility now seem to be coming to terms with five more years of Sheikh Hasina. The official aid agencies of Britain and America have funded an opinion survey suggesting that the Awami League would have won the election even without the boycott. That is a handy fillip for the government.

India, Bangladesh’s giant neighbour, will be pleased with things, too. It is especially close to Sheikh Hasina and the avowedly secular Awami League, and it endorsed the January election. Those who set foreign policy in Delhi are anxious to prevent Bangladesh becoming, as it was before, a haven for insurgent groups that operate in India. They want Bangladesh to resist the sort of Islamist extremism prevalent in Pakistan. And they want it to help limit the flow of illegal Bangladeshi migrants flooding into India for work.

Sheikh Hasina shares India’s aims, while doing everything to flatten the opposition at home. It bodes ill for democratic government. But the state of the opposition—pinned down in court, on the streets and in parliament—suggests a modicum of outward calm may prevail for a while.

First published in the Economist, February 8th 2014

Bangladesh’s volatile politics: The battling begums

The pendulum swings away from Sheikh Hasina and her government

AHEAD of the festival of Eid-al-Fitr on August 9th-11th, the two quarrelling heads of Bangladesh’s political dynasties exchanged greetings cards. But the outward signs of peace between the prime minister, Sheikh Hasina of the Awami League, and the opposition leader, Khaleda Zia of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), mean little. A European diplomat says he has just sent two cables to his capital. The first discusses the growing chances of the League’s defeat in elections due by next January. The second is about the dynastic succession plans of the battling begums.

One political party is likely to be missing at the coming election. On August 1st the High Court ruled that the country’s biggest religious party, the Jamaat-e-Islami, is unfit to contest national polls because its charter puts God above democratic process. The court has cancelled Jamaat’s registration. A few months ago this might have sealed victory for the League, for Jamaat has been a crucial vote-winning ally for BNP.

Yet growing numbers now doubt whether the League can win a second consecutive term, and not only because no elected government has ever done so in Bangladesh. In early 2013 judgments by a flawed but popular court, investigating crimes committed by current Jamaat members during Bangladesh’s war of independence from Pakistan in 1971, seemed to boost the nominally secular League, which revived the tribunal. Nearly all the leaders of Jamaat are likely to be sentenced, probably to death, by election day.

In response, the opposition framed the trials as a struggle between anti-Islamist forces and the pious. That paved the way for marches on Dhaka, the capital, by Hefazat-e-Islam, an Islamic splinter group with fundamentalist demands. The second time they marched, security forces killed up to 50 of them. The message young men took back to their villages was that thousands had been slaughtered. Across the country, the effect on the government’s popularity has been devastating.

Ever since, the BNP has been in the ascendant. It thrashed the League in mayoral elections in June and July, notably in Gazipur in the industrial belt, hitherto one of the League’s safest constituencies.

In an attempt to reverse its fortunes, the government plans to raise wages for 4m garment workers, who are angry at its failure to make factories safe and to compensate relatives of more than 1,100 killed in a ghastly factory collapse in May. A wage rise could sway many voters, but factory bosses are likely to resist a deal. A push against party corruption would also boost Sheikh Hasina’s popularity. A good third of her MPs dare not visit their fiefs for fear of being lynched for treating their constituencies as cash tills. Yet no precedent exists for firing miscreants, and appointing credible candidates would probably split the party. As a last resort, Sheikh Hasina’s son and heir apparent, Sajeeb Wazed, was handed around for three weeks in July before flying back to the United States. At this point, he looks like a non-starter.

His dynastic counterpart, Tarique Rahman, Mrs Zia’s son, is wilier. He would jump on a plane from London tomorrow. His mother is in poor health and keen to pass power to her first-born. But he faces charges of corruption and money laundering in Bangladesh: Mr Rahman was instrumental in ensuring that the BNP’s last stint in power was a glorious plunder. He would go straight to jail unless the League agrees in the coming weeks to pass control of the country’s institutions to a caretaker government for the elections, a sticking-point that could trigger a constitutional crisis.

The League will fight bitterly. But if it loses an election, the BNP would rehabilitate its disgraced heir and its Jamaat allies (at least, those not executed by then). Once a party is in power in Bangladesh it is the unalterable tradition to declare nearly everything decreed by your opponents to be null and void.

First published in Asia print edition The Economist, August 10th 2013