Sheikh Hasina who has been in power at the head of Awami League since 2009 in South Asia’s newly minted economic powerhouse Bangladesh, is set to score yet another landslide electoral victory a month from now, making her the longest serving woman prime minister in the world.
The ruling party’s main political rival — the Bangladesh Nationalist Party — has refused to contest the elections unless its demands for a caretaker government to oversee the polls are met while the Islamist Jamaat-e-Islami party’s registration has been cancelled, which essentially means that the elections will be one sided with Awami League sweeping to power against a clutch of smaller, largely insignificant political parties such as factions of the Jaitya Party.
Under the circumstances, protests, crackdown on Opposition supporters and leaders — thousands of whom have been detained, according to news reports — along with a US government announcement that it may bar Bangladesh’s officials and politicians from entering America if they “obstruct the democratic process”, poses a threat for the Sheikh Hasina regime and may turn out to be headache for India, her closest ally.
Questions of legitimacy of the election in the eyes of the West, however, do not seem to bother the ruling Awami League at the moment. Said Shamshul Haque Tuku, deputy speaker of Bangladesh’s Parliament and a prominent Awami leader, “It does not matter which party contests the election … the fact is that the common masses are participating in this celebration of democracy and that is what really counts for us.”
However other politicians and analysts are not so sure. “The elections are being held as per law and in that we can say that it’s constitutional. However, the absence of a major political party like the BNP does make it less acceptable politically,” said Abu Hena Razzaki, former Secretary, Foreign Affairs of the Zaker party and an advocate at the Bangladesh Supreme Court.
For India, the problem is compounded as those in Bangladesh who are protesting against what a BNP poster in Dhaka terms as an “election at gunpoint”, are also viewing the neighbour as Hasina’s principal backer and may transfer their ire at the larger neighbour.
Videos of Bangladeshis, who gained their independence from Pakistan in 1971 after a bloody civil war where the Indian army helped the Awami League’s Mukti Bahini (Liberation force), celebrating India’s recent loss at the ICC World Cup cricket finals are seen as a pointer to the growing unpopularity of the larger neighbour which surrounds Bangladesh from three sides.
“Anti-India rhetoric usually goes up during election season in most of India’s neighbours and Bangladesh cannot be an exception,” said Ambassador Pinak R Chakravarty, former Secretary in India’s Ministry of External Affairs.
Shantanu Mukharji, IPS, Adviser at think tank NatStrat, agreed and said, “We need to be mature and take such rhetoric in our stride as Bangladesh has been a good friend of India and we have a large constituency of pro-India people cutting across all sections there.”
Bangladesh, which is India’s closest neighbour, arguably has done the most in terms of helping the South Asian giant by rooting out insurgent groups from bases on its soil and operating in its turbulent Northeast as also pan-sub continental Islamists who were involved in terrorist activities. It has also settled a long-pending dispute over the boundary with a landmark treaty exchanging enclaves in each other’s territory.
Though the Begum Khaleda Zia-led BNP has been disarray ever since the former prime minister and wife of military dictator Gen Ziaur Rahman was jailed on corruption charges in 2018, it was expected to mount a credible challenge to the Awami League in the coming election; however that participation now seems a remote possibility.
Despite Bangladesh’s GDP growing dramatically in the last 15 years from $102 billion to $460 billion besides improvements in literacy levels, health care etc, there have been rumblings of discontent on account of what many see as an increasingly autocratic style of governance.
Obaidul Quader, Awami League’s general secretary and a minister in Sheikh Hasina’s cabinet, told newspersons earlier last month that the government welcomes all parties to contest the election slated for January 7, and there “should be no obstacles for anyone”.
However, this did not seem to satisfy the BNP which, besides voicing fears of vote rigging if the elections were held under the Hasina regime, also claimed that there were attempts to split the opposition party to create a “new King’s party”.
“Though the lack of participation by a major political party is a drawback, the fact is that it will not be an election devoid of opposition. A large number of Awami League rebels are fighting this election and many of them will swing votes. There are also known BNP local leaders who are fighting the polls as independents and will pose a challenge in many places,” said Munni Saha, a well-known Dhaka-based political analyst and former head of ATN News.
The BNP which boycotted the 2014 election had participated in 2018, but later claimed that the polls were marred by wide-spread use of “unfair practices.”
India has traditionally rooted for the Awami League partly because of connections dating to Bangladesh’s war of independence and partly as it sees it as more secular than the BNP, whose supporters had in the past led pogroms against minorities and as BNP has a history of allowing northeastern militant groups to operate out of Bangladesh whenever it is in power.
Despite joining hands with the US and other western powers in founding the Quad, largely seen as an anti-China military grouping, India has in the past pushed back against the criticism by its “western friends” of Sheikh Hasina’s government, mainly on account of these factors.
However, it will be difficult for South Block to completely ignore the complaints and protests by the US and others of an election in its backyard, which many will see as one-sided.
“The lack of participation will certainly impact perceptions and questions will continue to be raised by many countries ... there are also pointers that Sheikh Hasina’s own popularity which has been tremendous is perhaps eroding … India will need to take stock of all these points of views,” agreed Sreeradha Datta, professor of international relations at OP Jindal University and former fellow at India’s strategic affairs think tank Institute of Defence Studies & Analysis.
For Bangladesh, the threat of withholding visas for its elected representatives and officials is quite potent too. Besides shaming it, the move could actually cause problems for the nation, which has a large diaspora in North America sending back remittances home and is also dependent on dollars it earns by exporting garments to the US.
Ignoring the clouds that are apparent on Bangladesh’s skies is a no-no for the world at large and for India in particular given its geo-strategic position and its rising strength as a “tiger economy”.
However any transfer of power to a regime which is anti-India or by Islamists who over the years have grown in strength, will always remain anathema for policy makers in New Delhi.
As such Sheikh Hasina and the Awami League remain the best bet for India and the free world, but as one Bangladeshi politician said on conditions of anonymity, “We all need to see how the democracy quotient can be increased in this election and later, and only by doing so can we lend legitimacy and stability to the rulers of the day.”
Jayanta Roy Chowdhury is currently Consulting Editor with thesecretariat.in and former head of PTI’s Eastern Region network
