Bangladesh on edge as shadow of opposition boycott looms over Sunday's elections

By Faisal Mahmud

DHAKA, Bangladesh (AA) – Marred by opposition boycotts, Bangladesh’s national election on Sunday is unlikely to produce any surprise, as the 76-year-old Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina is almost certainly cruising on to her fourth consecutive term.

The election campaign, which independent analysts have dubbed a “bizarre one” as there is no opposition in the fray, closed on early Friday morning.

A few hours earlier, Hasina – already the world’s longest-serving woman leader – addressed the nation via a televised broadcast, seeking another five-year term. She promised that she would “amend her mistakes if she can form the government again.”

She also urged people to come to polling centers to ensure the continuation of a “democratic trend and stability” through which she could carry on her works of building “a developed and smart Bangladesh free from hunger and poverty.”

Hasina's promise and call meant little to the main political opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), the archrival of Hasina's Awami League (AL), which decided to sit out the election because it is not being held under a neutral caretaker government.

With the majority of their top leaders imprisoned and thousands more on the run, the party is scrambling to put up a fight. Yet, the party led by an ailing 78-year-old Khaleda Zia has held a series of protests and mass contact programs to drum up support for their call to boycott the election.

The BNP declared a 48-hour nationwide “Hartal” – equivalent to a complete shutdown or strike – from Saturday morning and asked the nation’s people to reject the balloting.

“Don’t take part in this ‘farcical election,’” Abdul Moyeen Khan, BNP senior leader and standing committee member, said at a public briefing on Friday.

“I know that they (AL) are forcing you to go to the booth. But remember, not voting in fake elections is also your fundamental right.”

- The turnout conundrum

Reasonable voter turnout has already become AL’s major concern for Sunday’s poll, as was pointed out by its joint secretary general Bahauddin Nasim.

The last two national elections, held in 2014 and 2018, were tainted with a similar BNP-led opposition boycott and a massive vote rigging.

After the 2018 election in which the AL-led alliance won 288 out of 300 seats, The Washington Post compared the result to something that “one might expect in a place like North Korea, not a democratic nation such as Bangladesh.”

This time, Hasina's party is under intense pressure from Western governments, particularly the US, which has repeatedly urged her government to hold a free, fair, and participatory election.

The US even imposed a visa sanction against those who would “undermine the democratic process.”

With the boycott of the BNP, one of Bangladesh's essentially "two-party" politics, AL's chance of holding a "participatory" election is gone, but the party has resorted to various tactics to give the seemingly "one-sided" election a competitive veneer.

AL had asked its failed nomination seekers to run as independent candidates, or “dummy candidates” and allegedly coerce the Jatyio Party, an AL ally but the current parliamentary opposition, to participate in the election by guaranteeing it 26 of 300 parliamentary seats.

The AL leadership, including party secretary general Obaidul Quader, said the upcoming election is "competitive and participatory," and that 28 of the country's 44 registered political parties are participating.

According to Election Commission data, 1,970 candidates, including 436 independents, are contesting in 300 constituencies.

Rezaul Karim Rony, a journalist and political commentator, told Anadolu that he is not sure who AL is trying to fool by calling Sunday's vote participatory and competitive.

“Are they trying to deceive their own people or Western countries? Because everyone knows that it’s a selection, not an election,” Rony explained.

"The results have already been prepared. It will only be released on Sunday," he claimed.

Voter turnout, Rony believes, will be very low as the people will not bother to go to the poll.

“If you take a look at social media, you will find out how people are mocking about this election. I don’t think this election will draw any sane voter.”

- Concerns over aftermath

Some analysts, however, believe that showing a high voter turnout will not be a problem as AL can always come up with cooked-up figures.

In a conversation with Waresul Karim, an accounting professor at Bangladesh's North South University who has done extensive quantitative research on Bangladesh's elections said the BNP-led alliance received zero votes in 1,179 of 38,102 polling centers in the 2018 election, and that this was unquestionably not the case.

Karim's analysis of Election Commission data revealed that the opposition alliance even received fewer than 100 votes in an astounding 15,352 polling centers with over 80% turnout.

“It can be rather conclusively said, that the votes were not even counted. Someone just produced cooked-up numbers,” Karim added.

Endorsing Karim’s findings, which he recently shared in a public forum, prominent election observer and civil society activist Badiul Alam Majumder told Anadolu that if “Western countries want to find out whether a free and fair election is possible under partisan government in Bangladesh, they can simply look up these data of 2018 election.”

"They don't need to find out the outcome of the Sunday's poll as it will reflect nothing, neither people's mandate nor the state of democracy of Bangladesh," Majumder said.

He expressed concern that the outcome of the upcoming election, which is pretty certain, will push the country's fate into uncharted territory. "The political unrest, depressing economy, and possible retaliation from the Western government could create serious chaos," he feared.

Hasina herself anticipated harsh reactions from the US and said the global superpower may impose additional sanctions on Bangladesh.

Threatening with "foreign sanctions will prove futile as Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina does not care about visa policy or any foreign sanction," her party's secretary general Quader said.

Talking with Anadolu, Ali Riaz, a distinguished professor of Politics and Government at Illinois State University in the US, said the big question is whether the Western countries will hold their noses and continue to engage with the (new) government without any punitive measures.

“Western nations have a responsibility, and I hope they will live up to it,” Riaz said, adding that a business-as-usual situation will be a defeat for them from a geopolitical perspective.

“Besides, a legitimacy to this election will increase China’s influence not only in Bangladesh but throughout the region,” he added.