Bangladesh in poll position

The exercise complicates geopolitics for India, the US & China

In less than a month, Bangladesh goes to the polls to elect members of the 350-member Parliament, or Jatiya Sangsad. The expectation is that Sheikh Hasina Wajed’s Awami League will return for an unprecedented fourth term. This could be seen as a vote of confidence for Sheikh Hasina, whose 14-year stint as Prime Minister has undoubtedly made Bangladesh, despite Covid-related economic woes, a case study in poverty reduction and development. From being one of the world’s poorest nations at independence in 1971, Bangladesh is likely to head out of the list of Least Developed Countries by 2026, with poverty declining from 12 per cent in 2010 to 5 per cent in 2022. The country also leads India on several human development indicators, the status of women being the key one among them. All the same, it would be a stretch to describe the upcoming polls as free and fair.

In fact, the elections are less likely to offer a clear example of democracy in action than an example of the incumbent Prime Minister’s overweening power in deploying the state machinery to repress her age-old rival Khaleda Zia, Bangladesh’s first female prime minister and head of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), the Awami League’s main rival. Over the past decade, Sheikh Hasina, daughter of Bangladesh’s founder Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, launched an unprecedented crackdown on BNP leaders and grassroots workers, jailing them on alleged corruption charges and causing many to go underground. In October, the Sheikh Hasina government doubled down by passing the Ansar Battalion Bill, empowering a paramilitary force to enter the homes of suspects and interrogate and arrest them. As a means of guaranteeing the veracity of the election process, the BNP had suggested that a caretaker government be put in place ahead of the elections. Since the government has rejected this request, the BNP has declined to participate in the elections. Not surprisingly, Human Rights Watch has requested Bangladesh’s diplomatic partners to act. The upshot of this is that Bangladesh has become, by virtue of its location, a new source of superpower tensions ,with India seeking to play a balancing role in a tricky situation centred on the Indo-Pacific power dynamic.

Ironically, in their support for Sheikh Hasina, India and China find themselves on the same side whereas the US has chosen a harder line, imposing visa restrictions on those it considers complicit in undermining the democratic process. Beijing has criticised the US for interfering in Bangladesh’s elections. China enjoys close ties with the Sheikh Hasina regime, having emerged as a significant player principally in infrastructure investment and defence supplies. India has had good relations with Bangladesh historically and with Sheikh Hasina across governments in New Delhi; not so much with the BNP, which was seen as supporting Assamese separatists in the past. Accordingly, the Government of India has chosen to view the recent developments in Dhaka as an “internal matter”. It is attempting to persuade the Joe Biden administration to soften its stance since the US is the largest market for Bangladesh’s garment exports, the centrepiece of the country’s economic miracle. How the three countries manage these geopolitical contradictions will become clearer after the first week of January.