Sheikh Hasina secured five more years at the head of Bangladesh this Sunday, due to the non-appearance of the opposition. The country’s streets, usually crowded, were half empty yesterday for fear of violence from pickets by the opposition Bangladesh National Party (BNP), which had called for the closure of shops and the paralysis of transport during election day. However, once inside the school, one could find a member of the government party ambushed inside the voting booth in a last attempt to cast the vote. An effort that is sometimes redundant, since it is common in Bangladesh to find at the polling station that someone has already voted for you.
From all of the above it appears that the quality of Bengali democracy remains very low, when more than half a century has passed since Bangladesh split from Pakistan with the military support of Indira Gandhi’s India. Political turbulence and institutional weakness, however, are accompanied by remarkable economic progress, slow but sure, driven by textile exports and remittances from emigrants.
During the last fifteen years of Hasina’s government – who had previously governed, alternating with her archrival, Jaleda Zia, of the BNP – Bangladesh has grown around 6% annually. A couple of years ago, without making a sound, it surpassed India in per capita income.
The Indian ambassador in Dhaka met with Hasina this Monday to congratulate her on her victory. It is a reciprocated love, since the prime minister had some complimentary words for Narendra Modi’s government yesterday, election day.
Stability in Bangladesh is a national security priority for India, which shares a 4,000-kilometre border. Before Hasina, several armed organizations in Northeast India used Bangladesh – and before that, East Pakistan – as a haven for their activities. Hasina has referred to the BNP as a “terrorist organization” in the campaign.
An unfair adjective in the case of the party of Jaleda Zia – widow of a former army chief, then head of government with Islamist sympathies – although not so much in relation to some of her allies. It should be noted that an Awami League activist was stabbed to death by opposition supporters during election day. A large number of buses, shops and even a Buddhist monastery have been set on fire during the 48-hour strike – and in the preceding days – by militants from the BNP or Jamaat Islami.
The Awami League would have obtained, according to the count, three quarters of the 299 seats at stake. The rest, with the exception of nine, would have gone to independent candidates from their own ranks, to give the image of an electoral game. The BNP, predictably, has called the elections a “farce”.
The conservative Bangladesh Nationalist Party also did not contest the 2014 and 2018 elections, which it would have surely lost anyway, just like yesterday. In the last ones, he withdrew on the same day of the elections. On paper, the reason mentioned, as yesterday, is the suppression of an interim administration that organizes the elections, as was done for fifteen years, until 2008. This is the system in force in Pakistan, due to the high risk of a blowout.
However, Sheikh Hasina abolished it, because the last interim government, backed by the army, extended its powers from three months to two years, with a former senior official of the World Bank and former governor of the Central Bank at the helm.
At that time, the “banker of the poor”, Muhammad Yunus, received the Nobel Peace Prize – awarded by a committee of the Norwegian Parliament – and was approached by the military, with the approval of some Western embassies, to lead a future technocratic government, which theoretically had to overcome the quarrels and corruption typical of years of alternation between the two begums, Sheikh Hasina and Jaleda Zia. That was the golden age of the myth of microcredits – with high interest rates – as a supposed form of emancipation for the poor, instead of the deployment of public policies.
Although Yunus never took the step, his feud with Hasina dates back to then. Last week, a Dhaka court sentenced the “banker to the poor” to six months in prison for failing to comply with the social obligations of his company. Although Yunus insists that Grameen is an NGO, his telecommunications arm, GrameenPhone, owns 34% of the company of the same name, the most valuable on the Dhaka stock exchange. 55% remains in the hands of the Norwegian Telenor.
Yunus considers this to be political persecution and has appealed. Although the sentence complies with the law, it certainly seems like a selective application of labor legislation, in a country that is not known for protecting workers, although there have been improvements, after the sinking of the Rana Plaza, which a decade ago crushed more of a thousand workers – most of them women – in the worst workplace accident in history.
Fittingly, the minimum wage in Bangladesh was revised last month, after more than four years, from 8,000 taka to 12,500 taka. An increase of more than 50%, agreed with the social partners after weeks of protests, which still leaves it at a meager 105 euros per month. It is no coincidence that many of the owners of textile factories subcontracted by large European brands are also deputies.
To the credit of Hasina’s last term is the entry into operation of Dhaka’s first metro line. There are others in the pipeline, in a minor and late relief of what is already the most polluted capital in the world. The prime minister also boasts of several projects financed by China, within the framework of the Silk Roads, such as a new bridge over the Ganges – here called Padma – recently inaugurated. Russia has also lent a hand to Hasina, with the supply, this fall, of fuel for the first Bengali nuclear power plant, which is being built by Moscow’s Rosatom.
The non-alignment of Sheikh Hasina – in the wake of her father, the murdered founding father Bangabandhu – does not make Washington happy and bilateral tensions have increased in recent months. But India’s protective shield has been effective so far. Bangladesh, on the other hand, remains a very important center of Western NGO activities, unlike Narendra Modi’s own India, which has led to the closure of thousands of them.
Incidents such as the burning of trains in recent days – with several deaths – have led to thousands of arrests of Bangladesh Nationalist Party militants in recent days. One in every hundred thousand Bengalis spent election day behind bars, according to the opposition. Jaleda Zia herself has been under house arrest for much of the last few years.
The notorious corruption of both begums, the intimidation at the hands of violent elements of the opposition and the completely predictable nature of the result explain yesterday’s low turnout of just 40%, the second lowest in the history of Bangladesh (the lowest , less than 30%, was recorded the year in which it was the Awami League that boycotted the elections).
For two women to accumulate so much power is not strange in the political culture of the Indian subcontinent and much less in Bengal. On the Indian side – in Calcutta, where Mother Teresa began her work in an old pilgrim hostel of the goddess Kali – another woman governs West Bengal, Mamata Banerjee, with the added merit of not owing the “scepter” to either her father or her. to the husband.
Even the rivalry between Zia and Hasina must have a biological limit – both are over 76 years old – but in both cases their offspring are already preparing to take over.
