Mostafa Kamal runs a car rental service in Dhaka but has another identity — he is the secretary of a unit of the Awami Motor Drivers League, a union that he claims was founded by Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina. He gave a detailed account of how the recent general election was “manipulated”. Having been entrusted with “gate protection” at a polling station, Mr. Kamal said he “allowed only Awami League (AL) voters to enter polling centers” so that people who intended to vote for the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) “went back after standing for hours in the queue”. “Not sure if this kind of election is entirely right,” he said.
Following the landslide victory of her party, Ms. Hasina’s challenge will now be to sell the results to her grass-root comrades, who are perhaps a little demoralised after defeating the Opposition in an ‘Opposition-less election’. Her next challenge will be to continue providing political stability and ensuring uninterrupted growth. The task is incredibly difficult, given the challenges.
U.S. presence
A top government official told The Hindu that the government is “unsure of the moves of the United States in the Bay of Bengal”. Pointing at St. Martin’s, an island in extreme southeast of the country, on a map, the official said that the U.S. wants “for sometime its fleet [to be positioned] there with logistical support from Bangladesh”. “It is within the submarine-launched ballistic missile range of both New Delhi and Beijing. It is dangerous for entire Asia and Bangladesh to have it [the U.S. fleet] at that pivotal point,” the official said.
Another challenge for Ms. Hasina is to balance the two friends — China and India. In an interaction with journalists in Dhaka before the December 30 election, Ms. Hasina said that the country is looking forward to have both corridors — the BBIN [Bangladesh-Bhutan-India-Nepal initiative] and the BCIM [Bhutan-China-India-Myanmar Forum for Regional Cooperation] — in place. This may not be liked by New Delhi, which has no interest in the BCIM. The 2017 BCIM meeting in Kolkata was a damp squib. China, on the other hand, has stressed on the the forum, thus making the balancing tricky for Bangladesh.
However, the most formidable internal challenge for Ms. Hasina will be to manage the very strong anti-Awami League and anti-India sentiment among a section of the religiously oriented Bangladeshis. Fierce clashes between two factions of Tablighi Jamaat, an apolitical Sunni missionary movement, a month before the election, indicated deep polarisation. A section of the organisation’s Bangladesh chapter refused to have Maulana Muhammad Saad Al-Kandhalvi, an Indian Deobandi preacher, conduct the main prayer.
“The demand was to let the chief of Raiwind Markaz of Lahore conduct the monazat [the prayer]. The followers [of Raiwind] argued that Maulana Saad from Delhi’s Nizamuddin Markaz is from a Hindu country. It indicates that other countries still influence Bangladesh’s religious networks,” said a senior official of Bangladesh’s internal security.
The Raiwind Markaz group is also closely aligned with Hifazat-e-Islam, a radical Islamic outfit that controls part of non-mainstream education in Bangladesh. Interestingly, Hifazat backed the AL in the election. Top AL official Gowher Rizvi said the government was “working with Hifazat to broaden the curriculum so that they are not snared into radical and extremist ideologies”.
The Awami League’s manifesto claimed that “small shocks cannot stop the progress of Bangladesh”; only time will indicate if the imminent shocks are small or big.
Suvojit Bagchi works for The Hindu and was recently in Dhaka, Bangladesh
