Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina once joined her rivals in a fight to restore democracy, but her long reign in power has been marked by arrests of opposition leaders, suppression of free speech and repression of dissent.
Hasina, 76, won a fourth consecutive term and fifth overall in power by sweeping Sunday’s general election, which was boycotted by the main opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) for the second time in the last three elections.
Hasina called the main opposition party a “terrorist organization.”
Daughter of the country’s founding father, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, who led Bangladesh’s independence from Pakistan, Hasina was fortunate to have been visiting Europe when most of her family members were killed in a military coup in 1975.
Born in 1947 in southwestern Bangladesh and later in eastern Pakistan, Hasina was the eldest of five children. She graduated in Bengali literature from the University of Dhaka in 1973 and gained political experience as an intermediary between her father and her student supporters.
She returned to Bangladesh from India, where she lived in exile, in 1981 and later joined her political enemy, BNP chief and former Prime Minister Khaleda Zia, to lead a popular uprising for democracy that ousted military ruler Hossain from power. Mohammad Ershad in 1990. .
But the alliance with Zia did not last long and the bitter and deep-rooted rivalry between the two women, often called the “fighting begums”, dominated Bangladeshi politics for decades.
Hasina first served as prime minister in 1996, but lost to Zia five years later. The couple was then jailed on corruption charges in 2007, following a coup by a military-backed government.
The charges were dropped and they were free to participate in the following year’s elections. Hasina won in a landslide and has been in power ever since.
As time went by, she became increasingly autocratic and her rule was marked by mass arrests of political opponents and activists, forced disappearances and extrajudicial executions.
Meanwhile, Zia, 78, is in poor health and confined to hospital after corruption charges sentenced her to 17 years in prison in 2018. Top BNP leaders have been sent behind bars, while that Zia’s eldest son and heir apparent, Tarique Rahman, is in exile in Britain.
Human rights groups have warned of a virtual one-party government by Hasina’s Awami League.
Hasina rejected BNP demands that she resign and allow a neutral authority to conduct the elections, accusing the opposition of instigating anti-government protests that have rocked Dhaka since late October and killed at least 14 people.
Both Hasina and her rivals have accused their opponents of trying to create chaos and violence to thwart political peace and endanger democracy that has not yet taken firm root in the South Asian country of 170 million people.
Hasina said she did not need to prove to anyone the credibility of the elections. “The important thing is whether the people of Bangladesh will accept these elections.”
Asif Nazrul, a law professor at Dhaka University, told Al Jazeera that Hasina is a “shrewd” politician, but history will remember her as a leader “who stayed in power thanks to repression, not popular mandate.” .
“Never in the history of this region has a politician remained in power despite lacking the mandate of the people,” he said. “In fact, I would now call her unpopular because [Sunday’s] The participation has shown the percentage of popular support that Hasina and her party have.”
Nazrul said Hasina has “set a milestone before the world on how a leader can establish complete autocracy in a nation disguised as democracy.”
“But that’s not a legacy one should be proud of,” he said.
Mixed legacy of a 15-year government
Hasina has been praised by her supporters for leading Bangladesh through a remarkable economic boom, largely thanks to the mostly female workforce that powers its garment export industry.
Bangladesh, one of the world’s poorest countries when it gained independence from Pakistan in 1971, has grown an average of more than 6 percent each year since 2009.
Poverty has plummeted and more than 95 percent of the country’s 170 million people now have access to electricity; Per capita income will surpass India in 2021.
Hasina also received international praise for opening Bangladesh’s doors to hundreds of thousands of Rohingya refugees fleeing a 2017 military crackdown in neighboring Myanmar.
It has been praised for a decisive crackdown on hardline Muslim groups after five local extremists stormed a Dhaka cafe popular with Western expatriates and killed 22 people in 2016.
But Hasina’s intolerance toward dissent has generated resentment at home and expressions of concern from Western powers.
Five senior Muslim leaders and a senior opposition figure have been executed over the past decade following convictions for crimes against humanity committed during the country’s brutal 1971 liberation war.
Instead of healing the wounds of that conflict, the trials triggered mass protests and deadly clashes. Opponents called the trials a sham and said they were a politically motivated exercise designed to silence dissent.
The United States has imposed sanctions on an elite branch of Bangladesh’s security forces and seven of its top officers over allegations of widespread human rights abuses.
Meanwhile, the economy has also slowed sharply since the Russia-Ukraine war drove up prices for fuel and food imports, forcing Bangladesh to turn to the International Monetary Fund last year for a $4,700 bailout. millions of dollars.
Inflation was 9.5 percent in November, one of the highest in decades, and tackling it will be one of Hasina’s biggest challenges in her next term, while attention will focus on how she approaches defending democracy.
Munshi Faiz Ahmed, former director general of the Bangladesh Institute of International and Strategic Studies, a state-funded think tank on strategic and security issues, called Hasina “perhaps the most strategic political maneuver in the history of Bangladesh.”
Ahmed, also a former Bangladeshi ambassador to China, told Al Jazeera that one must take into account the conditions under which Hasina operated over the past decade: a massive population crammed into a small land with scarce mineral resources, a divided and stubborn public , and continued pressure from global and regional powers.
“She skillfully handled all these factors and brought Bangladesh to a position of prosperity and importance. As a politician, she is more competent than anyone in recent history,” she stated.
Following a tainted election, Ahmed said Hasina had managed to cope with Western pressure so far while also being able to establish good relations with China, India and Russia, all of which have backed her government.
“It is no longer a unipolar world, it is rather multipolar. So I don’t think your government will face any problems now.”
Faisal Mahmud contributed from Dhaka, Bangladesh.
