The minus-one solution - Electoral farce in Bangladesh
Of 300 elected parliamentary seats, 153 will be uncontested. Of 92m eligible voters, 48.3m will not vote. Those who do may choose between the ruling party's candidates and candidates beholden to them. In gargantuan Dhaka, voting is to take place in only two of 20 constituencies.
Mrs Zia called a mass rally for December 29th, but the police banned it, cutting transport links into Dhaka and arresting more than 1,000 opposition activists. On the designated day, at the supposed rally site in front of the BNP's party headquarters, journalists were left to film other journalists.
Elsewhere in the city, lawyers siding with the BNP staged a protest inside the main gate of the Supreme Court, where police tried to disperse them with water cannon and sound grenades. Stick-wielding AL goons stormed the gate to beat the lawyers and chase them away, as the police stood by and watched. The men with sticks took to the streets vowing to take on their counterparts from the BNP, but there were none to be found. In all, two people were killed in Dhaka during the day's clashes. But there has been no fresh wave of bloodletting since December 26th, when 50,000 troops were deployed to provide extra security.
A few months back the BNP had the moral high ground. Sheikh Hasina's Awami League (AL) had overreached in claiming for itself the privilege of overseeing the polls. In 2011 the AL had junked a constitutional mechanism that was intended to rescue the country's frail democracy from its viciously confrontational two-party politics: an unelected caretaker administration to oversee elections. The caretaker-arrangement had been in place since 1996, after the BNP won 300 of 300 seats, in an election that the AL boycotted. Circumventing the caretaker system for the 2014 vote looks plainly self-serving on the part of the AL. A recent opinion poll shows nearly four out of five Bangladeshis think it a bad idea.
But now the BNP is in disarray and has no better option than to wait out Sheikh Hasina and the AL, hoping that they bring about their own downfall. In the past few months the BNP stepped up its series of crippling strikes, making one-day work weeks the norm. Its thugs, along with hooligans from the Jamaat-e-Islami, the country's biggest Islamic party, started killing civilians. This helped the nominally secular AL government make the argument that only it can save Bangladesh. A new manifesto, read out by the prime minister to an assembly of party loyalists and diplomats from Russia, Sri Lanka and Singapore on December 28th, charges that the BNP turned the country into a "valley of death" when it ruled in coalition with the Jamaat between 2001 and 2006. It suggests that since then the BNP has "taken up the role of the Jamaat"—the party that opposed Bangladesh's independence in 1971, and whose current leadership looks to be headed for the gallows by the time a trial for war crimes is concluded. Reverberations from that trial are mainly to blame for the 500 Bangladeshis who were killed in political violence in 2013, the worst annual toll since independence.
