Benjamin Parkin :
In 1975, 27-year-old Sheikh Hasina said goodbye to relatives seeing her off ahead of a trip to Europe from Dhaka. Among them were her three brothers, mother and father, the then president Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, who had helped secure independence from Pakistan four years earlier. It was the last time she’d see them alive. Two weeks later, mutinous army officers murdered them in a massacre of nearly 20 of her relatives, plunging Bangladesh into a military dictatorship and leaving Sheikh Hasina stranded overseas with her sister Sheikh Rehana. “We didn’t know what really happened,” she later said. “We didn’t know that all the family members were assassinated . . . My younger brother was only 10 years old. They didn’t spare him.” This traumatic event would define Sheikh Hasina’s trajectory over the next five decades and that of Bangladesh itself.
Now the 76-year-old prime minister is on the brink of winning a fifth term in Sunday’s elections. The massacre instilled in her a messianic zeal that has made her the world’s longest currently-serving female leader and Bangladesh’s most consequential premier. She has helped the country punch above its weight, overseeing rapid development and the growth of its garments sector while balancing China and India to extract maximum investment and taking on the US, its largest clothing buyer. But the incident also fomented bitterness and paranoia that has poisoned Bangladesh’s politics and, critics say, left her determined to retain power at all costs.
The result on Sunday is all but guaranteed after the opposition claimed that authorities rounded up as many as 20,000 members of the rival Bangladesh Nationalist party. The BNP is now boycotting the vote altogether, leaving little meaningful resistance to her Awami League party. She has denounced calls by Washington to ensure the elections are fair as an attempt at regime change. It is now an open question whether Bangladesh’s democracy can survive another term of Sheikh Hasina. Popular dissatisfaction is mounting as the economy slows, exposing inequality and corruption.
Some observers fear more tumult and repression. “She’s decisive, courageous and single-minded,” says a person who has long known her. “[But] she’s like Louis XIV. ‘L’Etat, c’est moi. I am Bangladesh.’” Sheikh Hasina was born in 1947 in what was then East Bengal, part of the new Muslim state of Pakistan. Her father Sheikh Mujib led a movement for the Bengali territory’s independence from its repressive, Urdu-speaking rulers, culminating in a war and the creation of Bangladesh in 1971. After her family’s murder, Sheikh Hasina returned from exile in 1981 to “fulfil my father’s dream”, as she told Time.
She campaigned against the country’s dictators and later the BNP, a party founded by a military ruler who she blamed for her father’s assassination. She was prime minister from 1996 to 2001, before assuming power continuously from 2009. She has survived multiple assassination attempts, including a 2004 grenade attack she blamed on the BNP in which supporters formed a human cocoon to protect her from the blasts. This near-miss cemented her belief that “maybe Allah has given me some job to do”, she said. It also, according to the person who knew her, “basically closes the door for a democratic transition in Bangladesh’s politics. It makes her think that, ‘If I’m ever in power, I’ll make sure that I’m not out of power because . . . they’re going to kill me.’” In office, she set about transforming Bangladesh, infamously dismissed by Henry Kissinger as a “basket case”.
The garments export sector grew into the world’s second largest, while she turbocharged infrastructure and oversaw impressive development gains. “It is Sheikh Hasina who gave some hope of prosperity to the people of Bangladesh,” AK Abdul Momen, her foreign minister, told the FT. “She doesn’t give a damn if she’s killed to pursue her policies. So she’s never afraid.” Yet reconciliation was never on the agenda. Sheikh Hasina repeatedly invokes her family’s massacre in interviews and speeches, and even presents visitors with photos of disfigured victims of alleged BNP attacks. She has built a personality cult around her father, whose image is ubiquitous across the country. “Loyalty matters,” says another person who knows her.
“You’re with her, or you’re never with her.” Hatred of her rivals has morphed into a broader assault on democracy. Her re-election in 2018 drew allegations of ballot-stuffing, after the Awami League won an improbably large majority. The state has wielded power to fearsome effect, with a US-sanctioned paramilitary battalion accused of extrajudicial killings. Muhammad Yunus, a Nobel Peace Prize-winning microfinance pioneer, was this week sentenced to six months imprisonment in a case that critics dismiss as a personal vendetta. Even if the outcome of Sunday’s vote appears to be preordained, observers argue another five years of Sheikh Hasina and the Awami League is not.
They point to painful inflation, falling foreign reserves and rising defaults, economic pressures which they say will test a population losing patience with her increasingly autocratic rule. “She has decided the path that she wants to go,” says Ali Riaz, a political scientist at Illinois State University. “Her supporters say it’s development, it’s the wellbeing of the people. My assessment is that she wants to make sure that her party remains in power in perpetuity.”
Financial Times
