Bangladesh heads to polls amid clashes, at least 17 killed in election day violence

Voting was underway Sunday in parliamentary elections in Bangladesh that are seen as a referendum on what critics call Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s increasingly authoritarian rule, amid complaints from both ruling party and opposition activists of attacks on supporters and candidates.

Hasina’s main rival is former Prime Minister Khaleda Zia, the leader of the opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party, who a court deemed ineligible to run for office because she is in prison for corruption.

Zia and Hasina, who is seeking a third consecutive term, have been in and out of power — and prison — for decades.

In Zia’s absence, opposition parties have formed a coalition led by Kamal Hossain, an 82-year-old Oxford-educated lawyer and former member of Hasina’s Awami League party.

By the time polls opened at 8 a.m., about 80 people had lined up to vote at a polling station in the Uttara Model Town section of Dhaka, Bangladesh’s capital. Polling workers appointed by candidates showed Election Commission officials empty ballot boxes before the first paper ballot was cast. Awami League supporters had set up help desks on the street outside the polling station for voters to find their registration serial numbers.

Spokesman Sohel Rana said more than 20 people were injured.

Police said they acted “in self-defense” in the southern town of Bashkhali, when they opened fire on opposition supporters who attempted to storm a polling booth, killing one. In a separate incident another man was shot by police after he tried to steal a ballot box.

The Associated Press received more than 50 calls from people across the country who identified themselves as opposition supporters complaining of intimidation and threats, and being forced to vote in front of ruling party men inside polling booths.

“Some stray incidents have happened. We have asked our officials to deal with them,” K.M. Nurul Huda, Bangladesh’s chief election commissioner, said as he cast his vote in Dhaka.

The election campaign was marred by the arrests and jailing of what the opposition says are thousands of Hasina opponents, including six candidates for Parliament. At least a dozen people were killed in campaign-related clashes.

Meanwhile, a leading Bangladeshi news channel has been taken off the air, hours before voting began, according to the TV station’s chief.

“Cable operators took Jamuna TV off air without giving us any explanation,” Fahim Ahmed, the station’s chief news editor, told AFP.

“We are still transmitting. But no one in Bangladesh can see our channel due to the blackout,” he said. The channel’s output can still be seen online.

The broadcaster, which is owned by Jamuna Group — one of Bangladesh’s biggest conglomerates, which also runs a newspaper — is known for its independent coverage.

A top cable operator in Dhaka said Jamuna broadcasts stopped for technical rather than political reasons.

“We are not getting their signal,” said S.M Ali Chanchal, owner of cable operator UCS. Jamuna rejected the explanation and insisted their signals were being broadcast as normal.

Both sides are hoping to avoid a repeat of 2014, when Zia and the Bangladesh Nationalist Party boycotted elections and voter turnout in the South Asian nation of 160 million people was only 22 percent. More than half of the 300 parliamentary seats were uncontested. The Awami League’s landslide victory was met by violence that left at least 22 people dead.

While rights groups have sounded the alarms about the erosion of Bangladesh’s democracy, Hasina has promoted a different narrative, highlighting an ambitious economic agenda that has propelled Bangladesh past larger neighbors Pakistan and India by some development measures.

Voters “will give us another opportunity to serve them so that we can maintain our upward trend of development, and take Bangladesh forward as a developing country,” Hasina said after casting her ballot along with her daughter and sister in Dhaka.

Hasina’s son Sajeeb Wazed told Reuters the Western media was unfair in its portrayal of his mother and that she considers being called authoritarian by the Western media a “badge of honor.”

“You know what my mother told me this morning?’ Branded authoritarian by the Western media now is a badge of honor'” Wazed, who lives in Washington D.C. and runs an IT business in the United States, said in the prime minister’s official residence in Dhaka.

He later clarified on Facebook that his mother compared herself to Mahathir Mohamad of Malaysia and Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore, who he said were both called authoritarian by Western media when they were leading their nations to development, “yet are considered heroes now.”

Walking with a cane, Hossain cast his vote near his home in Dhaka, saying that he was receiving complaints about vote-tampering and intimidation from various parts of the country.

Voting is expected to conclude at 4 p.m. across more than 40,000 polling stations. Counting will begin soon after the voting ends.

Hasina has expressed great confidence in the outcome, already inviting foreign journalists and election observers to her official residence on Monday, by which time the results are expected to be known.

About 600,000 security officials, including army and paramilitary forces, have been deployed across the country in a bid to contain violence in Bangladesh’s 11th general election. Bangladesh’s telecommunications regulator shut down mobile internet services nationwide to prevent possible protests from organizing.

The normally traffic-clogged streets of the capital were largely empty because of a ban on vehicles for everyone except election observers and journalists. Many residents of Dhaka had left days earlier to vote in their hometowns.

At one polling station, Istiaq Ahmed, a doctor in Dhaka, said it was critical that people “select the right government to maintain the development and enrich our country further.”

“I think the country has already developed much and it will be developed more,” she said in Bengali. “That’s why I’m here casting my vote.”

Source: Daily Sabah