Bangladesh, a nation situated east of India and home to more than 170 million people, held general elections on January 7. The elections followed months of growing tension that saw political protests turn violent and the arrests of thousands of political opposition members.

For months leading up to the election, the main opposition party, the Bangladesh National Party (BNP), called on Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina of the Awami League (AL) to step down in favor of a caretaker government to oversee the election. The government rejected this request, and the opposition ultimately boycotted Sunday’s election. According to the Associated Press, turnout for the election was around 40%. The US Department of State issued a statement after the election condemning the violence against opposition members and concluding that the elections were not “free or fair.”

To better understand the implications of Bangladesh’s general election results, we asked SIS professor Tazreena Sajjad to answer a few questions.

Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina secured a fourth straight term in Sunday’s election, with her Awami League party winning nearly 75% of seats in parliament, according to Reuters. What do the results of this election mean for Bangladesh? Why was this election important for Bangladesh?

2024 is a busy election year for South Asia, with India, Pakistan, Maldives, Sri Lanka, and Bhutan also all heading to the polls. Bangladesh was the first in the region to hold national parliamentary elections on January 7. According to emerging results, the incumbent political party, the Awami League (AL), has won by a landslide, claiming about 75% of the country’s parliamentary seats. This continues to make AL leader Sheikh Hasina Bangladesh’s longest serving prime minister—having won five times, four of which have been consecutive victories—and the longest serving female head of a country in the world.

At one level, the fact that a former British colony born of a genocidal war that has experienced famine, devastating environmental disasters, and violent military coups, including the military rule between 1975 and 1991, has continued to hold parliamentary elections since it regained democracy in the 1990s is notable. In the last almost-three decades, particularly under the AL administration, Bangladesh has managed to pull millions of people out of poverty through extensive social and economic welfare programming, met several of the UN’s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), and is on track to achieve the current Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). It has made notable strides in gender parity, particularly in areas of child and maternal mortality, education, and politics, and established one of the largest manufacturing and textile hubs of the world, particularly in the garments industry. The construction of the Padma Bridge—the longest bridge across the River Ganges, connecting the southeast of the country to the capital—with its own funding and the country’s first and most extensive metro rail system has demonstrated its capacity for self-reliance and the potential for ongoing economic progress. In short, within a narrow period of time, Bangladesh has become a success story of globalization and neoliberalism.

In addition, since 1991, except for short periods of significant disruption by military coups and rule by a caretaker government, Bangladesh has been only ruled by women heads of state—a feat that has arguably not been achieved by any other nation in the world. For those within Bangladesh and in the diaspora who support the AL and Sheikh Hasina, the 2024 elections therefore signal a continuation of many of the policies—including economic, education, women’s empowerment, and public health—that have been adopted by the current government. Its deliverance of a national tribunal to try war criminals of the 1971 genocide, at least on the Bangladesh front, has also had wide public support, even though the trials were critically scrutinized by the international community. Furthermore, AL’s measures against the threat of violent Islamist groups have also curried favor in national and international circles.

For neighboring countries and regional powers, particularly India and China who are interested in the country’s elections, the victory signals a continuation of security, trade, and other arrangements and negotiations that the AL-led government has been pursuing in its balancing act as an important player in regional politics in south, southeast, and East Asia. The AL- government under Hasina has also continued to effectively navigate a relationship with Russia, drawing on the USSR’s history of support for Bangladesh’s independence, even within the current complex geopolitics of the Ukraine invasion. The current US Indo-Pacific strategy will also benefit from the continuation of the AL government in power. Last, but not least, the 2024 elections prevent possible disruptions in Bangladesh’s emerging role as an actor in international peace and security through several of its initiatives on health, environment, and UN peacekeeping.

At another level, the elections also signal AL’s unrestrained ability to achieve electoral victory through highly undemocratic means and at all costs, leading its critics—both national and international—to argue that rather than a democracy, Bangladesh has morphed into an electoral autocracy. The fact that, like in 2014, the Bangladesh National Party—the largest opposition party headed by former Prime Minister Khaleda Zia—again boycotted the 2024 elections because the AL government ignored calls for a neutral caretaker government during the election period means that elections, rather than being a “backbone of a democratic process,” are being instrumentalized as a means for further consolidation of AL’s position in Bangladesh politics, leaving little to no room for dissent. As such, the 2024 elections, rather than being a healthy exercise of expressing the democratic will of all Bangladeshis with different political choices, become important as the means for the continuation of AL rule—even with significantly low voter turn-out.

Of the 350 seats in Bangladesh’s parliament, 50 are reserved for women members of parliament, while the remaining 300 seats are on the ballot. How has this unique system impacted Bangladesh’s politics and government? 

The quota system in Parliament was first introduced in Bangladesh’s 1972 election when 15 seats were reserved for women, and efforts for its expansion have been ongoing. In 1997, under the AL government, the 15th Amendment expanded the quota, bringing the total number of reserved seats to 50.

This quota does not account for women parliamentarians who are elected through the general seats. There are four different ways in which the reserved seats are filled: one system at the national level, two at the subdistrict level, and one at the local level. In the early days of the implementation of the quota, questions were raised about who these women parliamentarians were going to be, to what extent political connections were contributing to their attainment of these seats, and the extent to which they would contribute to Bangladeshi politics. Today, those questions are less subject to controversy and constitute grounds for research regarding the impact of female parliamentarians’ contribution at community and national levels.

According to the World Economic Forum (WEF)’s 2023 Gender Gap report, in the Political Empowerment subindex, Bangladesh ranks seventh globally out of 155 countries. It has attained 55.2% gender parity and has outperformed all other countries in South Asia, particularly in political parity. Existing research shows that elected women representatives have contributed to the fight against social malpractices including fatwa, dowry, child marriage, domestic violence, drugs, and polygamy. Women representatives have also continued to play a critical role in environmental protection against river encroachment and erosion, disaster preparedness, tree plantation, pollution control, solid waste management, carbon emissions, water pollution, and in encouraging climate-friendly farming. Furthermore, in addition to the women representatives in the general seats and the reserve quotas, Bangladesh has a female Speaker of the House, and between 2009-2013, the country had a female foreign minister.

While there is significant women’s involvement in grassroots politics in Bangladesh, and the numbers have continued to increase, structural and social barriers such as lower rates of higher education, lack of influence and political connections, limited access to campaign finance, and religious and social prejudices continue to contribute to lower percentages of women in ministerial and parliamentary positions. This was clear in 2018 when only 22 women were elected in general elections out of 300 MPs; accounting for the 50 reserve seats, only 20.7% of parliamentarians were then women. AL’s 2008 election manifesto committed to increasing the number of women’s seats to 33%, but that has been slow to materialize. If, in the future, AL can deliver on its promise of expanding the reserve seat quota, together with increasing numbers of women in all sectors of the country challenging conventional norms and demanding greater access to formal politics, there is hope that the impact of female parliamentarians on the country’s social, political, economic, and environmental sectors will continue to grow.

In the US, migration and immigration issues receive a lot of attention from candidates and voters. Do these issues, including the continued presence of Rohingya refugees from Myanmar, affect Bangladeshi politics?

It would be disingenuous to use the framework of immigration politics in Western countries—such as the US, Canada, Australia, or broadly Europe—to understand issues of refugee acceptance and rejection in what I call the “majority world,” or what is known as the “Global South.” The US, for instance, has a very specific history of immigration—mired in settler colonialism, slavery, anti-Blackness, and restrictive legislation against arrivals of ethnic and religious groups such as Jews, Muslims, and Asians (including East and South Asians)—and shaped by the Cold War, strategic foreign policy decisions, domestic lobbying groups, national obligations like the 1980 Refugee Act, established refugee resettlement and asylum systems, the politics of “white” identity and citizenship, and an expansive and militarized industry of immigration detention and border control. These dynamics have shaped the country’s sociopolitical and cultural landscape, and they influence and are influenced by the rhetoric used by the media and politicians, especially during an election season, to make immigration a priority issue. All of this also means that the American public remains quite uninformed about the country’s immigration history and its dynamics or about the fact that the US, and indeed, the “Western” world, except for Germany since 2015 and Poland since 2021, do not host—and have never hosted—most of the world’s refugee population.

This does not mean that xenophobia, expulsions, and border violence against refugees are not realities in the majority world, or that most of the world’s refugees—who are hosted in Turkey, Pakistan, Kenya, Sudan, Iran, Ethiopia, Uganda, and others—do not struggle with limited assistance, social protections, lack of legal documents, economic opportunities, and restrictions on mobility. But the historical and contemporary acceptance of refugees in each of these contexts—and their consequences—materialize under very different circumstances and cannot be compared to the economic, social, and political dynamics of the US, Canada, Australia, or broadly Europe. This also means that while refugee acceptance, the establishment of refugee camps, and heavy international presence shape the local spaces and politics in these contexts, by and large refugees do not figure into national politics as a major election issue in the way they do in “western” election cycles such as the US.

Bangladesh today is one of the world’s largest refugee hosts after accepting approximately one million Rohingya refugees who fled the 2017 genocidal campaign by the Myanmar/Burma junta. Today, the world’s largest refugee camp is located in one of the poorest areas of Bangladesh. My ongoing research has explored how Bangladesh’s “open border” response facilitated the arrival of so many people within two months or less, and how, after seven years of the crisis, that window of acceptance has narrowed significantly, given the protracted nature of the situation and how government policies toward the Rohingya have become less hospitable. Certainly, if one analyzes the local media in the area where the Rohingya are concentrated and the rhetoric used by some local politicians, one can easily discern xenophobic tropes and significant misconceptions about the refugee population. There have also been anecdotes of local politicians using Rohingya to achieve specific political objectives, including committing election fraud.

The complex realities of security considerations in the camps along Bangladesh’s border with Myanmar and Bangladesh’s ongoing concerns about violent extremist groups also influence people’s perception of the Rohingya in the capital, and there are those who are not in favor of the continued presence of the refugee population in the country. At the same time, immigration questions, including those on large-scale internal migration, labor migration, the presence of other communities in the country, and Rohingya acceptance, have never been a mainstream election issue in Bangladesh and have certainly not been so in the 2024 elections. There are more pressing concerns for Bangladeshi voters, the majority of whom are the youth population, related to the economy, inflation, corruption, employment opportunities, public infrastructure, labor rights, voting rights, freedom of speech, safety and security from violence, and education, which dominate election cycles.

Ahead of this year’s election, both the US and the EU raised concerns about the fairness of Bangladesh’s election following allegations of vote rigging in 2014 and 2018, according to DW News. International observers have also raised concerns about democratic backsliding in the nation over the past few years. How will the results of this year’s election impact the state of democracy in Bangladesh?

Bangladesh’s elections have historically been the subject of significant tensions, with four of its past 11 elections—all of which were conducted under a neutral caretaker government—widely regarded to be “free and fair.” Its 12th election cycle, held on January 7, 2024, has been steeped in controversy, even though AL had insisted that with 28 out of 44 registered political parties participating in the national polls, close to 2000 candidates running for 300 seats in the parliament (an additional 50 being reserved for women), and new youth voters, it was a participatory democratic process. Given the AL’s significant economic achievements; its political narrative; and the charismatic leadership of Sheikh Hasina, who has successfully harnessed her assassinated father, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, founder of the AL party, political leader of the Bangladesh independence struggle, and a former PM and president, the party continues to have a strong base of support. Arguably, its support base would have, in a healthy election environment, offered the opposition significant competition in the voting booth.

However, over the years, the AL-led government has implemented increasingly restrictive measures that have narrowed the space for a healthy democracy, including: changing the constitutional provision for a caretaker government in 2013; pursuing ongoing arrests of top oppositional leaders (sometimes on “ghost” charges); conducting a violent crackdown on press freedoms; passing draconian laws such as the 2023 Cyber Security Act (a revised version of the older the Digital Security Act) to detain hundreds of people, including teenagers, academics, writers, students, and political activists for using social media to criticize the government; detaining thousands of BNP supporters; limiting the scope for an independent media; capitulating in specific ways to far-right Islamist networks; politicizing intellectual life; and in short, allowed little room for dissent. Outside of the US and the EU, many in Bangladesh’s established intellectual community and civil society groups, including those who work in human rights, journalism, press freedoms, and elections, have repeatedly raised concerns about the state of Bangladesh’s democracy and its descent into autocratic rule. In addition, Bangladesh’s youth—whose experience in the last few election cycles has been shaped by electoral violence—and those who are now coming of voting age have notably depreciated faith in the democratic process, are jaded by the corruption in the institutions of governance, and have little interest in participating in electoral processes. Such levels of disenchantment have been heightened during the lead-up to the 2024 elections, which was marked by police violence against opposition leaders, disinformation campaigns, and disturbing political rhetoric—such as PM Sheikh Hasina calling the BNP a “terrorist” group—that created a political environment of distrust, fear, and disillusionment with national politics.

The low voter turnout on January 7 in a country that has historically experienced vibrant election cycles with very high participation across all demographics is therefore a clear indication of the waning confidence of many Bangladeshis in national elections. Emerging reports of election irregularities such as election fraud, ballot stuffing, use of fake or foreign electoral observers, and conflict raise further questions about AL’s claim that the elections were truly “free and fair.”

In 2024, with the conclusion of the national elections, Bangladesh stands at a crossroads with significantly weakened democratic structures and faces the reality of being a one-party state with questions about whether and how the BNP can make a significant comeback in the near future, damaged as it has been by AL strategies and its own weaknesses with internal leadership and governance structures. Furthermore, the significant number of seats won by independent candidates is generating questions about what kind of parliamentary dynamics and coalitions will emerge in moving forward with the smaller opposition parties and what Bangladesh politics will look like in the near future.

AL’s victory, although being framed as a legitimization of the current regime, may also impact Bangladesh’s diplomatic and economic relationships with the West, particularly with the US and Europe. Such an outcome poses additional challenges for PM Sheikh Hasina, who has vowed to continue to focus on Bangladesh’s economic development as the country faces multiple challenges with rising prices of food and fuel, a drop in foreign exchange reserves, and widespread labor protests from the garments industry demanding higher wages. While Bangladesh has completed one more national election, the promise of a healthy and vibrant democracy, particularly since the 1990s, has become more elusive.