In election observer parlance in Bangladesh–where telling blunt truths about government shenanigans can result in long residence behind bars as the internationally renowned photojournalist Shahidul Alam found out–it is known as the “Khulna model” of elections. Realizing that the brute manipulation of election results through blatant rigging alone is not considered polite these days, the …
Category Archives: Bangladesh Elections 2018
Better late than never, New York Times
Better late than never, though I am not sure Sheikh Hasina Wazed would have won a free vote either (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/14/opinion/editorials/bangladesh-election-sheikh-hasina.html?fbclid=IwAR0WHcijPV-mdyyWil5ai0iY9MkvBgjqWQWm6llz408Ttjxk-9u5OmzXY_U) . But the NYT and it’s ilk share the blame too: time and again and again they have given space to the junta’s craven apologists (like K Anis Ahmed, a pro-regime publisher who, along with …
Only in Bong-land!
Awami League apologists like Gowher Rizvi and his ilk regularly regale us about how Bangladesh is the epitome of Westminster parliamentary democracy…..but shy away from the obvious truth that only in Bangladesh among such ‘democracies’ is the ruling party and the ‘official’ Opposition (Jatiya Party) elected as electoral coalition partners. It is the statecraft equivalent …
Bangladesh’s Schutzstaffel
Since the beginning of its reign in 2009, the Awami League party (which just won the ‘elections’ with 96 % of the seats lol) has used its in-house vigilante squad, acronymed “BCL”, to visit terror on its opponents when even it’s pet police and official paramilitary units demurred such acts on the basis of being …
Just like in Syrian elections
So, as expected, the Bangladeshi junta got about 90 % of the vote in the just concluded ‘parliamentary’ elections which its security chiefs claimed were the ‘most free’ in history. That is usually the percentage that dictators often get in their ‘elections’…the other 10 % of the vote a reflection of possibly a few very …
The myth of a democratic Bangladesh post-2008
Let us be perfectly candid: never in the history of Bangladesh has a political government presided over an election that it has lost…and this is not going to change by some magic this Christmas. Not only is this a function of the normal human greed for power when left unchecked, but also of a structure …
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