“Transparently fraudulent”

“To give due credit for originality, a slow cooking approach to transforming a budding democracy into an authoritarian regime without officially becoming a dictatorship is perhaps an invention of Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe. The robust two-party parliamentary democracy with an independent judiciary that Zimbabwe started with in 1979 was slowly, steadily, and methodically transformed into a one-party, one-man banana republic under the careful tutelage of Mugabe who purged the courts, locked up opponents, took over civil society organizations, and used vigilante groups like the “War Veterans” to terrorize dissenters, extra-judicially. Even when he agreed to hold ‘free elections’, the supporters and potential voters of the pro-democracy Opposition movement MDC were hounded, intimidated, raped, and killed by the thousands in a reign of terror that shook even Mugabe’s patrons in the South African government. The Awami League in Bangladesh, simply adapted and perfected this political terror into an art form. Thus ended what the Economist–the white-shoe London magazine hardly given to hyperbole–-called the 2018 electoral exercise in Bangladesh, a ‘transparently fraudulent’ election. While the Western democracies were figuring out how to find nuanced responses to the increasing authoritarianism in Bangladesh, the country had transitioned from authoritarian to dictatorial in the space of weeks. A conceptual model of election manipulation had been tested, perfected, and found ready to be deployed en masse wherever dictators would need the veneer of ballot box legitimacy in the 21st century.” (From the article “Bangladesh’s robbed elections..” Winter 2018-19 Issue of the South Asia Journal.)