The Politics of Belligerence Are Back in Bangladesh
Banning the nation’s oldest party is not the step toward stable democracy investors were hoping for.
Banning the Awami League could set Bangladesh on the road to disaster.
Photographer: Fabeha Monir/BloombergWhen Bangladesh’s Nobel Prize-winning economist Muhammad Yunus was called back home to head its government as “chief adviser,” there were hopes that the country would finally break out of the see-sawing despotism it has endured since independence in 1971. Many of those serving in his new government were young and apparently idealistic students who had emerged from the movement that toppled the long-serving prime minister Sheikh Hasina. Perhaps a vibrant democracy would re-emerge in Bangladesh once the dust settled?
Those hopes did not survive a year. Last week, the cabinet banned Hasina’s party, the Awami League, under the country’s anti-terrorism laws. This is a depressing echo of how Hasina used to treat the opposition, though she never went as far as to shut down her main rivals in the Bangladesh Nationalist Party.