Arjuna Keshvani-Ham
On the face of it, last week’s election in Bangladesh marked a long overdue return to the country’s long-neglected democratic project. Over a year and a half after the autocratic matriarch Sheikh Hasina was overthrown by protestors, a liberal party – the Bangladesh National Party, or BNP – won a landslide in the first free election for 16 years. A hardline Islamist party was kept in check. The country voted overwhelmingly in favour of implementing the sweeping democratic reforms fielded by interim leader and Nobel Peace Prize-winner Mohammad Yunus. Reports of violence were few and far between, despite the country’s past trysts with post-election instability.
And yet, driving around Dhaka on the morning after the election, the city felt strangely eerie. The previous morning the streets had been packed with giddy voters: men in flowing white kurtas lining up in orderly queues outside polling stations, students sipping tea and chattering excitedly. Painted green trucks rigged up with loudspeakers zoomed through the crowded streets of the capital, belting catchy party jingles in a kind of gleeful sonic warfare. Now, there was a distinctly different feeling in the air. The office of the new prime minister, Tarique Rahman, was shuttered and closed; the streets outside the president’s house were bare; the BNP central office on Dhaka’s VIP Road was empty but for a few scattered journalists and lazy armed guards. Meanwhile, above the empty streets loomed Hasina’s half-built expressway, starkly noticeable, its unfinished concrete sections hanging over the city like ghosts.
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