DHAKA: Bangladesh holds a general election on Sunday, with Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina set to win a fourth straight term and the fifth overall for her Awami League-led alliance, despite an economy that required an international bailout last year.

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The main opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party of the ailing former Prime Minister Khaleda Zia is boycotting the poll after Hasina denied its demand to resign and let a caretaker government run the election.

On the other hand, violence erupted on the eve of the election, with a passenger train fire, which officials called arson, killing at least four people and several polling booths set ablaze around the country.

Nearly 800,000 police, paramilitary and police auxiliaries will guard the polls on election day. Officials of the army, navy and air force have also been deployed.

Main opposition party boycotts voting

Polling booths were earlier set ablaze on the eve of elections. Arsonists also attacked polling booths in the northeastern districts of Moulavibazar and Habiganj, police said, with similar incidents reported elsewhere in the past two days.

Police arrested seven opposition party members blamed for an alleged pre-election arson attack on a packed commuter train that killed four people and injured another eight.

Police said Nabiullah Nabi, a senior leader of opposition BNP in Dhaka, and six other party activists were arrested in the capital. “Nabi funded and masterminded the att­a­ck,” Dhaka police spok­es­­man Faruk Hossain said.

Friday night’s blaze engulfed the intercity Benapole Express in central Dhaka, with hundreds scrambling to pull passengers from burning carriages. It was the latest in a series of fires to hit railway services since late last year, blamed by police on “deadly acts of sabotage” by the opposition BNP, ahead of Sunday’s national election.

The BNP and dozens of other opposition parties are boycotting Sunday’s vote, which they say is a “sham” designed to entrench the rule of longtime Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina.

However, nearly 2,000 candidates overall are vying for the 300 directly elected parliament seats, with a record high 5.1pc women candidates.

There are 436 independent candidates in the race, the most since 2001, while first-time voters number about 15 million. The BNP says the Awami League has propped up “dummy” candidates to try to make the election look credible, a claim the ruling party denies.

Hasina has been credited with turning around the $416-billion economy and its massive garments industry, while also winning international praise for sheltering nearly a million Rohingya Muslims fleeing persecution in neighbouring Myanmar.

But in recent months, the economy, once among the world’s fastest-growing, was rocked by violent protests after a jump in the cost of living, as Bangladesh struggles to pay for costly energy imports amid depleting dollar reserves and a domestic currency.

The International Monetary Fund cleared the first review of Bangladesh’s $4.7 billion bailout in December, providing immediate access to $468.3 million and made $221.5 million available for its climate change agenda.

Published in Dawn, January 7th, 2024