Bangladesh’s main opposition party has started Saturday a 48-hour general strike as the South Asian nation is gearing up to hold its next general election.
The Election Commission said voting would start Sunday and last for eight hours across the country in over 42,000 ballot stations to receive the more than 119 million registered voters. Ballot boxes, among other election supplies, have been sent over in preparation for the vote, the commission said.
The main opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party, led by former premier Khaleda Zia, and other opposition groups are boycotting the election, saying they can't guarantee its fairness under Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina who is seeking to return to power for a fourth consecutive term.
The BNP has vowed to disrupt the election, calling for strikes and urging people to join the boycott. On Saturday morning, a small group of party supporters marched across Shahbagh neighborhood in the capital, Dhaka, calling on people to join the strike.
Ruhul Kabir Rizvi, a BNP joint secretary general, repeated his party's demand for Hasina to resign at the march, calling the election “skewed.”
“The government is again playing with fire. The government has resorted to its old tactics of holding a one-sided election,” he said.
Campaigning in the nation of 169 million people has been marred with violence, with at least 15 people killed since October.
On Friday, an apparent arson fire on a train in the capital, Dhaka, killed four people, heightening the apprehension ahead of the vote.
While authorities have not immediately accused any groups or political parties of being behind the arson, a police official said the people who wanted to disrupt the election were “definitely” behind it.
The BNP’s Rizvi blamed the government
Foreign Minister A.K. Abdul Momen said in a statement Saturday that the timing of the attack, just a day before the election, was to hinder the democratic process. "This reprehensible incident, undoubtedly orchestrated by those with malicious intent, strikes at the very heart of our democratic values,” he said.
Local media reported arsons targeting at least five polling stations outside Dhaka since Friday, with police calling them acts of sabotage.
The Election Commission has asked authorities to increase security around polling stations.
Faruk Hossain, a spokesman of the Dhaka Metropolitan Police, told The Associated Press over the phone they have reinforced security measures across Dhaka and that railway transportation was back to normal across the country following Friday’s attack. “Our cyber security and counter-terrorism wings are also working round-the-clock,” he said.
Sunday’s election comes amid an increasingly polarized political culture led by two powerful women, Hasina and Zia.
Zia, head of the BNP, is ailing and currently under house arrest. Her party says the charges were politically motivated, an allegation the government denied.
Tensions spiked since October when a massive BNP anti-government rally in Dhaka turned violent, demanding Hasina's resignation and a caretaker government to oversee the election. Hasina's administration said there was no constitutional provision to allow such a move.
Critics have accused Hasina of systemically suffocating the opposition by implementing repressive security measures. Zia’s party claimed that more than 20,000 opposition supporters have been arrested, but the government said those figures were inflated and denied arrests were made due to political leanings. The country's attorney general put the figures between 2,000-3,000 while the country’s law minister said the numbers were about 10,000.
Sunday has been declared a public holiday to allow voters to head to the ballot stations.
Bangladesh is a parliamentary democracy but has a history of military coups and assassinations.
