The secular Awami League-led alliance headed by Sheikh Hasina, former prime minister, clinched a victory in the Bangladesh elections held December 29, winning 258 seats of the 300 seats. She was sworn in as prime minister on January 6. The pro-Islamic coalition of the Bangladesh National Party and Jama’at-e Islami that ruled the country from 2001 to 2006 had to be content with 31 seats in the parliament.
Saha described the result from the “freest and fairest” election in Bangladesh history as a “true reflection of the will of the people.” He cautioned, however, that the secularists had a “dangerous victory” as Islamic fundamentalist groups, who might feel humiliated, could resort to violence in order to whip up support.
The election was originally to be held in late 2006 but was postponed due to political violence over the formation of an interim government that left more than 25 people dead and 300 injured. This led to two years under a state of emergency enforced by a caretaker government backed by the military. During that period authorities undertook extensive reform of the election process including issuance of voter identity cards to prevent fraud.
“We are really happy with the outcome of the elections,” Bishop Theotonius Gomes, secretary general of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of Bangladesh, told ENI. He said the verdict “clearly shows that for majority of our people, the nation comes before anything else.” Gomes noted that a Roman Catholic had been elected to the parliament.
Following the 2001 victory of the pro-Islamic BNP alliance, minorities in Bangladesh were harassed, especially Hindus and Christians, in areas where Muslim extremist candidates were defeated. Christians are a tiny minority in Bangladesh accounting for 0.3 percent of its estimated 153 million people, nearly 90 percent of whom are Muslim. Hindus, Buddhists, and rural people known as tribals account for most of the rest of the population.
Gomes also congratulated the interim government for the “unprecedented peaceful” elections with hardly any violence reported during a campaign in which the state of emergency had been lifted only two weeks previously. In the 2001 election, independent monitors had recorded 261 political killings and more than 2,150 injured in clashes during campaigning.
Surrounded by Indian territory, Bangladesh became an independent nation in 1971 after a war for independence from Pakistan, to which the territory had belonged after the 1947 partition of the subcontinent into Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan.
