DHAKA – An alliance headed by Bangladesh’s former prime minister Sheikh Hasina has won a parliamentary majority in the country’s first polls in seven years, unofficial results showed, but a rival party complained of irregularities.
Unofficial results showed Ms Hasina’s “Grand Alliance” had won 175 out of 204 seats counted so far in the 300-seat parliament, with 21 going to a group led by Begum Khaleda Zia, another former prime minister and rival for power, and eight seats to candidates outside the two alliances.
Yesterday’s parliamentary vote returned Bangladesh, a country of more than 140 million people, to democracy after two years of emergency rule imposed by an army-backed government.
Official results will not be available until later.
Analysts said it was unclear if the losers would accept the results or take their supporters on to the streets to protest. Confrontations, strikes and street violence have been frequent in past Bangladesh politics.
A leader of Ms Khaleda’s Bangladesh Nationalist Party said its supporters were kept from voting in various parts of the country, and it planned to file a complaint.
“We have reports that BNP supporters were barred from coming to polls and also were driven away from polling stations in many places,” BNP leader Rizvi Ahmed said in a news briefing broadcast on local television.
Ms Khaleda herself had said earlier yesterday: “If the election is free and fair, Inshallah [God willing] we will win and form the next government.”
A spokesman for Ms Hasina’s Awami League, meanwhile, told her supporters to wait to celebrate. “Our leader Sheikh Hasina has appealed to her party and supporters not to stage victory marches or engage in any kind of celebration until the final results are announced by the election commission,” her spokesman, Abul Kalam Azad, said in a TV broadcast.
The election had been generally peaceful, with independent monitors and many voters saying they had seen few glitches. Previous polls were marred by violence and accusations of vote-rigging.
“The election ended in a very peaceful environment and I never saw such a congenial atmosphere. The turnout was tremendous,” Taleya Rehman, executive director of monitoring group Democracy Watch, said.
A military-backed interim government took control of Bangladesh in January 2007 amidst widespread political violence, and cancelled elections due that month.
Whoever wins the election will have to tackle the endemic corruption, widespread poverty and chronic political and social unrest that prompted the military to intervene.
Rivals Ms Hasina and Ms Khaleda alternated in power for 15 years up to 2006. Critics say they failed to resolve Bangladesh’s problems partly because of protests, strikes and street violence linked to their parties when out of office.
Bangladesh’s neighbours worry that an increasingly violent Islamist militant minority in an otherwise moderate nation could provide support and shelter for radicals in their own countries.
The leading election candidates pledged to crack down on violent extremists and made populist promises to contain prices and promote growth in a country where 45 per cent of the population lives below the poverty line.
Many Bangladesh parties, including the Awami League and BNP, tend to be driven by personalities rather than ideology.
The government deployed 50,000 troops, 75,000 police and 6,000 members of its elite Rapid Action Battalion along with other auxiliary forces for election security.
About 200,000 local and 2,000 foreign monitors were at the election centres to check procedures.
“There have been [reports of] some minor problems, but those were mainly for technical reasons, not intentional or for bias,” Damaso Magpaul, chief of the Asian Network for Free Elections, said. – (Reuters)