FOR the past month Bangladesh, a country of nearly 160m people, has (yet again) been paralysed. The opposition leader, Khaleda Zia, has been confined to a party office in the capital, Dhaka. Her Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) has been staging a nationwide blockade of roads, railways and waterways. The trigger for the unrest was a banned protest to mark the anniversary on January 5th of last year’s election, in which the incumbent Awami League, led by the prime minister, Sheikh Hasina, was re-elected easily thanks to an opposition boycott. Nearly 50 people have been killed and more than 10,000 opposition activists arrested. BNP leaders are mostly in jail, in exile or in hiding, and face criminal charges that will probably bar them from running in the next election. This week events a...
Several diplomats from various countries including the US, Australia and others, as well as UN representatives in Dhaka, have termed the ongoing violence as contradictory to democracy. They have asked the government what solution there was to emerge from this violent situation.
The diplomats expressed their concern over the violence, during a briefing by the foreign minister AH Mahmud Ali at the state guest house, Padma, yesterday. The foreign minister said that the government was taking all measures to ensure peace.
Today, one year following national elections in Bangladesh, at least four people died in violence following political protests in Dhaka and other cities across the country. The proximate reason: the opposition Bangladesh National Party (BNP) took out protests, which the ruling Awami League government had banned, to mark a “Murder of Democracy Day.” Despite the ban on protests, press reports indicate that members of the Awami League “outnumbered” the opposition on the streets of Dhaka.
A brief recap of the past year’s events provides the bac...
The prevailing ‘unusual’ political situation is hurting country’s economy and affecting the quality of governance, politicians, economists and experts said Saturday.
They called upon the major political parties to engage in an immediate dialogue for, what they said, restoring democracy for the sake of clearing the way for economic growth.
Their observations came at the launch of a research report styled ‘The State of Governance in Bangladesh 2013: Democracy and Party Politics’ at the Brac Centre Inn in the capital.
The BRAC Instit...
Bangladesh has ranked the highest in terms of people’s political participation among 33 developing and emerging nations, says a global survey.
The country, however, has a very low political efficacy with over two-thirds of the respondents saying government officials do not care about what the people think, it says.
The survey, titled “Spring 2014 Global Attitudes Survey” by the US-based Pew Research Centre, shows 65 percent Bangladeshis have higher level of involvement in political affairs and 29 percent medium level, though the Asia region ranks the lowest in this field with an overall median of 24 percent. As regions, the Middle East and Africa have relatively high rates of participation in political affairs.
Bangladesh has the image of a developmental welfare state, as reflected in the country's Constitution and in numerous other official documents, but the country has to contend with a serious problem of dysfunctional governance, former caretaker government adviser Prof Wahiduddin Mahmud has said.
The country is rated very poorly according to most global indicators of political and economic governance, said the economist while addressing a session of the international conference on 'Political Economy, Accountability and Governance' at a local hotel on Thursday.
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