On 7 January, Bangladesh’s prime minister, Sheikh Hasina, is set to claim re-election in what some observers have called “staged polling”, the opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) has termed a “dummy election” and   The Economist  has described as a “farce”. Desperate to avoid a genuine democratic exercise, Hasina’s government has preemptively removed its only real challenger from the field. More than twenty thousand BNP activists are behind bars, as are key BNP leaders, and the opposition party has decided to boycott the election rather than contest an unfair vote. The farce is best explained with the facts. For the 300 directly elected seats in Bangladesh’s parliament, the ruling Awami League has official nominees in 263 constituencies. In addition, it also has 269 party members standing as “independent” candidates, meaning there are two or sometimes even more Awami League candidates in many places – and that’s not counting the candidates of other parties allied to ...

  Events leading to the schedule announcement of our 12th parliamentary election appear to have eerily similar to those before the  previous two much discredited and disputed elections. This time apart from serious disagreements among the most potent challengers centering  the election management process, the Election Commission’s consistently inconsistent statements and decisions show it lacks the courage and capacity to act decisively and independently. Otherwise, chief election commissioner Kazi Habibul Awal’s address to the nation would not have been full of contradictions.  CEC Awal admitted that “the EC has been noticing differences among the political leadership regarding the polls, particularly on the issue of the institutional system of elections,” and that “consensus and solutions are needed,’ but announced the voting schedule without any resolution of the disputes. He then expects the nation to trust him when he said,  “We believe the upcoming polls w...