Bangladesh elections features during UN chief’s interactions with politicians stakeholders

Dhaka, Mar 15 (PTI) Former prime minister Khaleda Zia’s BNP on Saturday told visiting UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres that it wanted elections in Bangladesh in quickest possible time after minimal required poll-centric reforms amid anxious speculations over the South Asian nation’s political course.
     Guterres, who is on a four-day visit to Bangladesh, had joined a roundtable on reform proposals attended by various stakeholders, including representatives of political parties and the National Consensus Building Commission.
     The National Consensus Commission is headed by the interim government chief Muhammad Yunus. The political leaders at the meeting excluded Awami League and its allies.
     “We told him (Guterres) we want the interim government to hold the next national election quickly after completing the polls-centric reforms only,” Bangladesh Nationalists Party (BNP) secretary general Mirza Fakhrul Islam Alamgir told media emerging from the visiting UN chief’s roundtable.
     BNP’s highest policy making standing committee member Salahuddin Ahmed, who accompanied Alamgir at the meeting here, said the UN thought Bangladeshis should decide how and when the reforms and elections would take place as it is an internal matter of the country.
     After the ouster of former prime minister Sheikh Hasina’s nearly 16-year Awami League regime in a student-led mass violent protests on August 5 last year, BNP has emerged as Bangladesh’s main political party.
     Hasina left for India and most of her party leaders and colleagues in the government were arrested or are on the run at home and abroad to evade charges like committing crimes against humanity or mass murders in Bangladesh’s International Crimes Tribunal.
     Yunus, earlier on Friday, told Guterres if the political party wanted the “reform package” to be smaller, the national elections could be held in December 2025 but if they agreed to the package to expand, the polls would be staged by June next year.
     The 86-year-old Yunus took over as the head of the interim administration as the Chief Adviser at the call of Students Against Discrimination (SAD), the students' platform that spearheaded last year’s street campaign ultimately leading to ouster of Hasina's regime.
     The SAD leadership recently formed a political party called the National Citizens Party (NCP). One of its leaders Nahid Islam said the existing law and order situation is not favorable for polls in December.
     Another NCP leader Sarjis Alam recently said no one must pronounce the word “election” until Hasina was returned home and exposed to gallows for crimes against humanity.
     The NCP leaders and interim government advisers also suggested the local government polls should precede the national elections while the Bangladesh Constitution be massively rewritten or scrapped declaring the country a second republic in line with the 2024 revolution.
     Several political analysts and politicians speculated Yunus’ interim administration could linger its tenure to accomplish the reforms but feared it could expose the country to uncertainty as the extreme or far right groups started making visible their strong presence in the political landscape.
     Guterres is visiting Bangladesh to assess the plight of more than 1 million Rohingya refugees from Myanmar whose future remains uncertain over possible aid cuts soon.
     On Friday, he visited Cox's Bazar in southeastern Bangladesh to see the plight of Rohingyas in the crammed makeshift camps after being evicted from their homeland in Myanmar’s Rakhine state and said the United Nations would do all it can to help prevent food rations being cut for.
     He described humanitarian aid cuts by the United States and countries in Europe to Bangladesh, where thousands of Rohingya refugees are located, as “a crime.”

(This story has not been edited by THE WEEK and is auto-generated from PTI)