Henry Kissinger famously called Bangladesh a “basket case.” As the nation goes to the polls Thursday—the first election since then-Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina fled the country in 2024 for India amid student protests—a question mark hangs over its future. Will Bangladesh become a basket case again?
The country’s fate matters beyond its borders. With a population of 175 million, Bangladesh is the fourth-largest Muslim-majority nation, behind Indonesia, Pakistan and Nigeria. A radicalized Bangladesh would be a setback for moderate Islam worldwide.
In recent decades, the country has emerged as a bright spot in global development. It has dramatically reduced extreme poverty and become the world’s second-largest garment exporter, behind China. Instability in Bangladesh would also affect the region’s largest economy, India, which has battled both Bangladesh-based terrorist groups and insurgents in India’s sensitive northeastern states.
The country’s recent political history has been rocky. In August 2024, protesters ended Ms. Hasina’s 15-year tenure as prime minister. Rising per capita income and human-development indicators on her watch prompted talk of the “Bangladesh miracle”: A once dirt-poor land racked by natural disasters joining the ranks of middle-income countries through grit and tenacity.
But Ms. Hasina was also a classic despot. During her time in office, corruption mushroomed, civil liberties shrank, and the opposition withered under sustained pressure from the government and the then-ruling Awami League party. Many independent observers concluded that widespread rigging and opposition boycotts marred the elections held under Ms. Hasina and made the contests meaningless for many voters. The opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party boycotted elections in 2014 and 2024.
Ms. Hasina’s ouster was greeted with widespread optimism in the West. The Economist named Bangladesh “Country of the Year” in 2024, and hailed it for “taking strides towards a more liberal government.”
Ms. Hasina’s successor, the microfinance pioneer Muhammad Yunus (Bangladesh’s sole Nobel laureate), was supposed to restore normalcy to the country as interim leader. Instead, he has opened the door to mob violence and hard-line Islamism. The biggest beneficiary of his rule has been the Jamaat-e-Islami, which is the rough subcontinental equivalent of the Muslim Brotherhood. The Jamaat’s widely documented participation in massacres against independence activists during the 1971 war of liberation had long limited its political acceptability. Mr. Yunus reversed a ban on the organization and included several Jamaat sympathizers in his government.
At the same time, Mr. Yunus’s government banned the Awami League, the country’s largest political party, and jailed thousands of its supporters, several of them under harsh antiterrorism laws. It also released scores of violent Islamists from prison on bail, including some of those arrested for brutal machete attacks on atheist bloggers.
The caretaker regime has targeted secular intellectuals and artists. Those imprisoned include Shahriar Kabir, a 75-year-old journalist and filmmaker. Last year, the government arrested and briefly held the actress Nusraat Faria, seemingly for the “crime” of playing Ms. Hasina in a biopic about her late father, Mujibur Rahman, who led Bangladesh to independence from Pakistan in 1971. In December Islamist mobs burned down the offices of Udichi, an art academy, and Chhayanaut, a performing-arts school. Mobs also burned the offices of two newspapers, Prothom Alo and the Daily Star. Another group beat to death a 27-year-old Hindu garment worker accused of blasphemy, hung his body from a tree, and set it on fire.
“Freedom of expression is no longer the main issue,” said Mahfuz Anam, longtime editor of the Daily Star, after the attack on his newspaper. “Now it is about the right to stay alive.” (Ms. Hasina’s government had also persecuted Mr. Anam.)
Are such concerns warranted? To be sure, Bangladeshis don’t face promising choices. The front-runner, 60-year-old BNP chairman Tarique Rahman, represents the dynastic politics that many educated Bangladeshis abhor. His father served as president between 1977-81. Mr. Rahman’s mother, Khaleda Zia, served three times as prime minister.
Controversies have trailed Mr. Rahman for much of his life. Leaked U.S. diplomatic cables written in 2008 and 2009 said he was “widely considered one of the most corrupt individuals in Bangladesh.” During Ms. Hasina’s tenure as prime minister, courts convicted Mr. Rahman of money laundering, a 2004 grenade attack on Ms. Hasina, and embezzling funds meant for an orphanage, among other crimes. He spent 17 years in self-imposed exile in London before returning to Bangladesh in December. Unsurprisingly, Bangladeshi courts cleared Mr. Rahman of all charges after Ms. Hasina’s downfall. (They also sentenced Ms. Hasina to death in absentia.)
If you’re an optimist about Bangladesh, you will hope that Mr. Rahman is able to keep the Islamist Jamaat at bay. Should he win the election, his most pressing tasks as prime minister will include restoring law and order, gaining investor confidence and repairing ties with India, which have been in free fall since Ms. Hasina’s ouster. If those aren’t his priorities, Kissinger’s characterization of Bangladesh might have been prescient after all.