The Economist: Bangladesh’s prime minister, Sheikh Hasina, is the world’s longest-serving female head of government, and one of the most significant of either sex. During two decades in office she has presided over momentous poverty alleviation in her country of 170m, fueled by average annual gdp growth of 7% for much of that time.
The 75-year-old has led her party, the Awami League, to victory in three consecutive polls, and four in all—one more than Indira Gandhi or Margaret Thatcher managed. With an election due early next year, which she is expected to win, The Economist asked her, in an interview in her northern Virginia hotel suite, what ambitions she had left.
“I want to make this country a hunger-free, poverty-free developed country,” she says—then abruptly switches tack. “Can you imagine that they killed my father?” she asks, referring to the grim history that launched and still shadows her career.
Her father, Bangladesh’s first president, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, was assassinated in an army coup in 1975, four years after the country’s bloody split from Pakistan. Seventeen of his close relatives—almost all except Sheikh Hasina, in Europe at the time—were murdered too.They killed my brother, my mother, another brother—only 10 years old! My two sisters-in-law, my only uncle, a disabled person,” says the prime minister, her eyes glittering with tears. Her advisers had primed this interviewer to ask about that long-ago tragedy. He had not, but Sheikh Hasina raises it anyway, as she often does. This illustrates the great sense of loss and destiny she exudes—and on which she has built an imposing personality cult. A huge portrait of Sheikh Mujib, schlepped around the world by her 100-man retinue, leans by her chair. She nods towards it, as if bringing the murdered man into the conversation.
Before she was re-elected in 2008, power switched repeatedly between the League and the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (bnp), run by another charismatic dynast, Khaleda Zia. Amid the political tumult, the country’s institutions, including the media, police and courts, had a degree of independence. Now Mrs Zia is under on-off house arrest, her party’s activists are hounded, the media is cowed and the police and courts are suborned to Sheikh Hasina’s party. Not coincidentally, they are two of the country’s most corrupt bodies. The coming election will not offer the bnp a way back. Although Sheikh Hasina claims to be committed to a free vote, she says that only a “real political party” should be permitted to compete—and that her opponents do not fit the criteria. She accuses the bnp, formed under army rule half a century ago, of being “constituted by a military ruler illegally”. She alleges that the country’s biggest Islamist party, a former ally of Pakistan, is “almost all war criminals”. “Our point is that there is no such party [apart from the League] who can really contest the election.”
In some ways, Bangladesh has probably benefited from her iron grip. It has not obviously boosted the growth rate, which hit a high gear before her extended spell in office and is largely a product of pre-existing factors: such as the country’s garment industry and services provided by its elite ngos. Yet she has wrought policies, including infrastructure investment, that have helped maintain the boom, which a weaker government might not have sustained. But authoritarianism has diminishing returns. Overly reliant on garments, Bangladesh needs to develop new exports, a reality its government is hardly grappling with. (Sheikh Hasina says it is looking to develop handicrafts and food processing—an insufficient solution.) Bangladeshis, a disputatious people, are bridling at her strictures. Several hundred were protesting rowdily outside the hotel. Rights groups say the election could be violent.
News Source: The Economist