Bangladesh ruling party wins election marred by violence, boycott

Bangladeshis awoke Monday to news that the country's ruling Awami League won a violence-plagued parliamentary election whose outcome was never in doubt after a boycott by the main opposition party, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP).

At least 21 people were killed in separate incidents as voters took to the polls on Sunday, according to local media reports, and voting was halted at about 400 polling stations. Police said more than 200 polling stations were set on fire or ransacked by mobs in a bid by opposition activists to disrupt the contest, which they believed to be rigged. Police said they were forced to fire on opposition activists in six incidents. 

In an address to media at her house in Dhaka on Monday, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina denied there was a crisis in the country and said that people had voted in line with democracy and the constitution.

The boycott by the main opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party should "not mean there will be a question of legitimacy", she said. "People participated in the poll and other parties participated."

More than 100 people were killed in the run-up to the ballot, mostly in rural areas, and fears of violence kept many voters away. Alarmed by prior violence, the U.S. and EU declined to send election observers.

"The election was supposed to be peaceful, but it was not so. There were not a lot of voters in the polling booths," Dhaka resident Rukhsana Afroz told Reuters. 

Fewer than half of parliament's 300 seats were contested. The Awami League, led by Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, won 105 of the contested seats in addition to the 127 seats it ran unopposed, giving it more than a two-thirds majority. Hasina is expected to form a new government this month. 

However, low voter participation could pile new pressure on Hasina to find a compromise with the BNP for holding new elections. Either Hasina or BNP chief Begum Khaleda Zia has been prime minister for all but two of the past 22 years. The two are bitter rivals. 

At the center of their current dispute is Hasina's scrapping of the practice of having a caretaker government oversee elections, an initiative put in place in the mid-1990s to ensure fairness. The Awami League says the practice has proved a failure.

As of early Monday morning, complete turnout figures were not available, though election officials acknowledged that they had anticipated low numbers and voting appeared slow at polling stations in the capital, Dhaka.

The BNP said low turnout vindicated its denunciation of the poll as a farce.

At one polling station in the Lalbagh area of Dhaka, 626 of 2,274 voters, or 28 percent, cast ballots. At a nearby site, final turnout among male voters was 21 percent.

"The turnout is a clear indication that the common people rejected this election and it is almost an election without voters," Shamsher Mobin Chowdhury, a BNP vice chairman, told Reuters on Sunday.

The impasse between the two main parties, which showed no sign of easing, undermined the poll's legitimacy and is fueling worries of economic stagnation and further violence in the impoverished South Asian nation of 160 million. 

The country's $22 billion garment industry, which accounts for 80 percent of exports, has been disrupted by transportation blockades ahead of the election. Officials from the BNP, which had called for a strike on election day, said party supporters would maintain the blockade and called for another in a series of general strikes starting Monday morning. 

"This is a suicidal election as it will not bring any peace in the country," Abul Kashem, who works as a driver and is a supporter of the BNP, said outside a Dhaka polling station. 

Hasina has spoken of holding talks with the opposition on the conduct of future elections which, if successful, could lead to another poll. The BNP had demanded a halt to the current electoral process.

Junior Law Minister Mohammad Quamrul Islam said the election was necessary for the democratic process and repeated that another poll could be held anytime in agreement with the BNP. 

"But they (the BNP) must stop violence before dialogue for the next elections could start," Islam told reporters after voting. 

Al Jazeera and Reuters