Bangladesh’s Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina continues to evoke her father Sheikh Mujibur Rahman in what the critics say is an effort to deepen the political roots of her ruling Awami League.
Awami League is widely expected to win Sunday’s elections following an opposition boycott.
Hasina’s government has enacted a law that implements stiff punishment for any comments, written work or social media posts deemed defamatory.
“She has basically introduced a secular blasphemy law in the country for her father — the kind we see in one-party states,” a senior human rights activist in Bangladesh told news agency AFP on the condition of anonymity.
How Sheikh Mujibur Rahman looms large in Bangladesh?
Since his daughter returned to office in 2009, Mujib’s picture has appeared on every banknote and in hundreds of public murals across the South Asian nation of 170 million people situated above the Bay of Bengal.
At the centre of this project of national commemoration is Hasina’s childhood home in an upmarket neighbourhood of the capital Dhaka.
Now a museum, the residence is where her father, uncle and three brothers were gunned down by disgruntled army officers in August 1975.
The walls are still marked with bullet holes from that day.
Hundreds visit daily to pay their respects to the ‘father of the nation’.
About Sheikh Mujibur Rahman
He was the key political figure during a period of growing agitation for independence from Pakistan, which had governed the territory now known as Bangladesh since the 1947 end of British colonial rule.
He was imprisoned by Pakistan’s military regime in March 1971 but was released in December following the formation of Bangladesh, as months of crackdown by the Pakistani Army killed as many as three million Bangladeshi people and pushed people to the edge for freedom from military oppression.
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Mujib was the first post-independence leader but the tumultuous years that followed saw Bangladesh struggle through the economic devastation imposed by the war, including a famine in which hundreds of thousands of people died.
Hasina reportedly refers to his assassination in a 1975 military coup in almost every speech she gives, her voice often choking with emotion.
It was “the betrayal of the hopes and aspirations of the people of the soil”, she once wrote.
Hasina, 76, has been in power for 15 straight years – the longest-serving leader in Bangladesh’s history.
As she seeks a record fourth term in Sunday’s vote, the main opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), led by ailing former Prime Minister Khaleda Zia, has decided to boycott the vote, as it did in 2014.
Zia, 78, was jailed for more than two years over corruption charges. Zia was moved to house arrest over health concerns in 2020.
(With inputs from agencies)
