Bangladeshi voters head to the polls on Sunday for an election in which the result is all but preordained.
Thanks to an opposition party boycott, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina of the ruling Awami League is poised to win a fourth consecutive term as leader of the Muslim-majority nation of 170 million people.
A Hasina victory will also mark a defeat for President Biden, who has made Bangladesh a centerpiece of his effort to place democracy at the heart of U.S. foreign policy, stated an article of famous US media outlet Wall Street Journal.
The 76-year-old Ms. Hasina, who has held power longer than any currently serving elected female leader worldwide, presents a striking paradox.
She has curbed radical Islam, ensured civilian supremacy over the army, and led her country out of extreme poverty—achievements not many developing countries’ leaders can claim.
At the same time, Ms. Hasina’s take-no-prisoners approach to politics fits “Game of Thrones” better than a parliamentary democracy. Those who refuse to bend the knee risk legal harassment or even violence.
As part of Mr. Biden`s bid to contrast his administration with Donald Trump`s, the White House has sought to punish Ms. Hasina`s government for human rights abuses and for cowing opposition parties with mass arrests.
But Ms. Hasina has thumbed her nose at these efforts, refusing to make more space for the opposition or civil society groups.
In the runup to the elections, the government has arrested about 10,000 opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) activists.
"This is absolute brute force," says Avinash Paliwal, an expert on South Asian geopolitics at London`s School of Oriental and African Studies, in a phone interview. "There isn`t even a semblance of free and fair elections."
The U.S. failure in Bangladesh stands out because the country was in theory an ideal testing ground for Mr. Biden`s values-centric foreign policy.
The world`s eighth most populous nation is arguably big enough to matter, but at the same time not vital enough for Washington to need to place strategic and economic interests above democracy promotion.
Though the country has slipped toward one-party rule under Ms. Hasina, it has deeper democratic roots than many other developing nations.
As part of British India until 1947, Bangladesh had some familiarity with elections as well as with liberal institutions such as an independent judiciary and free press.
Many leading Bangladeshi journalists and intellectuals were educated in the West. Until 2006 the country boasted an opposition party, the BNP, vigorous enough to alternate power with the Awami League.
Moreover, the Bangladeshi economy`s reliance on garment exports to the U.S. and the European Union-$32 billion in 2022-gave Washington a measure of leverage.
But the White House was either too tentative to use that leverage or over confident that it could shame Ms. Hasina into better behavior.
Mr. Biden pointedly excluded Bangladesh from the U.S.`s two high-profile Summits
democracy, while inviting several countries with arguably worse records.
In 2021 the Treasury Department imposed sanctions on Bangladesh`s Rapid Action Battalion (RAB), an anticrime and antiterrorism unit, for serious human-rights abuses.
Last year the U.S. ambassador to Dhaka made his concerns about Bangladeshi elections public, and the State Department imposed visa restrictions on people it identified as "responsible for, or complicit in, undermining" the Bangladeshi election.
The White House should have known that harsh words and half-measures would have scant effect on Bangladesh.
If anything, they played into the Awami League`s foundational story-as the plucky party that in 1971 led the country to independence from Pakistan, despite Islamabad`s U.S. backing.
Ms. Hasina has skillfully countered American pressure by building an unlikely coalition of backers-Russia, China, and, most important, India, where she`s seen as a bulwark of stability in a volatile country.
Any serious effort to nudge Bangladesh toward greater liberalism would have entailed getting New Delhi on board from the get-go. Instead, the Biden administration alienated a broad swath of Indian opinion makers, who view American pressure on Bangladesh as dangerously naive and would rather the U.S. worked more closely with New Delhi to curb Chinese influence in the country.
From the Indian perspective, whatever Ms. Hasina`s shortcomings, the alternative is much worse. The last time the BNP was in power it was quiescent in attacks on Bangladesh`s Hindu minority and gave sanctuary to separatist and terrorist groups that targeted India.
The BNP has long allied with the Islamist group Jamaat-e-Islami, which was responsible for unspeakable atrocities against civilians during Bangladesh`s 1971 war of independence. Indians aren`t willing to take a chance on another BNP government.
Unable to convince India that liberal democracy in Bangladesh is worth saving, the White House instead relied on finger wagging at Ms. Hasina.
That it now has little to show is a result typical of a U.S. administration whose reach has often been greater than its grasp. And it shows how, in a complex world, it`s much easier to talk about democracy than it is to promote it successfully.
This story is an opinion piece by Sadanand Dhume, published in Wall Street Journal. Apart from the headline, no editing has been done in the copy. The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect The Report’s editorial stance.
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