Whilst Khaleda Zia has been trying to gin up support for her country-wide protest movement to ring out against the sitting Awami League government, ostensibly for leading the country toward ruin, she has been chucked out of her house. In her stead, the Prime Minister, Sheikh Hasina has used any availing opportunity to shame her near-life long opponent.
Ultimately however, it is not hard to see that these protests are attempts at stitching together a public rebuke for Begum Zia’s recent eviction. This is baldly the personalistic politics on mutual vengeance– a source of deep national shame. Or, rather it should be. For their personal politics has been ruining Bangladesh for nearly a generation.
Begum Zia instigated the recent day long strike immediately preceding the Eid just gone past. That move shut down public transport and infrastructure so that many thousands of hard working Bangladeshis could not get back home to celebrate the holidays. She has put out a call to engage in nation-wide street protest movements on November 30th. Further, she drew together an economic argument with which to batter the AL, though it lacks the salient beneficences of facts and the truth.
Mrs. Zia’s politics is that of fear and demagoguery. She draws together a widely ranging narrative that cannot, plausibly, be true. The Awami League best not give her any well-ground excuses to bring the real dissatisfactions of the Bangladesh out on the street. The best way to do that? Work hard to deliver policy and politics that makes the majority of Bangladeshis better off during the Awami League’s current term in power.