Muhammad Yunus fears attempts to thwart planned Bangladesh polls

Dhaka: Bangladesh’s interim government chief Muhammad Yunus on Wednesday said he feared forces “from home and abroad” to thwart planned general elections over debarring deposed prime minister Sheikh Hasina’s Awami League from contesting.

“Many forces from inside and outside the country will work to spoil the election. Many powerful forces, not minor ones, will attempt to thwart it. Sudden attacks may come,” Yunus’s press secretary Shafiqul Alam quoted him as saying at a high-level meeting on election preparedness.

Chief Adviser Yunus, he said, told the meeting that the election will be “challenging” as “various types of propaganda will be carried out in a planned manner from inside and outside the country”.

Yunus said AI-generated images and videos would also circulate online and on social media platforms, stressing immediate action to prevent the spread of such content.

“We must overcome them (obstacles),” 85-year-old Yunus was quoted as saying.

His comments coincided with Hasina’s interview with foreign news agencies and the UK-based The Independent newspaper on the same day.

This was Hasina’s her first such interactions with mainstream media since August 5 last year, when a violent student-led protest toppled her government.

Since her ouster, 78-year-old Hasina has been staying in India while most of the leaders of her party and government were in jail or on the run at home and abroad.

Three days after her ouster, Yunus flew in from Paris to take charge of the interim government saying the students were his appointer.

The Yunus administration subsequently disbanded the Awami League activities under an executive order citing national security threats charging Hasina and several of party leaders under trial in Bangladesh’s International Crimes Tribunal in absentia.

The Election Commission suspended the Awami League's registration, disqualifying the party from contesting polls while in her interviews on Wednesday Hasina said "millions of party supporters will boycott election".

Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) of former premier Khaleda Zia is seen as the frontrunner in Awami League’s absence.

Several Awami League supporters in recent months have staged sudden or flash street marches in the capital to make visible their presence.

Police in the past several months have arrested several hundred activists of the “banned party” for staging the marches. On Wednesday, five of its junior leaders were arrested overnight on charges of bringing out sudden processions in different parts of the capital.

Despite her stay overseas and ongoing trial in absentia, Hasina in her interviews insisted that she remained committed to “restoring democracy” in the country.

“Only free, fair, and inclusive elections can heal the country,” she told the Independent newspaper of the UK while in other interviews she said the next government must have electoral legitimacy.

“Millions of people support the Awami League, so as things stand, they will not vote. You cannot disenfranchise millions of people if you want a political system that works,” she said, rejecting any government formed without her party’s participation in the voting.