SO Sheikh Hasina Wajed and her Awami League have ‘won’ Sunday’s ‘general election’ — an unqualified fraud perpetrated on the Bangladeshi people. Eighteen parties, including the main opposition Bangladesh National Party, boycotted the polls, less than half of the 300 parliamentary seats were contested, and voter turnout at some polling stations was as low as 20pc. Violence has already led to a number of deaths and is likely to snowball rather than subside given the wave of acrimony the prime minister has unleashed by doing away with the requirement of a caretaker government. Because provisional administrations have been supervising the polls, general elections in Bangladesh had more or less been transparent since 1991. In June 2010, Sheikh Hasina amended the constitution and abolished the caretaker system. Established democracies with strong constitutional institutions may not need a neutral set-up, but for a country like Bangladesh, which has had more than a dozen military interventions since 1971, dropping the interim government clause in the constitution was poor judgement. The big question is what now? Who is going to accept an election in which the Awami League has secured 127 seats unopposed? BNP leader and former prime minister Khaleda Zia has called the entire exercise “a scandalous fraud” and demanded that the election be declared null and void and fresh polls held. She has the moral ground plus 17 other parties on her side.

Sheikh Hasina is now on the threshold of a major political crisis. If she doesn’t adopt a conciliatory course and insists on the acceptability of Sunday’s electoral hoax, her morally weak position is unlikely to stand her in good stead against a furious and united opposition alliance that enjoys international sympathy. If violence persists, the Bangladesh army will once again be forced by circumstances, if not by choice, to intervene. The crisis reminds us of the 1977 situation in Pakistan when the army used election manipulation as a pretext to seize power and perpetuate tyranny for 11 years. If the Awami League leader doesn’t want her country to suffer a similar bout of military dictatorship, she should show common sense, let an interim administration oversee fresh polls and prove through a transparent election that she enjoys the people’s confidence.