Sheikh Hasina has over her years in power since 2009 attempted to instill a one-party state. In effect, she's echoing the attempts of her late father Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. She certainly promotes a powerful personality cult around her father and around herself. I sense that she too believes that a powerful authoritarian party in power is what holds the country together. But I believe she's wrong. Democracy in Bangladesh has never been fragrant.
Shifts in the garment industry, which powered development in the country, represent one risk; meagre currency reserves are another. Yet nothing so imperils Bangladesh’s economic miracle as graft and patronage at the highest levels. How does North Korea afford its flashy weapons programme? Crypto scams of eye-watering scope. And the newsmaking history of BBC Monitoring’s radio translators.
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