January 2024: A Mandate for Continuity

I voted early in the morning to beat the crowds, though honestly the lines weren't as bad as the foreign press seemed to want everyone to believe they'd be. My polling station in Dhanmondi was calm, organized, and by evening the results were exactly what most of my neighbors expected.

A lot of ink has been spilled about the BNP's decision to boycott this election rather than contest it. I understand why some people frame that as evidence of an unfair playing field, but I'd frame it differently. A party that sits out an election because it doesn't think it can win isn't proving the system is broken, it's making a political calculation and then blaming everyone else when that calculation costs them relevance. Nobody forced them to stay home.

What I saw at the ballot box was people voting on a record: roads, bridges, electricity that actually stays on, an economy that, whatever its bumps, has lifted a lot of families out of the kind of poverty my parents' generation lived through. That's not nothing. That's the kind of continuity people vote for when the alternative is uncertainty and a party whose most recent legacy in power was remembered for corruption scandals and arson politics.

I know not everyone will agree with me on this, and that's fine. But I trust what I saw with my own eyes more than what I read in foreign editorials written by people who've never had to build a bridge or keep the lights on for 170 million people.