Bangladesh shuts down Mobile Internet towards election

Bangladesh’s telecoms regulator has ordered mobile operators to shut down high-speed mobile internet services until midnight Sunday, the day of the national election.

Zakir Hussain Khan, spokesman for the Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission said on Saturday that the decision has been taken to prevent rumours and propaganda surrounding the vote. 

As the people of the south-asia nation got set for Sunday’s parliamentary elections, there were fears that violence and intimidation could keep many voters away from exercising their franchise.

A spokesman for the RAB, Bangladesh’s elite security force, said on Saturday they had arrested eight men from different locations for spreading rumours on various social media platforms  before the poll.

The decade-long tenure of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, whose ruling party hopes to retain power in the elections, has been marred by allegations of mass arrests and jailing of activists and critics, forced disappearances and extrajudicial killings.

The Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) led the campaign for the deployment of over 600,000 soldiers, border patrol, paramilitary and police officers who have fanned out across the country in advance of the elections.

The polls, the 11th since Bangladesh won independence from Pakistan in 1971, pit 71-year-old Hasina against a united opposition led by Kamal Hossain, 82, an Oxford-educated lawyer and one time foreign minister of Bangladesh.

Notably absent is former Prime Minister Khaleda Zia, 74, Hasina’s archrival and the head of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party. Courts ruled she was ineligible to run from her colonial-era Dhaka jail cell, where she’s serving a 17-year sentence for corruption

Hasina, daughter of Bangladesh’s founding father Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and now its longest-serving leader, is seeking a third-straight term since winning a landslide in December 2008. She has been praised for presiding over healthy GDP expansion, with the country set to rise from one of the least developed country to a middle-income nation, and praised for opening Bangladesh’s doors to around one million Rohingya refugees fleeing a military crackdown in Myanmar. 

But the opposition and critics accuse her of muzzling free speech and clamping down on dissent, including through an authoritarian anti-press law toughened this year.

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