With elections looming, the government finds new ways to quell critics

Bangladesh’s slide towards authoritarianism is accelerating

IT IS hard to see how the prime minister of Bangladesh, Sheikh Hasina Wajed, could lose the next election, which is due to be held by January 28th. The main opposition parties are in disarray—the product in part of a relentless barrage of lawsuits fired at them by Sheikh Hasina’s government. Yet in the run-up to the vote, the suppression of dissent is growing ever more ferocious.

The latest attack on critics is a bill regulating online publishing and social media, which parliament approved at the end of September. Its draconian provisions include prison terms of up to 14 years for those who spread “propaganda” about the war in 1971 in which Bangladesh won independence from Pakistan. (Sheikh Hasina’s father led the independence movement; she is so vitriolic about his opponents that she could be accused of propagandising herself