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extreme the crackdown on dissent has become,” the Guardian quoted Angelita Baeyens, vice-president of international advocacy and litigation at the Robert F Kennedy human rights organisation, as saying.

The report says BNP Secretary General Mirza Fakhrul Islam Alamgir hours before his arrest on October 29 spoke to the Guardian and expressed his fears of being picked up on false charges.

“It is clear that the government’s goal is to put all of our leaders behind bars and hold a one-sided election,” Fakhrul told the newspaper.

The report comes amid growing political unrest in the country centring on the national election, slated for January. BNP and other opposition parties want the government to resign and install a non-party government to oversee the election. The ruling Awami League insists that the election will take place in line with the constitution, meaning under the Sheikh Hasina-led government.

The Guardian report also mentioned that jails in Bangladesh are already overcrowded with thousands of political prisoners inside cells for months, many facing dozens, perhaps hundreds, of criminal charges.

About the violence centering BNP’s October 28 rally in Dhaka, the newspaper talked to Ali Riaz, professor of political science at Illinois State University, who said, “The violence appeared premeditated by the authorities as a means to crack down on the BNP…. The response of the police, which triggered the violence, seemed to be planned well ahead of the rally.”

The newspaper talked to a number of BNP leaders, including Habibun Nabi Khan Sohel, who evaded arrest and are now in hiding. Sohel, the BNP’s joint secretary general, faces more than 450 cases.

The newspaper also talked to Law Minister Anisul Huq and spokesperson of Dhaka Metropolitan Police who deny that the mass arrests of the BNP members are connected to the forthcoming elections.

The report says since 2008 Bangladesh has seen an economic rise to become one of the strongest economies in South Asia, but the three terms of the present government have also been defined by democratic backsliding and increasingly authoritarian measures against dissent or any form of political opposition.