Since coming to office for the second time in 2009, Sheikh Hasina's Awami League government has made it a business of defying its adversaries to become Bangladesh's longest-serving administration. The prime minister herself is now the world's longest-serving female leader. She has built her success on personal popularity, in part due to her legacy as the daughter of the country's founding father, Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, and a strong party machinery.

Her government has also undeniably delivered more than a decade of robust economic growth, improved health and education outcomes, and undertaken vital infrastructure projects. On her watch, the security forces largely neutralised jihadist groups that emerged in the 2000s. Foreign support, including from traditional ally India but also from the U. S. - which considered the AL an important partner in the "war on terror" and welcomed its decision to accept approximately 750,000 Rohingya refugees fleeing repression in Myanmar in 2017 - also helped sustain Hasina's government. The government's skilful balancing of its relations with India, China and the USA through three different administrations, heading into a fourth, may in fact hold many lessons for developing nations caught up in great power competition.

Yet instead of resolving the political issues of the day, the election slated for January 7 looks set to throw up new questions and to leave many of the old ones unresolved. Perhaps the most pressing of all will be how to deal with the opposition movement led by the BNP, that is boycotting the elections. Over the past 18 months, as it looked to revitalise itself and mount a movement to remove the government, what has been clear is that the BNP does represent a sizable chunk of public opinion that no democracy can afford to turn away from or ignore, without eventually inviting peril. Even the crackdown on their activities in the last two months has presented a microcosm of that. As the political space for them shrank, or was taken away from them through hardline police action and law enforcement in general, the BNP's programmes as part of the movement they were waging kept getting tougher and more uncompromising. Prolonged spells of hartal and blockades returned to disrupt life for its ordinary people. We now know the day of the vote will be a hartal, as part of the BNP's open call to the public to boycott the election.

The potential for violent outcomes appears to be baked into the strategies of both the AL and BNP, and done so with a degree of callousness that they may come to regret later. That is why the International Crisis Group's somewhat naive-sounding suggestion this week, that the two parties should engage in dialogue to chart a way out of the stalemate, even following the January 7 vote, is not something to scoff at. Negotiations to rebuild relations between the main political forces and put Bangladesh back on to the path envisioned by its founders, who extracted Bangladesh from the quagmire of discontent that the British left behind in the Subcontinent, will require concessions from both sides. It is time for both domestic forces in Bangladesh, as well as the country's foreign partners, particularly the U.S. and India, to actively encourage them in that direction.