In Bangladesh election, Christians offered prayers—and votes

Tarique Rahman, the 60-year-old chairman of the center-right Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), smiled and raised his right hand in a victory sign at a news conference on Saturday in the capital of Dhaka.

“This victory belongs to Bangladesh. This victory belongs to democracy,” said Rahman, whose party won a landslide majority in last Thursday’s general election. “To ensure that no evil force can re-establish autocracy in the country, and to ensure that the nation is not turned into a subservient state, we must remain united and uphold the will of the people,” he added. Rahman was sworn in as Bangladesh’s prime minister on Tuesday.

Rahman’s party and its allies secured 212 directly elected parliamentary seats out of 300 in last week’s election—Bangladesh’s first since the 2024 student-led uprising ousted former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and ended her 15-year rule. Bangladesh, a Muslim-majority nation of nearly 176 million residents, recorded a voter turnout of slightly over 59%. The BNP defeated Bangladesh’s largest Islamist party, Jamaat-e-Islami, which claimed 77 seats—still a major win for a party that was banned under the previous government.

To Bangladeshi Christians, who make up only about 0.5% of the population, the BNP’s victory over Jamaat-e-Islami suggests that Rahman’s new administration may better protect the freedom of Christians and other minorities, including Hindus, Buddhists, and indigenous communities. Open Doors currently ranks Bangladesh in 33rd place on its Top 50 list of countries where Christians suffer the most persecution, citing the Islamist violence that Bangladeshi Christians and other minorities often face. Leading up to the election, denomination and ministry leaders urged Christians to vote. They argued that participating in democracy could help the country continue to stabilize after youth-led protests overthrew the former government in 2024.

The BNP’s “practice is democracy, so we are hopeful, if they are really liberal and democratic, that they can maintain that,” said David Das, general secretary of the National Council of Churches in Bangladesh. Das cast his ballot in his hometown, about 140 miles outside Dhaka, at a polling station that he described as “very peaceful, calm and quiet.”

Das believes that he has a Christian and civic duty to vote. “The Bible says [government] authority is from God,” he said. “If I abstain from voting, it is not Christian responsibility.” To Das, none of the candidates who ran were truly desirable, so he voted for who he believed to be less weak.

Das believes Rahman’s background will equip him to lead Bangladesh. The BNP leader comes from a political family, and his father, Ziaur Rahman, was an army commander before becoming the country’s president and founder of the BNP. Tarique Rahman’s mother, Khaleda Zia, served as Bangladesh’s first female prime minister. Tarique returned to Bangladesh in December after 17 years of self-exile in Britain over what he called political persecution.

But Das is concerned about the BNP’s stance toward women since the party nominated only 10 female candidates among 300 constituencies.

Palpably absent from the election was the Awami League party, which dominated Bangladesh’s political scene until the protests toppled Hasina, the party’s leader. The country’s interim government, led by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Muhammad Yunus, banned the Awami League under the Anti-Terrorism Act while Bangladesh’s International Crimes Tribunal conducted a trial on Awami’s deadly crackdown on protesters. The tribunal in November sentenced Hasina and former Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan—who both fled to India amid the uprising and remain there in exile—to death on charges of crimes against humanity.

The interim government estimated that more than 800 people died during the uprising, which protesters started over a controversial job quota that critics said favored Awami supporters. The United Nations estimated a death toll as high as 1,400.

Christians and other minorities were “very reluctant to go out and vote” in last week’s election because the Awami League was banned, said Martha Das (no relation to David Das), general secretary of the National Christian Fellowship of Bangladesh. She explained that many minorities voted for the Awami League, which described itself as moderate and secular.

Many Bangladeshis also associate the party with Bangladesh’s independence from Pakistan in 1971. Hasina’s father, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, led the independence movement, co-founded the Awami League, and became Bangladesh’s first president. Hasina won her first term as prime minister in 1996 after military members killed her father and several other family members in a 1975 coup. While many characterize Hasina’s rule as authoritarian, she and her party brought economic progress and furthered women’s rights.

Martha Das, who also voted in last week’s election, thinks Christians should exercise their civic responsibility by casting ballots: “You can at least choose one candidate whom you think is good and honest.” She noted that while the election was peaceful on the whole, the fear of persecution is “always there” for Christians. Martha Das cited instances of minorities attacked by political candidates who lost in previous elections. The candidates blamed the minorities for not voting for them and so causing their defeat, she said.

Jamaat-e-Islami, now the main opposition party, formed an alliance with the student-led National Citizen Party and nine other parties. In 2013, a court prohibited Jamaat-e-Islami from registering as a political party, finding that the group’s charter, which supports Sharia law, would violate Bangladesh’s secular constitution. Hasina’s government also banned Jamaat-e-Islami in 2024 under an anti-terrorism law, alleging the party fomented the deadly violence during the uprising.

According to David Das, “Jamaati-e-Islami is very aggressive against all people who are not going along with their Islamic ideology.” He said when he was a university student, a student group affiliated with Jamaat-e-Islami beat him and his family because of his former involvement with progressive student organizations.

Jamaat-e-Islami has prompted concerns about its view of women since the party put forward no female candidate for the latest election and its leader, Shafiqur Rahman (no relation to Tarique Rahman), has publicly stated that no woman can lead Jamaat-e-Islami. In 1971, the party sided with Pakistan against Bangladesh’s independence.

Martha Das hopes Jamaat-e-Islami will work constructively with the new BNP-led government. She said that, during the lead-up to the election, her organization held religious freedom training sessions for up to 700 pastors and Christian leaders across Bangladesh. It encouraged participants to vote, telling them they should “not leave everything to the people who do not know the God of the Bible,” she said.

The organization also arranged prayer meetings, including one earlier this month outside the parliament building, to pray for a peaceful election, the protection of religious freedom, and that “God will choose the good candidates to run the government,” said Martha Das.

Since the 2024 uprising, she noted, some youths have developed a tendency to “disobey their parents, teachers, the law and order of the nation” and become “prone to mob violence.” She encourages young people to participate in the nation-making process. “In the Bible, we see politics is not a dirty thing,” Martha Das said. “God is a lawgiver. God is a judge. God is king.”

Before the election, the National Council of Churches in Bangladesh, the National Christian Fellowship of Bangladesh, and the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of Bangladesh all urged Christians across the nation to pray. “We thought that it was the time for prayer, for God’s intervention, for God’s control, for God’s providence, for God’s love, so that our country could have a peaceful, credible election,” said David Das. “We think God listened to our prayer, because at least the election was peaceful overall.”