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DHAKA, Bangladesh — As Bangladesh prepared for general elections on Sunday, a truck driver named Nur Islam was trying to haul a load of potatoes to Dhaka, the capital, along a route he knew would be targeted by protesters allied with the opposition.

He took precautions, strapping on a helmet and leaving in the dead of night, but was still terrified after his truck was surrounded — not once, but twice — by young men hurling bricks. His windows and windshield shattered, blanketing him with glass, but he kept driving, afraid that if he stopped the men would set his truck on fire. He arrived in the capital battered, exhausted and more frustrated than ever by the combustible standoff between the country's two major political forces.

"Both parties are playing with the lives of common people," Mr. Islam said.

The tension could rise to a new level on Sunday, when the country will go to the polls in a vote that is strikingly noncompetitive by Bangladeshi standards. The opposition has refused to participate, leaving more than half of the seats in Parliament uncontested.

The country's main opposition party, the Bangladesh National Party, called the boycott after the government refused to put in place an impartial caretaker government ahead of the elections, which has been customary in Bangladesh since 1996 and is seen as a guard against government manipulation. Protesters have set fire to vehicles and hurled bricks and homemade explosives, demanding that the government hold new elections on terms the opposition accepts.

For weeks, it seemed as if the vote might be delayed at the last minute, in an effort to avoid the confrontation that was certain to follow. But the governing Awami League has pushed forward. As the vote approached, each side took a harder line — the opposition calling for a street campaign powerful enough to derail the elections, and the government clamping down severely on demonstrators and opposition leaders. By Saturday, the country was bracing itself.

"The fact that we are having this sort of sham election, it's not going to solve our problems," said Badiul Alam Majumdar, secretary of the nonprofit group Citizens for Good Governance. "It will push us to an uncertain future. We will be in uncharted waters."

Street protests often accompany elections in Bangladesh, but political violence intensified in 2013, resulting in around 150 deaths, according to Human Rights Watch.

The violence increased in part when the government began prosecuting figures from Bangladesh's 1971 war of independence for war crimes, handing down death sentences to several leaders of Jamaat-e-Islami, the country's largest Islamic political party. The Awami League has also hardened its view of Begum Khaleda Zia, the Bangladesh National Party's leader and a two-time prime minister, accusing her of links to Islamist militants.

That distrust culminated last week in an unprecedented step. Police officers surrounded Mrs. Zia's home when she tried to leave for a rally, and would not allow her to leave. Since then, she has remained blockaded inside the compound, at one point behind five trucks loaded with sand. After arranging with Mrs. Zia for an interview on Friday, a reporter for The New York Times was turned away by officers at the gate, who said the meeting could not take place, out of concern for Mrs. Zia's security.

Hasanul Haq Inu, Bangladesh's information minister, said Mrs. Zia had been "unleashing violence" and was not under arrest, but "detained."

"The law of the country says a person can be detained in his house by an order of the home ministry," he said. "We are just protecting her safety. In her house, she is very safe." Asked what threat Mrs. Zia faced, he said: "Nobody knows. Some miscreants can just shoot at her."

One worry about Sunday's elections is whether they will lead to a burst of violence from supporters of the opposition. By Saturday evening, Bangladeshi news outlets were reporting arson attacks on some polling stations, ballot boxes and trucks used to transport election materials. Near midnight, police officials in the country's north reported the stabbing death of the chief at one polling station.

Osman Faruk, a former education minister and top aide to Mrs. Zia, said the party told its supporters to discourage Bangladeshis from voting on Sunday, and hoped to continue its campaign "in a peaceful way," by distributing leaflets, for example. But he went on to justify the use of violence as the only outlet available to Mrs. Zia's followers.

"When people say the movement is not peaceful, the reply is that whatever happens in the street is a reflection of the government's actions," he said.

A low turnout could pressure the government to begin preparing for fresh elections, something that happened after a similar opposition boycott in 1996. Gowher Rizvi, an adviser to Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, said it was "almost without doubt" that Mrs. Hasina would call new elections ahead of schedule, noting that an election "loses its luster" when a major party does not take part.

"Is it one year? Is it nine months? Is it 15 months? I can't tell you," he said.

That step would be welcomed by many in Dhaka, where opinion polls testify to voters' frustration at being denied a choice. Bangladeshis are boisterous in their embrace of democracy, having voted out the incumbent government in four consecutive elections. A Western diplomat, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said that factor might force the two parties to "step back and realize that they may be overreaching."

"This election does not appear to be credible in the eyes of the Bangladeshi people," the diplomat said. "So they have to find a way back to the table."