The lessons out of Gaibandha

The decisive move by Chief Election Commissioner Kazi Habibul Awal and his colleagues in cancelling the by-election to the Gaibandha-5 constituency on Wednesday has been as welcome as it has been surprising. The opposition has welcomed the move, given its conviction that the polling was being subjected to widespread rigging and intimidation by the followers of the ruling party. For their part, activists of the ruling Awami League have gone into burning effigies of the CEC and even calling for his trial.

That said, the arguments put forth by the CEC and his colleagues call for serious reflection. It is not that vote rigging and intimidation of voters and forcing opposition polling agents out of voting centres is new. Rare has been the instance where elections and by-elections in Bangladesh have been free of any taint, especially when they have been conducted on the watch of ruling parties.

In December 2004, the Election Commission, in what was at the time regarded as an unprecedented move, declared a municipal election at Bhola's Daulatkhan null and void on the ground of gross irregularities having been perpetrated at the polling stations. 

Going back a decade prior to that act, the rigging resorted to at a by-election in Magura in 1994 on the watch of the then ruling BNP ignited the spark for politics to assume a new and disturbing dimension. It eventually led to general elections, after much trouble on the streets, being held under a new caretaker administration in June 1996.

The above are but a few examples of how elections have gone wrong, almost on a regular basis, in the country. Citizens in the past have complained that their names had been erased from voters' lists and that they had to return home without casting their ballots on election day. 

In 1986, the announcement of the results of a parliamentary election organized by the Ershad regime was stopped halfway into the count and the outcome would not be made public until later. 

The referendum organized by General Ziaur Rahman in 1977 had few voters trekking to the voting centres and yet the picture given out by the military regime was one of a whopping majority achieved by the general.

Elections have often raised more questions than they have answered. The parliamentary election, held under a beleaguered BNP government in February 1996, lacked credibility because voters did not make their way to the polling booths. 

In 2001, the loss of all eight parliamentary seats by the Awami League in the nation's capital raised the suspicion that election engineering had been applied to the polls. 

In 2014, the unopposed election of 153 Awami League nominees to parliament raised eyebrows across the country. And questions have swirled around the election of December 2018.

The Election Commission preceding the current one came in for regular opprobrium for its inability or reluctance to assert itself where voting by citizens was concerned. One of its members, Mahbub Talukdar, often recorded his dissent over the nature of voting under the EC and ended up getting flak from his colleagues.

Given these realities clouding elections in the recent past, can Kazi Habibul Awal and his team make a difference by going for an assertion of authority by the Election Commission? The CEC has explained the rationale behind the cancellation of the Gaibandha-5 by-election. 

He and his colleagues, on CCTV, watched the chaos unfolding at the voting centres. At some centres, links to the cameras had been taken out. Ballot stuffing was merrily resorted to by the supporters of a candidate.

The CEC now owes it to the country to come forth, as a way of shoring up his position in the aftermath of the polls cancellation, with details of how the voting went on at the 88 centres in Saghata upazila and the 57 centres in Fulchhari upazila before the decision to cancel the election was made. 

He ought to inform the country of those polling stations where voting went on without hindrance. There is, besides, the question of whether it was a majority of the 145 polling stations where rigging and voter-cum-opposition intimidation was in progress. 

There is that other, extremely critical point to be made. While it remains the job of the Election Commission to conduct voting and ensuring that elections are not interfered with, it is the responsibility of DCs, UNOs and SPs to go into action, immediately, when signs of disturbance are detected at any voting centre. 

On Wednesday, were these government officials, whose constitutional allegiance is or must be to the state, exercised by a sense of urgency about preserving law and order or restoring law and order at the centres where it came under assault?

Syed Badrul Ahsan. Sketch: TBS

Finally, the cancellation of the Gaibandha-5 by-election should serve as a sobering lesson for the nation's political classes. That elections need to be credible, that voting needs to be above board, that the Election Commission must bring into full play the responsibilities entrusted to it by the nation's constitution are truths political leaders, their parties and their followers must remember to uphold.

It will not do to excoriate the CEC and his colleagues over everything that happened in Gaibandha on Wednesday. They have done their job. It remains for the politicians to huddle, to sit back and devise the means by which they and their parties can ensure a free, fair and therefore credible general election by or before the beginning of 2024.

Syed Badrul Ahsan writes on politics, history and literature