EC puts it down to Local Govt Ministry’s inaction
The Election Commission cannot hold the elections to the bifurcated Dhaka City Corporations, despite being prepared.
Election Commissioner Shah Nawaz on Wednesday made the remark while talking to reporters at his EC Secretariat office in the city.
“The DCC polls cannot be held due to delimitation complexities. We can arrange the polls soon after the complexities are resolved. The commission is totally prepared for this,” he said.
Blaming the Local Government Ministry for not resolving the complexities, he said the ministry doesn’t pay heed to the commission’s repeated requests for solving the problem.
On November 29, 2011, the government split the DCC into two bodies, effectively partitioning the capital and forming Dhaka South City Corporation (DSCC) and Dhaka North City Corporation (DNCC).
On April 9, 2012, Chief Election Commissioner Kazi Rakibuddin announced the election schedules for the split DCCs, fixing May 24 for voting. But, a writ petition stalled the election process halfway through.
Later, fresh complexities arose as the Local Government Ministry demarcated the Wards No 55, 56 and 57 following Cadastral Survey (CS), hampering compactness of locality, lane and street. Hence, the voter lists cannot be prepared as voters of the same locality, lane and street overlap in more than two wards.
Turning to the sixth phase of the upazila elections, to be fought in 13 upazila parishads on May 19, Shah Nawaz said, “As we’ve learnt from the experiences of the previous five phase elections, we hope the May 19 election will see no violence.”
If political parties hadn’t sought to directly influence the previous phases of the upazila elections, there would have been no violence, the election commissioner claimed.
Source: UNB Connect
