With the electoral code of conduct breached, and the EC reduced to the role of a bystander, what can we hope from tomorrow’s elections?
It’s been interesting to watch the entire machinery of the government moving through the gears to generate all the hype usually associated with parliamentary elections in Bangladesh around the upcoming round of municipal elections.
Much of the excitement, so goes the narrative, derives from the fact that for the first time in seven years, the famed electoral symbols of the country’s two major political parties — the Awami League’s nouka and BNP’s dhaaner shish — will be facing off on the ballot. Never mind that just 7.1 million or 4.4% of the population will be eligible to view one of those come December 30.
But why not? Let’s pretend a pourashava election in Bangladesh can offer the same sort of opportunity for the people to deliver change, to put a point across, or just to make themselves heard, that has had us on tenterhooks here all year long, keeping up with developments in places like Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Canada, the Delhi legislature, and most recently, Bihar.
The entire exercise calls for a collective suspension of disbelief at a level that even the late Steve Jobs would have balked. For one thing, to still retain even the slightest bit of interest in seeing whether the Election Commission, led by Rakibuddin Ahmad, exercises its constitutional authority in holding an election, is surely only a fool’s errand.
It isn’t that we question their ability. Under the last chief election comissioner, the excellent ATM Shamsul Huda, the Election Commission attained the requisite manpower to go with the considerable authority granted to it in the constitution, over matters concerning the conduct of elections to represent the people who are the owners of the republic.
Its five-year term was marked by generally free-and-fair elections — including the December 2008 national election, a zenith of sorts in the post-1991 era — as well as a surfeit of important internal reforms that won the public’s respect and approval. When their tenure expired in February 2012, Mr Huda and his fellow commissioners all left office with their heads held high.
Then came Rakibuddin, and what we’ve seen since is the EC largely confines itself to the routine task of updating the voter list, while waiting on orders from above in most matters actually pertaining to elections.
Even the five mayoral elections it arranged in June 2013, all judged to have been largely free-and-fair at a crucial juncture ahead of the parliamentary elections scheduled to take place the following winter, can no longer be held up to the EC’s credit — not in light of subsequent events, starting with the disenfranchisement of more than half the electorate in the January 5, 2014 parliamentary elections, through the mission creep over the five phases of the upazilla elections held in 2014, to the high-profile mayoral elections in Dhaka and Chittagong that ended in farce earlier this year.
You see, fairness cannot be a matter of choice for an Election Commission, to be employed at their discretion. It must be their compulsion. What we’ve seen so far during the diabolical tenure of the present Election Commission is a tendency to play fair, if one can call it that, when it has suited the government, or at most when the results were not already going against the ruling party.
Whenever the stakes have been high, we’ve seen the EC ready to turn the dial on their highly partisan mode all the way to “shameless,” if so required. Like when it effectively quashed all the complaints from members of the public over irregularities during the Dhaka and Chittagong city corporation elections last April 28, and gazetted the results within 48 hours.
This time around, although on the face of it, the stakes cannot be that high in municipal elections, what is clear is that the government senses there is something to be gained from being able to tout a substantive seal of the public’s approval, in the form of a victory in these polls. The unfeasibly hurried nature of the way the law was changed, just five weeks prior to the elections’ due date, to officially allow political parties into the fray for the first time in local elections, should be enough to tell us that.
The way the elections have been subsequently talked-up by the government’s apologists, and played-up by the nauseatingly reverential media, lend further credence to that view. Some have been caught trying desperately to latch on to signs of the EC displaying some guts and gumption this time around. Hence, we saw a variant of the headline “EC says no to PM” peddled by a rabidly pro-government news site on December 12, that failed so abjectly to do justice to the accompanying story. Particularly the sheer absurdity of the request that was turned down.
All such efforts will have been overwhelmed of course, by the rampant breaches of the electoral code of conduct, and the growing spectre of violence as polling day draws nearer, that have all occurred with the EC left in the role of a helpless bystander. The BNP, in its bedraggled state, is forced to play to the government’s tune.
The public though, might be cleverer this time around, than either of the two impostors. The wisdom of the old saying: “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me,” should not be lost upon them, despite the ravaging it suffered by way of George W Bush some years back.
Blame him for taking the third or fourth time of asking to wise up, but really this time we shouldn’t even have to wait till polling day to draw the following, tragic conclusion: These elections are not worth the ballot they’ll be voted on.
Source: Dhaka Tribune
