Editorial
First-time and women voters
They received less attention than they deserved
AS the countdown to the parliamentary election gets into the final moments, the cumulative impressions drawn from the contents of party manifestos and electioneering trends make for two conclusions: first, the two major parties have not quite focused on the new voters comprising 32 per cent of the electorate as much as they really should have. Secondly, the women voters who constitute slightly more than 50 percent of the electoral roll have not received adequate attention.
Through an analysis of voter reactions to the party manifestos and by following the campaign trails in various constituencies, we have found out that individual candidates may have spoken of women and young voters, but the major political parties as organisations have not been able to offer any robust new deal to the young and women voters which they deserved with their potential weightage as voters.
The AL has noticeably lent a focus on the young voters by dedicating the party's manifesto to them and expressing a futuristic resolve to create digital Bangladesh by 2021. How the party tasks itself in meeting some tangible targets during its five-year tenure with any sense of urgency and immediacy doesn't come through clearly to the voters. The BNP, on the other hand, has not focused on the concerns touching the lives of women and young people.
The first-time voters, especially, have minced no words to ventilate their disappointment over the lack of uplift programmes specifically geared to an improvement of their lot. In the first place, there is the problem of educated joblessness. And as if that was not enough, there are the vast multitudes of uneducated youth whose hopes and aspirations are choked in the whirlpool of uncertainty and darkness. The scourge of unemployment pushes them into the throes of desperation seeking out relief in socially destabilising preoccupations. The frittered -away youth power is there to harness with concrete social mobilisation plans. These are missing in the party manifestos. Equally, the issues that affect the lives of women seemingly fail to cross the threshold of gender prejudices.
All in all, a lip service appears to have been paid to women and youth issues; at best they have been approached perfunctorily. In other words, the mainstay of the electorate, around 65 per cent of it (the youth category including almost equal number of men and women), has not received the attention they had nursed the hope for.
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