No complaining please!
THE much-awaited national election finally took place on December 29, 2008 without any hitch. Out of 299 seats, the Awami League-led grand alliance bagged 262. For Awami League it has been more than a landslide victory, out of 262 seats they won in 230.
For the BNP led-4-party alliance it was more than a shocking defeat. An alliance which had more than two-thirds majority in the last parliament could manage only 32 seats this time, having been totally wiped off in Dhaka and Sylhet divisions. For Jamaat e Islam, it was literarily a whitewash. With all the stalwarts losing they could win only in 2 seats as against 17 in 2001.
Election 2008 had some interesting features. Thanks to the caretaker government, the armed forces and the Election Commission, it was for the first that time a national election was held with transparent ballot boxes and a fairly accurate voter list with photos. Nearly 87% voters exercising their right to franchise, the highest in any parliamentary election in the history of Bangladesh.
Women participation in the election, both as voters and as candidates, was also the highest. As many as 55 women candidates directly contested the election in 60 constituencies and 19 were successful.
Given our political culture, it was only natural that BNP would reject the result. In their first post-election press conference BNP chairperson and leader of the 4-prty alliance Begum Khaleda Zia termed the election as farcical, stage-managed and, therefore, not acceptable. How such an accusation will hold water is a different matter.
There is no chance of giving any credence whatsoever to such allegation without concrete proof. According to the foreign election observers, it was a free, fair, transparent and peaceful election of international standard. They found no evidence of any election rigging. The opinion of the local observers is not different either.
Taking into consideration their past record of misrule plagued with widespread corruption, abuse of state power, plundering of national wealth, acts of terrorism, patronisation of Islamic militancy and soaring prices of food and other essential commodities, it was not difficult to predict that the BNP-Jamaat jote would lose.
But to explain such a crushing defeat of BNP, or for that matter the stunning victory of Awami League, one has to go further down the track of events that followed the departure of BNP from power in October 2006. I would like to summarise them as follows:
- The prices of food and other essential items, which were already up by 60-70 percent during the BNP regime, went well beyond the buying capacity of common people.
- The anti-corruption drive of the caretaker government revealed harrowing tales of corruption and abuse of power committed by political stalwarts, including the two sons of Begum Zia. The news of former finance minister Saifur Rahman's whitening black money and Begum Zia's son Arafat Rahman taking bribe of Tk. 12 crore from a foreign company and depositing it in a Singapore bank roused tremendous anger among the common people.
- BNP's nomination of a good number of controversial candidates (their wives where they were legally barred) who were either convicted or arrested on charges of large-scale corruption and or abuse of power, was not taken lightly by the voters.
- The issue of war criminals and anti-liberation forces, thanks to the relentless campaign by the Sector Commanders' Forum and citizen groups, was another dominant factor in the rejection of the BNP-Jamaat candidates.
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