EC and caretaker government

"The commission’s use of Article 91 was less about upholding election integrity and more about reinforcing its alignment with the ruling party's agenda."

THE Gaibandha 5 by-election held on October 12 appears to have been a game plan of the Election Commission that evidence, which has come to light since the election ended. The commission’s game plan was to establish that the commission had major powers to hold the next general election, freely and fairly, under the leadership of the incumbent chief election commissioner Kazi Habibul Awal.

The commission used Article 91 of the Representation of People Order 1972 as the trump card in its game plan. Very few remembered that Article 91 existed or whether it was used in the country’s election in recent memory. The commission allowed massive irregularities to occur in the Gaibandha 5 by-election that the chief election commissioner watched with his colleagues and journalists on television monitors in the commission’s headquarters in Dhaka that were connected to the closed-circuit television cameras that were videotaping the election, for the first time in the country’s electoral history. The chief election commissioner cancelled the election at 2:15pm on the election day after he was satisfied that enough evidence of massive irregularities had taken place that was mandatory to cancel an election under Article 91.

The commission did not explain where the trump card had been hidden for so long while massive irregularities were allowed to become a common occurrence in every election conducted by it since the Awami League came to power in January 2009. Thus, it is no longer discussed that both the 2014 and the 2018 national elections were held amid massive irregularities. The reasons are also no longer debated or discussed either. These reasons are, first, the political bias of the Election Commission and the chief election commissioners of the period for the ruling party; second, the politicisation of the civil and law enforcement agencies that assisted those elections; and, third, the direction the government gave to the chief and other election commissioners that they carried out without questions asked.

The present chief election commissioner, his colleagues and the present commission failed, leading to the Gaibandha by-election, to establish that they are any different from their predecessors since 2009. The BNP-led opposition believes that the present chief election commissioner and the commission are closer to the present government than the previous chief election commissioners and commissions based on their summary rejection of, first, the BNP or the opposition’s demand for the next election to be held under the caretaker government or the caretaker government system and, second, the use of electronic voting machines in the next election.

The BNP was aware that Article 91 gave the chef election commissioner or the commission enormous powers over elections. It was also aware, more importantly, of the nexus between the government/ruling party and the chief election commission or the commission related to the elections in the country where they have become part of the same team. The BNP’s demand for elections under the caretaker government system was intended precisely to break this dangerous nexus. The BNP believed that without breaking this nexus, any additional power and hitherto unused ones in the hands of the chief election commissioner or the commission would only become additional obstacles to existing ones in their effort for a free and fair general election and strengthen the nexus further.

Ironically, the Awami League with Jamaat and the Jatiya Party as allies had held 266 days of general strikes during the BNP’s 1991–96 term that had brought the country to a standstill to break this nexus and force the BNP to amend the constitution and make the caretaker government system constitutional. The BNP agreed to break the nexus by adopting the caretaker government system as the 13th amendment to the constitution that ensured that the chief election commissioner or the commission would henceforth be under no pressure for bias towards any political party while holding a national election. The Awami League, for reasons that it alone would be able to explain, re-established the nexus through the 15th amendment in June 2011. National elections have since become nothing other than an election for fulfilling the interests of the government or the ruling party.

Therefore the BNP dismissed the commission’s game plan summarily for reasons it did not have to explain. The weaknesses, contradictions and inaccuracies in it were unbelievable. In the first place, the commission failed to clear his game plan with the ruling party. Obaidul Kader, the ruling party’’s general secretary, at first blamed the chief election commission for cancelling a peaceful election that its candidate was winning easily. He questioned the technology through which evidence of election irregularities was collected.

The information minister, Hasan Mahmud, was also at first very eager to establish the credibility of the election, like the AL general secretary, to dismiss the widely held public notion that elections conducted by the commission under the Awami League were marked by massive irregularities to favour the ruling party and its candidates. He told journalists that he had statements from 98 of nearly 150 returning officers, all staff of the commission, that the election was peaceful. Curiously, the statements of these presiding officers were reportedly unsigned and had the same text.

The information minister, after blaming the chief election commissioner for cancelling a peaceful election and establishing that his staff had revolted against him on the issue of alleged irregularities in the election, made a U-turn on both the chief election commissioner and the commission to spin Article 91 in favour of the ruling party and against the BNP on the latter’s demand for the caretaker government system. He said that the chief election commissioner had established by cancelling the election under Article 91 that the commission was ‘all in all’ in matters of conducting an election where the government was only a ‘facilitator.’

He then concluded that the chief election commissioner would, therefore, be able to conduct the next general election as ‘all in all’ and treat the government as the ‘facilitator’. He, therefore, further concluded that the chief election commissioner by the way he cancelled the Gaibandha 5 election under Article 91 had established that there was no longer any need for the caretaker government system for the next general election. He, thus, not just built a mountain out of a mole hill but also took for granted that people would accept his conclusions as gospel truth and would dare not ask what would happen to the next general election if the present chief election commissioner and the commission chose like the two previous chief election commissioners or the commissions and toe the line of the government or the ruling party.

The commission and the ruling party made it palpably evident to the BNP or the opposition that their objective in the Gaibandha 5 election was a common one, to project Article 91 as the panacea, the antidote to the BNP’s demand for the next general election under the caretaker government system. In the process, they ensured with what was a poorly framed and even more poorly executed game plan that the BNP or the opposition would reject it outright without any need for an explanation. The BNP simply iterated after the Gaibandha 5 by-election that there was no question for it to participate in the next general election outside the caretaker government system.

The chief election commissioner, thus wasted a golden opportunity to establish with the Gaibandha 5 election that he was more than capable of conducting an election of international standard. He had all the powers and with Article 91 at his disposal, more so to exclude every irregularity that he named in the end for cancelling the election. These were the same ones that occurred in all elections that the commission held since January 2009. He could have avoided these simply by remembering the cliché that forewarned is forearmed. Therefore, the general conclusion that emerged from the Gaibandha 5 by-elections was that the country could only at its peril have any confidence in a chief election commissioner or the commission of holding the next general election in 300 constituencies on a single day consisting of tens of millions of voters that made such a mess of a single by-election with a meager number of voters, held on a single day.

The chief election commissioner’s game plan would have succeeded, its fatal flaws notwithstanding, if only Abraham Lincoln’s famous quote that you cannot fool all the people all the time, had not been true. Meanwhile, threatening clouds are gathering on the political horizon with the BNP-led opposition restless to restore the right of the people to vote and the international powers, the United States, the European Union and the United Nations supporting democracy, human rights, the right of Bangladesh voters to a general election held according to international standard. India, a long-time ally of the Awami League, also appears to be with these powers.

(This article was originally published in New Age)