BNP gained more than it lost

The BNP thinks it has gained more than it has lost in Tuesday's elections to the three key city corporations of the country.

Though the mayor candidates it backed were defeated, senior BNP leaders believe they have "achieved" quite a lot that will benefit the party in the long run.

The most notable success it achieved through the polls, marred by widespread rigging and other irregularities, is that the party's demand for a non-party administration to oversee the national elections now stands more justified, they say.

The elections in Dhaka and Chittagong cities, they believe, also exposed "the government's undemocratic nature" and it is a boon for the opposition 20-party combine led by the BNP.

"Besides, the Election Commission's spinelessness in the face of irregularities during the polls has substantiated our claim that the constitutional body is at the government's beck and call," said ASM Hannan Shah, chief campaign coordinator for BNP-backed mayor candidate Mirza Abbas in Dhaka South.

"Different quarters had described our decision to boycott the January 5 national elections [in 2014] as improper, unwise and immature.

But the way the city corporation elections were held has proved that we were right in doing so," he told The Daily Star.

"We had feared that the candidates backed by the ruling party would enjoy some undue benefits in the polls. But we were stunned to see the government's desperate attempts to clinch victory for their candidates at any cost, even by using the law enforcement agencies," said the BNP standing committee member.

The polls confirmed that the Awami League government is autocratic, and that not even a local body election can be fair under them, let alone the parliamentary polls, he added.

Moudud Ahmed, who coordinated the election monitoring activities for BNP-favourite Tabith Awal in Dhaka North, spoke in the same vein.

"We have once again been able to prove that the Awami League can indulge in any form of wrongdoings to cling to power," he told this paper.

As the elections have exposed "the true colours" of the government, the 20-party alliance will now gain more public support in its anti-government movement, both the leaders claimed.

Raising allegations of massive rigging and irregularities in the polling, the party decided to boycott the elections and announced the decision around 12:10pm, midway through the voting.

Nonetheless, its mayor candidates in the three cities managed to bag around 35 percent of the total votes cast, according to unofficial estimates. The AL-backed aspirants won in all three city corporations with 55 percent votes.

On allegations that the boycott was pre-planned, Hannan Shah said: "After the voting started, we started sending all information to the election control room at the chairperson's [Khaleda Zia's] residence."

"I informed the BNP chief that ruling party men obstructed me from going to a polling centre at Tejgaon College at 9:00am. We also informed Madam [Khaleda] that the polling agents of the BNP-backed candidates were barred from entering many polling centres.

"Then we talked with Mirza Abbas, his wife, and Tabith Awal and his father Abdul Awal Mintoo, and decided to boycott the polls ... After consulting our chairperson, we finally informed the media about this," he added.

Asked why no polling agents for the BNP-backed mayor runners were found in many polling stations, he said: "There were some shortcomings on our part, especially that we could not deploy polling agents at every voting booth due to time constraint."

DEMAND FOR DISSOLVING EC
Terming Tuesday's polls a farce, pro-BNP professionals' platform Adarsha Dhaka Andolan yesterday demanded that the city elections be cancelled and the Election Commission be dissolved.

"Yesterday's [Tuesday's] polls were an inglorious incident in the nation's history. The entire election process became useless due to the conscious inaction of the Election Commission," said Shawkat Mahmud, member secretary of the platform, at a press conference at the Jatiya Press Club yesterday.

Prof Emajuddin Ahmed, convener of the platform, said: "I'm an elderly person. I've seen many elections since 1946. But yesterday's [Tuesday's] election can only be compared to the one held on January 5 last year."