What Election Commission can do?

We could draw lessons from the recent events in Thailand where not only Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra resigned from his post though his Thai Rak Thai Party secured more than fifty percent of the votes cast in the recently held controversial elections, but the country's Constitutional Court declared the election as null and void, rejected the Election Commission's proposal to hold fresh elections in late October, and also asked the Election Commission to resign as it had lost the confidence of all the political parties.

Bangladesh CEC's position has become more untenable with the Appellate division's rejection of his appeal against the directives of the High Court that the existing voters' list be updated and no fresh voters' list need be prepared. Now legal experts are trying to fathom the implications of the judgment and whether responsibility can be ascribed to the CEC for the lost time and money spent on preparation of the new voters' list which in any case flies in the face of population growth rate, estimated total number of population of the country and is also full of holes because of exclusion of many people from the list and inclusion of “fake” voters therein.

One wonders why Bangladesh does not borrow a leaf from the experience of West Bengal where the Left Front won the elections for the seventh successive time since 1977 winning 235 out of 294 seats in the West Bengal Assembly. Neither the Congress nor Trinomul Congress nor the BJP has leveled any complaint to the Election Commission about any election irregularity. It was truly amazing to watch on television young Debasish Sen, the State Chief Election Officer, laying down his diktat which was followed to the letter by all the political parties. Except religion, and West Bengal truly professes secularism, there should not be many differences between the Bengalis on the two sides of the border. Then why is it that in these days of waning communism people continue to vote again and again the Left Front to rule the State? One obvious reason is their respect for law and institutions. The other reason could be the almost total incorruptibility of the leaders.

Buddhadev Bhattacharya reportedly lives in a modest apartment with his wife, daughter and mother, and lives on his salary like any middle class Bengali. The denial of party ticket to contest the elections to a number of Ministers in the last cabinet due to their alleged failure to perform well the responsibilities ascribed to them and the induction of new faces in the Ministry and the Assembly is because the Left Front is wedded to the principle of performance based reward and punishment so alien to politics in Bangladesh. Like the Chinese leaders Buddhadev Bhattacharya has no hesitation in welcoming investment, both domestic and foreign, in furtherance of industrialisation of West Bengal. In other words, the Left Front government, as it should be in a democracy, is promise bound to deliver political goods to the people. It can safely be assumed that the repeated victory of the Left Front in the elections since 1977 is because of the satisfaction of the electorate of the performance of the government.

This “satisfaction” of the electorate can only be shown through elections for which a faultless voters' list is sine quo non.

CEC through his unilateral decision to go for a fresh voters' list opposed by the two then Election Commissioners has displayed bad judgment. One wonders whether the order to engage enumerators to prepare the fresh voters' list was given in a transparent manner. After all, six hundred million taka out of a budget of 146 crore taka has already been or is in the process of being spent on a project now declared illegal. Who, one may ask, will bear the responsibility for the wastage of this colossal amount of taxpayers' money? Can an individual's ego be a sufficient defence or is it to be added as a fraction to the huge amount of money that is wasted by the government every year through inefficiency and corruption? US Assistant Secretary of State Richard Boucher in his most recent testimony to the US House Sub-Committee on South Asia and Pacific identified “corruption and governance which are a drag on the country's economy...(and) keeping Bangladeshi people from realising their potential and preventing the levels of growth that would make significant progress in reducing poverty”.

But for Bangladesh to free herself from “poverty trap”, defined by Donald Rutherford as, keeping low income group at the same level of disposable income because a country's rules on tax and benefit system penalise shift from welfare to employment income, further compounded by increasing disparity between the rich and the poor leading to social exclusion of a large number of people, immediate steps have to be taken to bring the disenfranchised within the arena of stake holders in societal development. Keeping people out either due to sloth, inefficiency or malafide intention would only further vitiate the existing tense political situation in the country. Instead we should accept Jurgen Habermas' thesis that a state's raison d'etre lie primarily “in the guarantee of an inclusive process of opinion-and-will formation in which free and equal citizens reach an understanding on which goals and norms lie in equal interest of all”.

By any standard the CEC and the Election Commission appear to have lost the confidence of the people at large. In such a situation it would be in the interest of the country if the controversial persons were to remove themselves, as Nixon did after the Watergate scandal, and save the country from further agony. We sorely need a free and fair election under an acceptable caretaker government, Election Commission, and reformed electoral laws for the progress and peace in the country.

Kazi Anwarul Masud is a former Secretary and Ambassador.