Since independence, Bangladesh has conducted 12 national parliamentary elections. A neat piece of paper might say this is the record of a solid democracy.
However, if we delve deeper, an uncomfortable question keeps surfacing: Have the people of Bangladesh ever had a national election that was truly free from controversy, suspicion, or cheating?
In order to comprehend why this question keeps haunting, one has to go all the way back to Bangladesh’s first parliamentary election in 1973.
In the aftermath of the liberation war in 1971, Bangladesh ratified its new constitution on 16 December 1972. Less than three months later, on 7 March 1973, the country went to the polls for its first national election. The Awami League under Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was the freedom movement. It was so popular that no one doubted it that it would be the government.
However, it was this very first election that sowed the seeds of suspicion of the election system for a long time.
Researchers and analysts concur that without the manipulation, the Awami League would still have won. But despite that, there were still so many irregularities.
The most notorious case came from Cumilla-9 in Daudkandi, where the Awami League candidate Khondaker Moshtaque Ahmed, later involved in the murder of Sheikh Mujib in 1975, was getting defeated.
Initially the publisher, writer and election analyst Mohiuddin Ahmed, in his book ‘Tehattorer Election’, describes how the initial reports on the first voting day showed Moshtaque losing heavily to the well, liked local community leader Rashid Engineer. At that time, an extraordinary incident occurred.
Ballot boxes were reportedly moved from Cumilla to Dhaka, allegedly by helicopter, and voting was locally stopped. The final official result indicated Moshtaque with 52,419 votes while Rashid got 36,630.
The whole incident made Cumilla-9 one of the most debatable constituencies in the electoral history of Bangladesh, and it was the very first election of the country that featured such an incident.
The 1973 election was another record-breaking event: a parliament without any notable opposition. The Awami League secured 293 out of 300 seats, including 11 unchallenged seats. Though 14 political parties and over a thousand independent candidates were in the fray, the result was a one, sided parliament.
The following day, the daily Ganakontho, which was one of the very few critical newspapers at that time, went to print with the headline “Election turned into a farce” prominently placed. The very next day, Sheikh Mujib himself declared at a press briefing that there was no opposition in Bangladesh since a party needed a minimum of 25 seats to be recognised as such.
What questions, if any, would a newly formed democracy, which has never had an opposition party in Parliament, have to ask itself?
Besides preventing voters from participating, the 1973 election also had the candidates preventing each other from standing. One of the most notorious cases is that of Azhar Uddin Ahmed, a very popular local leader of Bakerganj and JSD’s candidate was kidnapped to prevent him from filing his nomination papers, which were supposed to be against Sheikh Mujib, new in the area.
Consequently, Sheikh Mujib was declared the winner of Bakerganj-4 without any contest, thus being one of the two seats that he won without facing any opposition. The same uncontested victories were enjoyed by a number of top leaders of Awami League.
These events only served to strengthen the impression that the party in power was not only interested in winning. It desired to achieve total dominance.
Boycotted or one-sided elections consistently produce low credibility and weak public engagement. Even the pro-government dailies had forecast opposition parties to win between 15 and 20 seats. However, they ended up with scarcely any seats.
One of the things that makes the 1973 election really special is that it not only witnessed certain events, but it also led to a series of events impacting future elections. Mohiuddin Ahmed states that hardly anyone expected the first election after the liberation of Bangladesh to be challenged so severely.
That first violation of trust was the factor which led public opinion to become skeptical of elections for a very long time.
Later governments, whether civilian or military, seem to have taken the same path: controlled elections, repression of the opposition, walkover seats, and fabricated landslides. Even when elections were competitive, like in 1991, June 1996, 2001, and 2008, the mistrust that lingered never completely went away.
If the word real means totally free of any kind of controversy, manipulation, or doubt, the truthful response is probably ‘no’. Since 1973 till 2024, practically every election has had some form of baggage, whether it be boycotts, accusations of rigging, or issues regarding fairness.
The sad thing is that it didn’t necessarily have to be like this. The democracy of Bangladesh was weakened at the very beginning, and the country has been suffering the consequences ever since.
As long as elections remain merely a tool for the winning of power and are not regarded as a nationally shared process, the same question will come up after every vote, in every era.
