The last nail in the coffin of democracy Mozammel H. Khan

The last nail in the coffin of democracy

Mozammel H. Khan

Published on February 13, 2007

�Two commissioners appointed to give the CEC majority�, read the headlines of the January 17 issue of the Daily Star. The widely read English Language Daily further reported, �in the wake of an impasse over preparing a fresh voter list, the government in a hasty move yesterday appointed two more election commissioners apparently to win the chief election commissioner (CEC) the majority in the commission.� The �clever government move� gave the CEC the much awaited medicine to cure his illness from which he was suffering for thirteen long days since the ruling of a High Court (HC) bench issuing some very common sense directives for the Election Commission (EC) to follow in the preparation of the voter lists. In the wake of the ruling, the CEC was so sick that he was not even able to entertain the telephone calls, a minimum courtesy, from his fellow commissioners who tried unsuccessfully more than once to get through to him! Now through the stroke of a pen of the honourable President of the Republic, who naturally under the advise of the honourable Prime Minister, has appointed two citizens of the Republic as election commissioners and the CEC, himself an honourable judge of the highest court of the Republic has miraculously given himself a clean bill of health to come back to work and hold the much over due meeting, as directed by HC, of the EC to proceed further with his agenda!

The two newly appointed Election Commissioners, the salient features of whose credentials as appeared in the news media are not any different from those of any other appointees, executive or constitutional, under the current government since its inception to the helm of the state some four years ago. Out of the two, one of them was a highly talked-about �representative� of the alternate centre of power in the EC, and was dubbed, obviously, by many as a downright adherent of the ruling alliance. His unflinching loyalty to his appointer was scrupulously reflected in his vituperative, if not virulent, comments about two of his senior colleagues (superiors a few minutes ago) when he said, �they [Munsef Ali and Mohammad Ali] know nothing. They are illiterate. They have tarnished the image of the election commission by talking nonsense, which must be stopped right away." The other commissioner, who is a retired judge of the HC, reportedly was an active member of the pro-BNP lawyer forum and was rewarded with the appointment when BNP was at the helm of the state in 1992. He, too, spared no time to jump at the fray of criticisms, however, not explicitly directed to his colleagues, but to the HC itself, of which he himself was a honourable judge until 2000. His utterances, vis-�-vis the HC directives to EC, such as, �it's not a High Court directive. It's its certain observations. It's absolutely [self] contradictory and beyond its (the court's) jurisdiction�, challenge the very jurisdiction of the court. The newly appointed commissioner further went on, "since the judgement is not lawful, the question of compliance does not arise.� Here the retired judge portrayed himself as an arbiter, not advocate, to pronounce the HC judgement of a writ of so much national importance as unlawful. If his words carried any substance, then the HC was not empowered with the authority to give any ruling pertaining to the activities of the CEC or the EC for that matter. If that were so, the HC should not have entertained the writ petition in the first place. This is a serious constitutional matter and the nation�s constitutional experts and its highest court should be dealing with it on an urgent basis. If the retired judge, with his newly vested authority has stepped his feet into a no-no territory, the HC, through its power of suo motu should be dealing with the comments, which by all standards are contemptuous of the highest order, to say the least.

The CEC, since his appointment, in the face of the disapproval of the major opposition political parties, as the principal vanguard to carry forward the most vital process of nation�s democratic exercise has been mired with controversial and partisan activities in line with the alleged blue print of �election engineering� by the ruling alliance. One after another, his indiscreet activities and injudicious declarations, rather than alleviating the suspicions of the opposition, have intensified their apprehensions that the CEC is destined to carry out the agenda of the ruling alliance, the least of which is to hold a fair and impartial election.

Earlier, the CEC was creative enough to discover 120 or so political parties to invite for dialogues and equated AL, the largest political party of the country, with any other. His comments about the AL were so imprudent that even it generated an irked advice from a leader of a component of the ruling alliance during his meeting with him. Even the PM, in her recent effort to stage a dialogue to tackle the national crisis, could not find more than two dozens political parties that would matter. The CEC went out of his way to support the appointment of the BNP cadres as the Upazila election officers by the PSC, believed to be a far fetched evil design of the government to implement its master plan of �election engineering�, as alleged by the opposition.

For long, it has been a national consensus to make the EC independent from the executive branch of the state, especially to make it free from the clutches of the PM�s office. The HC has already issued a rule (January 2, 2006) on the government and the EC asking them to explain why the functioning of EC Secretariat under the jurisdiction of Prime Minister's Office will not be declared illegal. The HC ruling went further by asking them to explain in three weeks why government's formulation of rules for the EC will not be declared illegal and unconstitutional as the Constitution and the Representation of the People Order 1972 empower the EC to formulate its rules. Notwithstanding the aforesaid HC ruling, the opinions of a few former revered CECs and the common sense observations of the citizens from all spectrums of the nation about the lack of independence of the EC, the CEC went out of his way once again to declare that he did not find any lack of independence of the EC under its present structure.

The CEC was not at all perturbed by the news report that the ruling alliance cadres have been delegated to make the new voter list, which he, disregarding the stiff opposition from the other two election commissioners, initiated. An observation of the HC, a part of the ruling of January 4, 2006, reiterated, �a fair voter list is the prerequisite of a free and fair election and if any confusion is created in public mind in this regard, the EC will be considered to have failed in discharging its constitutional duties.� Notwithstanding the very explicit ruling of the nation�s highest court, given in a very transparent and unambiguous terms, the CEC, still a judge of the appellate division of the supreme court chose to ignore and defy the directives. In the pretext of the so-called illness, he was allegedly working behind the curtain to collude with the government to appoint the two new commissioners to hand him the majority in the commission to carry forward with his agenda. With a dysfunctional parliament, a partisan President in the helm of the state, a controversial to be chief of the future CTG and the PM�s refusal even to discuss the opposition�s reform proposals as regard to the EC and the CTG, the democracy in Bangladesh was already on notice to get ready of its burial. With the appointment of two extremely partisan election commissioners, believed to be in collusion with the CEC, the government has hammered the last nail in the coffin of democracy. The CEC, with his newly acquired majority in the EC and its unchallenged indemnity to defy the ruling of the HC, is in the commanding seat to steer through all his ideas and plans, which he alone considers lawful and appropriate for the benefit of the nation�s arduous journey through the process of democracy! At the end, it all boils down to the ordeal of how deviously the citizens of the Republic, in particular, and the international community, at large, could be fooled by the CEC and his patrons.

Dr. Mozammel H. Khan is the Convenor of the Canadian Committee for Human Rights and Democracy in Bangladesh. He writes from Toronto, Canada.