e_Paper_Thursday_December 30, 2016

Opinion 23
Second time’s a coronation
Narayanganj just showed the country how a proper election is carried out
DT
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 30, 2016
Have we found a true ‘people’s champion’?
MAHMUD HOSSAIN OPU
to expect the party to lay its fort
out against a proven vote-winner
like Ivy was unreasonable. Almost
whimsical.
The conditions were ripe for a
reconciliation. And there was one,
of sorts. Or as much as there can
be between the two houses laying
claim to the soul of the Awami
League in Narayanganj.
Ignoring its Narayanganj unit’s
recommendations, the centre went
with Ivy, in what was very much
a case of the AL latching onto Ivy
rather than the other way around.
The result was never in doubt, of
course.
The BNP’s fortunes in
Narayanganj have long been on the
wane, and there was nothing to
suggest they were about to arrest
the slide. The fact that Khaleda Zia
didn’t even bother to show up and
lend her support to the campaign
said a lot about the state of play.
Osman, eager to fall in line
with the party command after a
reported telling-off, had taken
it upon himself to prevent that
occurrence, as he did once before,
famously in 1996. But this time
around there was also the distinct
lack of a challenge in the air to stir
the teapot, as it were.
And so, a bit of national-level
anti-incumbency, perhaps, ate into
her winning margin, but it was
never going to be enough.
The BNP, instead of falling
into the trap of looking at it as
a debacle, should plainly state
the hill was always too steep for
them and not read too much into
analysis of why they failed to
win as many votes as -- as what
exactly? As required to win? They
were never going to.
To prevent Ivy from winning
positively wholesome election,
right down to the post-victory
visit by Ivy to her defeated rival’s
residence, sweets in tow.
Not an accusation of voter fraud
in sight, at least not the kind we
may understand as such.
Rakibuddin Ahmad’s outgoing
Election Commission needn’t fish
for compliments, there’s nothing
genuine about whatever has been
on offer.
The country can’t wait to see
their backs. Ivy was accompanied
by her brother, carrying on
a tradition she has wound
since 2003, when she was first
elected chairman of the local
administration in Narayanganj.
She would be elected chairman yet
another time, before Narayanganj
won city corporation status.
In a sense, she is the only
politician the AL, as embodied by
the figure of the prime minister,
has bent to in the last five or six
years, recognising in her a true
people’s champion.
Will that aura brush off now
that she is to be absorbed into
the party central? Or will the AL
allow her to flourish and emerge
onto the national stage, where
she would seem to belong? Might
she get the sense of it herself, and
seek a parliamentary seat in future
perhaps?
That might test the uneasy
compromise struck between the
Osman household, and that of Ali
Ahmed Chunkha in Narayanganj
-- although nothing that a party
leader’s stern hand shouldn’t be
able to sort out. •
Shayan S Khan is Executive Editor,
Dhaka Courier, and Senior News Editor,
UNB.
• Shayan S Khan
Narayanganj’s second city
corporation elections
caused nowhere the
same drama, at least
around the day of the election
itself, as did in its first -- a
memorable contest made all the
more so by the final result.
The 2011 version featured
a thumping victory for rebel
candidate Selina Hayat Ivy, against
the Awami League’s establishment
candidate Shamim Osman, back
from being encamped in India
during the course of the two-year
interregnum summed up as 1/11,
and in pursuit of an elected office.
Having not made it for the 2008
parliamentary cohort, the mayor’s
seat, that too Narayanganj’s first at
having acceded to city corporation
status, presented a welcome
The same Ivy, only this time in what was never a contest but much
more of a coronation, registered a preciously rare show of strength at
the ballot box for the ruling party -- in the form of a victory unsullied by
accusations or indeed, evidence, of electoral malpractice
alternative.
But it was not to be. Ivy
whooped him by over 100,000
votes.
Fast forward to 2016: The same
Ivy, only this time in what was
never a contest but much more
of a coronation, or some such
ceremony, even as her winning
margin dropped, registered a
preciously rare show of strength at
the ballot box for the ruling party
-- in the form of a victory unsullied
by accusations or indeed,
evidence, of electoral malpractice.
The election was effectively
fought on the day of the AL
nomination, where Osman’s
favoured candidate was snubbed
by the party central command, and
clearly he had been swayed by his
most respected leader’s abiding
wisdom.
He was even back in parliament
now, having snuck in as part of the
unopposed batch in 2014. For him
handsomely? Even that would
have been difficult. To at least
reduce her margin of victory
significantly, showing enough
of a swing away from Ivy as
the AL candidate (compared
to her victory in 2011 as a rebel
candidate), to keep BNP interested
in Narayanganj for the next round
of parliamentary elections in 2019?
At close to 30,000, that would
seem to have been achieved.
The stage was set also, for a