Feature 
 

Outrage at the Polls

Casting one’s vote is a human right but many South Asian regimes ensure polling
goes their way because this enhances their stay in power, no questions asked.

By Minahil Mahmud | April 2020

In the troubled democracies of South Asia, the pattern of election cycles has always remained the same, with campaigns marred by violence and frequent incarceration, an opposition alleging vote tampering and a result that a large part of the country refuses to endorse.

In the final days of 2018, Bangladesh elected - for the fourth time - Sheikh Hasina Wajed of the Awami League, a seasoned politician with a cloud of scandals looming over her rule. Today, two years since the Prime Minister took office, the predicament of human rights in the country invites skepticism regarding her government’s role in the matter. The ever-growing list of blocked news agencies and imprisoned academics is reminiscent of all the human rights violations that the country’s National Human Rights Commission brushed under the rug over the past two years.

Only minutes into reading about the commission’s recent record online, one could unravel a grave history of an impotent institution, with a lengthy past of letting down the people it was mandated to protect. Its structural deficiencies allowed for the commission to skirt its responsibilities and for the government to exploit the gaping hole in accountability mechanisms to enforce a claustrophobic grip on the country.

Human rights activists have long complained to deaf ears the internal organization of the commission, which they say is designed to create chaos. For example, the sitting commission was selected entirely by a hand-picked committee of government appointees, through a process that was far from transparent or participatory. With only one civilian representative - that too an honorary member - and the entirety of its senior staff saturated with deputies from government ministries, the public was clueless as to who was running the institution - and how.

“We never know who the alternatives for the positions are. At the very least, two names should be nominated for each member’s position,” says Sayeed Ahmad of Front Line Defenders, an international human rights organization. All this undoubtedly contributed to Bangladesh’s NHRC being awarded B, rather than A status by the Global Alliance on National Human Rights Institutions, most recently in 2015, on the basis of its compliance with the Paris Principles, the global yardstick for measuring human rights institutions’ performance. To top it off, in August 2019, the Secretary General of the commission, Dr. Saiful Islam was arrested by the police for alleged misuse of official funds.

Now the state of the institution has risen to relevance once again. This time it is due to a rapidly growing list of news agencies, websites and blogs that are becoming victims, one after another, to a dogmatic policy of internet surveillance and filtering of political views - a clear indicator of an increasingly paranoid government.

The Information Ministry ordered that all outlets of news would require official review and registration - with dire consequences for those who failed to comply, including permanent shutdown and incarceration.

“On December 29, 2019, access to the Sweden-based investigative journalism website Netra News was blocked in Bangladesh after it published a report alleging corruption by Obaidul Quader, an influential party leader and a minister in the Awami League government,” reads a January 2020 report by the Human Rights Watch. The agency now joins a long list of others, including internationally acclaimed Al Jazeera and The Wire, for publishing content criticizing Hasina’s regime. Such behaviour, for local and foreign onlookers alike, points towards the possibility that this government has much to hide.

There is a rewind needed to the day of Hasina’s most recent election to get a sense of what exactly that is.

In the Subarnachar region of Naokhali, a woman was assaulted and gang-raped because she voted for an opposition party candidate. According to her husband, after the event, a group of men forced their way into the family’s home, tied him and their four children up, and sexually assaulted the woman in the dead of the night.

According to a BBC report, she was allegedly warned by the men earlier that day while at a polling center not to vote for the opposition candidate. Afterwards, she told the local media that she had angered ‘Rahul Amin,’ a local Awami League leader, thus inciting him to send the men after her, though he became a prime suspect himself. Yet, despite such overwhelming evidence and motive, the NHRC proved to be a great disappointment when it published its report on the incident. It established no connection whatsoever between the assault and the polls.

“There is no proof that the woman was assaulted and raped for voting in the 11th parliamentary election. No evidence was found that the accused belonged to the Awami League or that she was tortured and raped by any Awami League activist.”

It is no secret that the Awami League government has made enemies everywhere. Not long after coming into power, it was faced with the challenge of dealing with hundreds of protesting students, teachers and journalists who took to the streets in outrage after a string of extra-judicial killings by security forces. Moreover, the government was attempting to balance a precarious relationship with local Islamist groups whom it was also afraid to upset, thus adding to its unpopularity. But unpopularity is a common trait for most sitting regimes in the region. Governments misuse institutions that are meant to keep tem in check to either manipulate popularity ratings, or to simply clamp down on the dissenters, as in Bangladesh’s case, and things get problematic.

When the Human Rights Commission in Bangladesh was unable to impartially resolve a case of grave social injustice because something as heinous as rape had also been politicized, the danger zone had been crossed. By the looks of it, there is no foreseeable limit to Sheikh Hasina’s rule. But the NHRC will be held accountable sooner or later.

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