Were the general elections that brought the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) to power with a thumping majority after nearly 18 turbulent months free and fair? An audit carried out by a Sweden-based media outlet Netra News claims they were. The probe found almost no discrepancy when it compared the Bangladesh Election Commission’s (BEC) official data with data collected independently by Netra News on polling day (12 February), refuting the claims of rigged elections.

Jamaat-e-Islami (JeI), whose performance did not match up to its own expectations, was one party which had questioned the credibility of the election, describing its defeat as the result of “extraordinary engineering.” The party’s secretary-general Mia Golam Parwar had alleged that manipulations happened somewhere “between the counting of the votes and the declaration of results.” Several BNP candidates who lost the elections too made similar claims.

“They sidelined a mainstream political party (JeI) through election engineering. We have raised the issue publicly through official statements and press conferences and have also lodged complaints before the tribunal about this,” Parwar told National Herald, who lost from his stronghold, Khulna-5 constituency.

The way Netra News went about its audit is worth detailing.

The organisation........

© National Herald