The student wing of former prime minister Khaleda Zia’s BNP on Thursday boycotted polls at a major public university alleging rigging, two days after their crushing defeat at premier Dhaka University.
Jatiyatabadi Chhatra Dal (JCD), backed by Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), announced their withdrawal from Jahangirnagar University Central Students Union (JUCSU) elections alleging rigging by Jamaat-e-Islami backed Islami Chhatra Shibir (ICS). ICS won a landslide victory in Dhaka University Central Students Union (DUCSU) on Tuesday while JCD rejected the poll results alleging that the election was “manipulated”. ICS is the student wing of Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami, the largest Islamist party in the country. Fears of violence prompted the Bangladesh Army to engage troops alongside paramilitary BGB (Border Guard Bangladesh) on and around the Jahangirnagar University campus on the outskirts of the capital despite its earlier refusal to be evolved for security in student union polls saying regular police should be enough to maintain order. “Ballot papers and OMR (Optical Mark Reading) machines supplied by a Jamaat-linked businessman were used in the election. We repeatedly warned the administration that this would prevent a fair election, but they ignored our demands,” JCD’s general secretary candidate Tanjila Hossain Baisakhi said. She said from the very beginning they feared the JUCSU elections to be a “staged” election and eventually the university administration “has clearly lost its neutrality”.
The university authorities were holding the JUCSU polls after a pause of 33 years while the votes were to be counted through OMR machines which identify and convert marks like filled-in bubbles into digital data for automated processing.
ISC won the landslide victory bagging nine out of 12 posts of Dhaka University Central Students Union (DUCSU) on Tuesday.