Bangladesh News

The Election Commission (EC) may refrain from redrawing the parliamentary constituencies if political parties oppose the move, an election commissioner said yesterday.

“We will reconsider the plan to redraw the boundaries of the parliamentary constituencies if all political parties oppose it, although it’s our constitutional duty to do it,” Election Commissioner Muhammed Sohul Hussain told reporters in his office.

Since the announcement of the plan to redraw the boundaries of constituencies last week, major political parties including Awami League, BNP, and Jatiya Party have been saying the move might end up hampering the EC’s ability to maintain its course in line with its own electoral roadmap announced on July 15 last year.

Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) ATM Shamsul Huda, who last week announced the EC’s plan for redrawing the boundaries, is likely to announce the commission’s next course of action today at a scheduled media briefing, officials in the EC Secretariat said.

Talking on the matter, Sohul however said during the electoral reform talks between the EC and political parties, that took place over the last three months, the commission informed them about its plan to redraw the boundaries of the constituencies, and none of them opposed it back then.

“Now they are opposing it. We will discuss the issue with political parties again when we will sit with them again with the electoral reform proposals,” Sohul said.

In defence of the EC’s plan, he said one of our constitutional tasks is to redraw the constituencies following every population census.

“We have to do it now since the Census Report 2001 was published recently,” the election commissioner said adding that the issue was included in the electoral roadmap at the time of its announcement.

The political parties argued, once the EC would begin the field level activities for redrawing the boundaries, it would be swamped by a large number of litigations which would end up delaying holding of the poll.

Earlier, the constituencies were redrawn in 1973, 1979, 1984, and in 1995 on limited scales. During some of those endeavours the EC had to face a significant number of cases filed by many aggrieved persons.

The EC however argued that the 2001 census report was published only recently, meaning the boundaries have not been redrawn in this decade, and since only minor changes were brought to the boundaries in the last 30 years, the existing constituencies vary dramatically in their densities of population.

The delimitation ordinance identified three criteria for redrawing the constituencies — population, administrative convenience, and keeping the administrative units intact.