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Tuesday | September 29, 2026 | Dhaka
Municipal polls

30 oppn strongholds identified as ‘risky’

 New Nation
 Published: 12:00 AM, 25 December 2015

Ehsanul Haque Jasim :
One third of the total polling centres of the December 30 municipal polls has been identified as ‘risky’. These are opposition candidates’ strongholds and where they have good chance to come out with flying colours, sources said.
The Election Commission (EC) has identified 1,184 polling centres as risky out of 3,403 across the country. Most of these are in Khulna Division, where 195 out of the 471 centres (41.4 percent) have been marked as hazardous centres.
The EC prepared the list of the ‘risky’ centres on the basis of a report received from the Home Ministry, sources said.
According to the report, Dhaka Division has 348 risky polling centres out of 991, Rangpur has 118 out of the 304, Rajshahi has 195 out of the 471, Sylhet has 45 out of the 189, Barisal has 63 out of the 167 and Chittagong has 169 out of the 480 centres.
On the voting day, each centre will have 20 Police, Ansar and Coastguard members. In total, nearly 70,000 members from different law enforcing agencies will be on duty on the day.
Officials of the EC Secretariat said, the EC has marked those centres as unsafe where BNP and Jamaat-Shibir, or any other party, may spark trouble. They fear that clashes may take place in some centres, especially where more than one candidate of Awami League and BNP are contesting. The EC believes vested groups may try to spark trouble in several places.
The Home Ministry’s report said, there is a possibility of disorder in different polling centres to establish supremacy. BNP and Jamaat-Shibir men may create trouble to make the environment unstable as well as to make the election questionable. Several political parties may create chaos in different polling centres for getting majority votes. Factional clashes may take place between the factions of local Awami League in those municipalities where AL rebel candidates are contesting for the mayor post, says the report.
The Home Ministry suggested that deployment of full-time mobile court observation in the areas where minority people are living before the polls.
BNP leaders, however, said that most of the centres have been identified risky in a bid for election engineering, as the ruling party wants to capture the those centres which are strongholds of the BNP’s candidates with support of law enforcers.
BNP Joint-Secretary General Ruhul Kabir Rizvi Ahmed on Thursday said that the government had devised to manipulate the polls. The EC is working as a puppet body of the government. The ruling party will try to capture the polling centres, even of the strongholds of the BNP’s candidates where the EC will help the ruling party in various ways, he said.
says that the EC is not paying any heed to BNP’s complaints about violation of code of conduct by the ministers and MPs and several other complaints.
Election Commissioner Shah Newaz said that the commission would take action for violation of electoral code of conduct even by the VIPs. “We have asked the returning officers to go for direct action through magistrates in this regard,” he added.