Once upon a time we had the reputation of honesty, transparency, dedication and commitment in our politics. We felt proud of our honest, courageous, dedicated, committed and patriotic political leaders like Father of the Nation Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, Hossain Shahid Suhrawardy, Moulana Bhasani, Sher-e-Bangla A K Fazlul Haque, Moni Singh etc and their followers. Despite having honest, committed and patriotic politicians in political parties, people of Bangladesh strongly feel absence of country's development friendly political environment. They undoubtedly demand harmonic co-existence, mutual respect, patriotism, highest level of commitment and respect to others ideals and belief to the political leaders and workers. But people are quite suspicious of fulfilling their desired aspirations because political parties in Bangladesh are mostly occupied by the politicians who don't have qualities like those of our previous renowned leaders. Present political programmes and agitations are completely full of vandalism, acute rampage of public and private resources and brutality of killing innocent people in the name of political agitation by political activists. Political leaders have no control over political activists. People don't want to see these occurrences in an independent country. Our leaders, freedom fighters and innocent people didn't dedicate their valuable lives in the independence war for occurrence of these types of barbarous and heinous incidents by political activists in the name of political programmes. People desperately want to get relief from these undesirable situations created by political parties. They firmly believe that we still have politicians who are honest, patriotic, knowledgeable, committed, dedicated, greedless and faithful to the spirit of independence war. They could take initiatives enabling political parties to run the country in the right track of expediting economic growth of the country through restoring political harmony and stability. They may come forward to make politics and politicians again acceptable to the people. But our existing election procedures never encourage persons who are honest, greedless, dedicated, meritorious and faithful to ideals of 1971 to come into politics. So we should bring transparency, honesty, mutual respect and trustworthiness, commitment etc in our politics by changing present election system. It is not mandatory to follow other countries' election systems in Bangladesh. Rather we may introduce a suitable model for election that enables to bring country's development friendly political environment which could be followed by other nations as a role model. The following proposal for the national parliamentary election may be considered by our politicians, election commission and think-tanks for the sake of restoring country's development friendly political atmosphere.
With the present system of government, number of seats in the parliament and constituencies remaining the same, the procedure of electing parliament members may be changed. Parliament members can be elected indirectly. Before election all parties will send a database of district-wise party leaders from all sections of the society. Leaders must have proven honesty, sincerity, dedication, intelligence, optimum educational qualifications, commitment and above all faithfulness to the ideals of liberation war. Besides politicians, government officials, teachers, doctors, intellectuals, businessmen, journalists and other professionals may have the opportunity of getting included in the database of a particular political party. Political parties must enlist their leaders in the database by addressing equitable issues of ethnic minorities, tribes, genders etc. Therefore professional and executive bodies of the country won't have access to politicise themselves being backed by political parties. Rather they will have welfare organisations. In the database there must be the information of every leader's source of income, annual income, details of personal and family members' wealth and assets, TIN number and amount of paid income tax, details of any kind of punishment/court case etc. A neutral committee of Election Commission will verify the information of leaders and according to their positive report the district-wise database of each and every political party will be published openly through electronic and print media for getting public opinion about the leaders. After getting public opinion a high powered review committee of Election Commission will review the opinions and finally approve the database. Evaluating performances of individual leaders of the database Election Commission will edit it every year. Political parties may include new names as leaders in the database maintaining the same procedure. Political parties will also submit union, upazila and district-wise database of their workers or activists to the Election Commission just to watch their activities for ensuring a harmonic and stable political environment.
Voters will give their verdict not for individual candidates but for political parties. Political parties will get number of seats in the parliament according to the proportional rate of received votes in the election. There may be the provision of getting seats in the parliament by a certain percentage of received votes. Election Commission will distribute number of seats among political parties. After distributing seats to the parties according to their proportionate percentage of received votes, rest of the seats may be distributed in favour of the party getting highest votes. Election Commission will also select district-wise constituencies for the political parties against their number of seats considering total received votes given by the voters in favour of a political party in the particular district or setting other criteria. Then political parties concerned will ask for selecting their parliament members against constituencies from the database. Election Commission will verify parliament members of every individual party whether they ensure participation of all districts and address equitable issues or not for selecting parliament members.
Election Commission will publish the names of parliament members against constituencies in the electronic and print media after getting approval from H E President of Bangladesh. Then Honourable President will ask the political party with the highest number of parliament members to form government. It could be better if there may be the provision of asking the government forming party to include other parties from the parliament to make the government having more than fifty percent voters' verdict. There may be the provision for the President/Chairman of the political parties not becoming Prime Minister or Leader of the Opposition. There will be no provision of Technocrat Minister or Adviser to the Prime Minister. It can be mentioned that a leader will get chance for two terms only to hold the positions of Prime Minister and Leader of the Opposition. All the ministers including Prime Minister will be accountable to the parliament. Any kind of allegation against ministers will be investigated by a committee of parliament members formed by the parliament. Parliament will review the investigation report and send a proposal to the President for taking proper punitive action. Similar procedures may be taken for parliament members also in case of allegation against them. Government officials, journalists, teachers, doctors and other professionals who will be selected as parliament members may not lose their job. Rather they will serve for the nation by taking leave or on deputation from respective department. In case of their involvement in corruption and unethical activities they may be dismissed from service.
Political parties must not pay any fees for election. Moreover parliament members and ministers will get a handsome amount of money as honorarium or salary and package of other allowances and logistic supports from the government so that they can ensure hundred per cent sincerity, honesty and dedication in providing services to the nation. Political parties will ensure their workers' involvement in income generating activities. Election Commission will get allotment of money to conduct election and verify database of political parties. Now the question is: how will the government ensure the huge amount of extra money to bear expenses for the said purposes? If political stability prevails in the country and politicians work honestly and sincerely, then economic growth will be expedited, foreign investment in the industrial sector will increase, unemployment will decrease and internal revenue income as payment of income tax & VAT will increase. As a result government's annual income will increase and no problem will arise to meet expenses of the government.
The above proposal is not a utopian one. Rather it could be a clue for government, all political parties, Election Commission and other concerned to come to a consensus regarding our election procedure so that political parties may encourage bringing people like honest, dedicated, meritorious and faithful to our independence war into politics for the sake of developing the country rapidly.
Email: auparbayazidkhan@gmail.com
© 2026 - All Rights with The Financial Express
