By Wang Xuemei, Xinhua,
Dhaka : With few days left, Bangladesh is in full swing for its long-awaited ninth parliamentary elections scheduled on Dec. 29 as all-out measures are taken to create congenial environment for voting.
To build up foolproof security for the elections, Bangladesh’s Home Ministry will field a total of some 1 million members of the law enforcing agencies across the country to maintain law and order during the elections, according to reports of local media.
It would request a record security spending of 1.29 billion taka (about 18.4 million U.S. dollars) compared with previous occasions, leading daily The Financial Express reported earlier quoting finance ministry officials.
So far, some 50,000 armed forces personnel have started patrolling across the country and hundreds of thousands more security personnel will join them during the elections, the home ministry said.
Home ministry officials said the security personnel would work as striking forces to thwart any trouble and “maintain peace in every constituency across the country.”
A total of 35,216 polling centers will be set up across the country with 177,107 polling booths for voting. At each polling center, some 14 to 18 law-enforcers will be deployed to maintain security.
Amid growing security concerns, Chief Adviser of the Bangladesh caretaker government Fakhruddin Ahmed has asked field-level government officials to take highest cautionary measures to check further emergence of terrorists before the election.
The head of the government also cautioned the field-level government officials that any kind of forgery, rigging and willful irregularities would not be tolerated at all.
The current caretaker government since taking office on Jan. 12,2007, has promised to organize the general election by the end of this year.
In the long-drawn election preparation, the Election Commission completed the national voters’ list with photographs and fingerprints in July this year. Over 81 million voters were registered, of which 50.9 percent are females.
The Election Commission further completed the registration of political parties contesting in the elections in late November and almost finalized the candidate list.
According to the commission, more than 1,500 candidates of 39 registered political parties as well as independent candidates will contest for 300 seats of the parliament.
For the sake of conducting election campaigns, the government withdrew all restrictions on meetings and rallies from Dec. 12 and fully lifted the 23-month-old state of emergency from Dec. 17.
However, the Election Commission has imposed a ban on poll campaigns from midnight of Dec. 27 to avoid any untoward incidents before the Election Day.
Besides, to ensure a free, fair and credible election in the country, more than 500 foreign observers as well as some 182,000 local poll observers will monitor the elections.
A high-powered election monitoring team from the United Nations will also arrive in Dhaka one or two days before the election.
Bangladesh’s 9th parliament elections was originally due on Jan.22, 2007, but was postponed following violent disputes over the impartiality of election issues, which also led to an imposition of a state of emergency from Jan. 11, 2007.