Awami League’s Arafat wins Dhaka-17 by-election, turnout only 11.5%

The Awami League won the seat, though voters largely seemed uninterested in a contest held so close to the general election

The Awami League’s Mohammad A Ali Arafat has been declared the winner of the Dhaka-17 by-polls.

Arafat, well known to viewers of TV talk shows, is a member of the Awami League’s executive committee and a chairman of the Suchinta Foundation.

The researcher, who completed his higher education in the US, is the chief adviser to the Board of Trustees at the Canadian University of Bangladesh.

Running with the party’s boat symbol, he received 28,816 votes at 124 centres. Independent candidate Ashraful Alom aka Hero Alom received 5,609 votes, the Jatiya Party's Sikdar Anisur Rahman got 1,328 votes.

Dhaka Regional Election Officer Munir Hossain Khan announced the results from the 'result collection and presentation room' set up at Banani’s Vidya Niketan School and College at 9pm.

With five and a half months left before the next parliamentary election, voters seemed largely uninterested in the contest, with a turnout of 11.51 percent.

Of the 325,205 voters in the constituency, only 37,037 voted. Another 383 votes were rejected.

The low turnout can be compared to the Dhaka-10 bypolls in March 2020 when the KM Nurul Huda-led commission secured only a 5.28 percent turnout.

Two independent candidates alleged their agents were thrown out of polling centres during voting. One of them boycotted the polls after 9 am.

Hero Alom was attacked and assaulted outside a polling centre before polls were to close, allegedly by Awami League supporters. After receiving treatment at a hospital, Alom held a press conference at his home, announcing he would boycott the polls and not run for office again under the current government.

After the polls, Awami League candidate Arafat told reporters, "I call for legal action against those involved in the attack on one of the candidates. If they are our party workers, organisational action will be taken by the party. I want the truth to be revealed.”

The Election Commission also ordered action against those involved in the attack on Alom, but also said that the election had been fair.

“The election was fair and peaceful,” said Election Commissioner Md Alamgir. “This morning I went to inspect 8-10 polling centres myself and saw that things were peaceful. Another election commissioner accompanied me.”

“Voting was peaceful at all centres. We watched it on the CC cameras. There were some municipal polls outside Dhaka. All of them were fair.”

When asked about the attack on Alom, Alamgir said, “Voting took place at 124 polling centres. An isolated incident in one location doesn’t make it an unfair election.”