Awami League's Atiqul wins Dhaka North mayor by-election with massive margin

The Awami League candidate Atiqul Islam is succeeding late Annisul Huq as Dhaka North City Corporation mayor after he won the by-elections with a massive margin.

Atiqul, a businessman and former BGMEA president like Annisul, has defeated his nearest rival the Jatiya Party’s Shafin Ahmed by 786,873 votes, according to Returning Officer Abul Kashem.

Kashem declared Atiqul the unofficial winner from the Bangabandhu International Conference Centre around 1:30am on Friday after the ballot was held from 8am to 4pm on Thursday.

Atiqul alone bagged 839,302 votes with ‘boat’ symbol in all 1,295 centres while the total votes received by the other candidates was 83,671.

The turnout was 31.05 percent, according to the returning officer.

Singer Shafin, the lead vocalist and bassist of Miles who ran with ‘plough’, pulled 52,429 ballots. 

The others in the fray were National People’s Party or NPP’s Anisur Rahman with ‘mango’, Progressive Democratic Party or PDP’s Shahin Khan with ‘tiger’ and independent candidate Abdur Rahim with ‘table clock’.

Anisur secured 8,695 votes, Shaheen bagged 8,507 while Rahim won 14,040.

The BNP, its allies and most other parties stayed away from elections to local government bodies like city corporations and Upazilas after losing the Dec 30 parliamentary polls by a huge margin to the Awami League.

The party headed by Khaleda Zia, who is in jail for over a year now for corruption, had demanded fresh polls alleging widespread rigging and intimidation of its candidates and supporters in the general election.

Officials sitting idle at Monipur High School centre at Mirpur during voting in Dhaka North mayoral bypolls on Thursday. This photo was taken at 9am. The scenario was same in many other centres. Photo: Asif Mahmud Ove

Fazilatunnesa says she has voted in all the elections since the 1952 Language Movement. This photo was taken when she was casting her vote at Wide Vision School centre in Uttara during Dhaka North mayoral bypolls on Thursday. Photo: Mahmud Zaman Ovi

Election officials, polling agents, and security personnel at different centres in the city had no work in hand amidst rains after the voting began.

Officials expected the voters to come after the rain stopped around 10am, but the polling stations remained empty.

Election Commission Secretary Helal Uddin Ahmed said the turnout may finally be around 50 percent altogether.

The number of voters in Dhaka North is more than 3 million.  

Four years ago, when Awami League-backed candidate Annisul defeated BNP leader Mohammed Tabith Awal, the turnout in the polls to mayor’s office was around 37 percent.

The BNP had announced boycott halfway through the voting in 2015.