The Awami League candidate Rezaul Karim Chowdury has won the mayoral elections to the Chattogram City Corporation by a huge margin of over 316,000 votes after deadly violence and low turnout.
Published : 28 Jan 2021, 01:35 AM
Running with the ruling party’s electoral logo boat, he fetched 369,248 votes in 733 out of 735 centres, Returning Officer Md Hasanuzzman announced at the MA Aziz Stadium gymnasium after 1:30am on Thursday.
Rezaul’s nearest rival Shahadat Hossain of the BNP polled 52,489 votes with the party's paddy sheaf symbol.
No other mayoral candidate could secure more than 5,000 votes.
The turnout was 436,543, or 22.52 percent of the over 1.9 million registered voters in the port city.
After daylong voting amid allegations of irregularities with sporadic clashes in which one person was killed and scores were injured, the Election Commission began announcing the results in the evening. Voting was postponed at two centres due to irregularities.
Hasanuzzaman said it took time for the results because they did calculations manually to confirm the results from the EVMs.
In the last elections in 2015, the Awami League’s AJM Nasir Uddin defeated the BNP’s M Manzur Alam by a margin of over 100,000.
Manzur, a former mayor, had announced a boycott halfway through the ballot alleging widespread irregularities.
This time the BNP has not announced a boycott, but said the ruling party men took control of the polling stations in such a way that it cannot be called an election at all.
The polls were postponed in March last year due to the coronavirus outbreak. The pandemic has not ended, but the number of confirmed infections in daily count has dropped in Bangladesh.
Freedom fighter Rezaul, a former leader of Bangladesh Chhatra League, is a member of the influential Bahaddar family at Bahaddarhat in the city.
This is the first time he joined the race to a public office in over five decades of his political career.
After winning the nomination, which came to a big surprise to many, he had told bdnews24.com that he is grateful to Hasina and the people of the city for valuing the role he played in his political career.
Rezaul had said he would follow the path of Mohiuddin to turn Chattogram into a model city.
A senior joint general secretary of the party’s port city unit, Rezaul has established a polytechnic institute and a technical training institute.
Born in 1953, he passed SSC from Chattogram Muslim High School. After studying at Chattogram Government College, he was graduated from the Chattogram University.
When he was a student, Rezaul was acquainted with Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman.
Rezaul has also written two books – “Chhatra League Shaater Dashak Chattogram” and “Swadesher Rajniti O Ghorer Shotru Bibhishon”.