Chaos and confusion spread all over the country less than a day after the Bangladesh Cricket Board sent letters to various affiliated bodies, seeking councillorship ahead of the planned election. The letters, sent on Wednesday, were the first significant steps taken towards holding the election, which has been a long time coming since an Appellate Division order on July 25 removed the legal barriers that had been preventing it.
The BCB took nearly two months to send out the letters, allegedly doing so as a favour to the current ad-hoc committee members, who have reportedly been busy for months with behind-the-scenes election machinations.
Rival groups alleged that BCB incumbents were busy trying to convince district sports association and club officials to nominate their preferred persons as councillors, who will in turn elect 24 BCB directors.
The letters were greeted with chaos, as many district and divisional sports organisers alleged that they were kept in the dark about who received them on behalf of their respective organisations and about who is nominating whom.
Kazi Shamim Ahsan, general secretary of the Khulna District Sports Association and a former councillor, complained that they had not received a letter officially but he had come to know that it had reached the division.
‘As far as I know, [the letter] is with an influential member of the division, who is using all his power to get the form signed by the DC [district commissioner] in favour of a person designated by BCB president Nazmul Hasan,’ Shamim said on Thursday.
‘The DC is being pressurized to nominate their selected persons. If that was their intention then there was no need to ask for the councillors,’ said Shamim.
‘Apart from Magura and Khustia, no other district organisation from our division has received the letter. Those two district organisations have been loyal to Nazmul,’ he added.
Abdullah al Fuad Redwan, a Jamalpur district organiser and a former BCB director, threatened to lodge a case against Jamalpur DC Delowar Haider for keeping all of the local organisers in the dark over the process.
Delowar was besieged in his office for several hours after he nominated Mirza Jillur Rahman, a relative of a ruling party lawmaker, as a councillor.
‘I will go to the court on Sunday. He nominated someone without consulting us, which is totally against the constitution,’ said Redwan.
Delowar rubbished Redwan’s claim and said that there was no external pressure on him.
‘He [ Zillur Rahman] is a member of the DSA and was given the councillorship considering his contribution,’ Delowar told New Age.
Organisers of other district and divisional sports organisations, as well as several club members, complained along the same lines.
Former BCB president Saber Hossain Chowdhury, who is also running against Nazmul for the president’s post, went further, alleging that huge sums of money are being transacted under the table over the councillorship.
‘There is high-scale exchange of money involved for getting councillorship,’ Saber alleged during an impromptu press conference at his residence.
‘It only proves that the nomination process cannot be democratically done according to the constitution,’ he said.
‘I think there are severe irregularities in the way the councillors’ letter was distributed. The time frame is very short and the introduction of the form is questionable,’ said Saber, who ran the BCB from 1996 to 2001.
-With New Age input
