Syed Badrul Ahsan writes for DOT :
ATM Shamsul Huda will be remembered for the high standards he set at the nation’s Election Commission in the five years he presided over it. When you reflect on the confidence with which he and his team went about setting the commission back on track after all the disastrous experiments it had gone through before they took charge, you will be reminded of individuals like Justice Abdus Sattar and TN Seshan. Sattar remains the man who organized, with a degree of competence rarely matched, the first general elections in Pakistan in December 1970. It is another matter that those elections were eventually set aside by the very military junta which had come into office promising democracy for Pakistan. But there has never been any question of the integrity and efficiency that Justice Sattar brought into the office of chief election commissioner.
The Indian TN Seshan, for a very large number of people in South Asia, remains the epitome of what a diligent, purposeful chief election commissioner ought to be. He was never one to be browbeaten into fear or doubt by anyone, least of all by politicians in office. What mattered for him was the purity of the elective process and he did a good job of ensuring that no hint of unfairness came to be associated with all the elections he oversaw during his term as chief election commissioner.
Our happiness today is that ATM Shamsul Huda and his two colleagues have left behind the refreshing feeling that elections do not have to be stolen to be won, that voters do not have to stay home from a sense of ennui because they know that their votes will be cast for them. You have to go back to where all such questions about the legitimacy of the electoral process began in Bangladesh, to a point where you have the notorious instance of the Justice Aziz-led Election Commission manufacturing voters out of nothing and spending tons of money on committing the felony. Again, there came with that bit of tinkering the huge probability of those holding political office returning to the same through elections that were anything but fair. Think here of the voting planned for January 22, 2007. Rigging, thoughts of it, dripped from the roof.
There is, of course, the terrible record of the Election Commission which caused Magura in 1994, a shame that was to lead us once more to deliberations on the efficacy of a caretaker system of government. We thought we had left the caretaker system behind us with the successful culmination of the general elections of February 1991. The nation went through a sea change through the overthrow of the Ershad dictatorship in December 1990 and politics ought therefore to have been restored to the niche it occupied till the early 1970s. But Magura put paid to all of that. Had we had a Shamsul Huda at the time, things would be different.
Now that ATM Shamsul Huda and his team are gone, it becomes possible for us to take a step back and observe the honesty and sense of purpose which they brought into the working of the Election Commission. Having come into office during the period of the Fakhruddin Ahmed-led caretaker administration, one that is under quite a cloud these days, Huda and his team were always suspect. There was the sordid tale of the caretaker attempt to promote a so-called minus two theory, through pushing Sheikh Hasina and Khaleda Zia out of politics. There was too the very public manner of the formation of some political parties that gave off the whiff of government involvement in the process. Besides, the excesses of the government, backed as it was by the military, in dealing with student protests (read Dhaka University, August 2007 here) and in handling political prisoners (recall the shame of politicians being subjected to degrading treatment in remand), all pointed to an eventual electoral exercise that would in the end remain devoid of meaning.
ATM Shamsul Huda proved that assumption false. Despite a shortage of manpower, despite the bad legacy the Election Commission was privy to before he came in, he went into organizing the elections in a way that would have made stronger men rethink the options before them. But then, Huda accomplished the job exceedingly well in December 2008. In an electoral exercise that was as fair as it was clean, he emerged, for all the battering he had been getting over the months, a heroic figure. His sense of duty was all. Nothing intimidated him. Not the politicians, not the caretaker government, not the myriad sceptics ready to pounce on him should he stumble somewhere.
An individual in a responsible position needs a whole lot more than personal integrity. Huda’s integrity was, and will be, beyond reproach. But a specific quality he brought into his integrity was to pass it on to all the election officials who would serve under him. His sense of self-esteem was huge, which he transferred to everyone at the Election Commission. It was leadership of a bold kind, stewardship that was infectious in its assertion. When you have a leader whose understanding of the choices before him is clear, when he knows that it is the collective weal of a nation he must channelise into the right direction, you know you cannot go wrong.
The Election Commission, through the general elections, through the by-elections, through the mayoralty elections, did not go wrong on ATM Shamsul Huda’s watch. Exercising our right to vote in line with our conscience is a truth Huda and his team put back up on the high pedestal of governance.
Therein Huda deserves our tribute. Therein Sakhawat Hussain and Sohul Hossain are deserving of our gratitude. Their successors must now convince us that they can build on this truth.
The writer is Editor-in-Charge, The Asian Age