Electoral/Political Party Reform – 1998
1998
The first three clauses of this provision date back to 1989 in the original Rangamati Hill District Council Act and did not involve any change to existing legislation. The 1997 Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) Accord added clause 4, which stipulated that only certified permanent residents of the CHT could vote in CHT elections. The significance of adding clause 4 was that, if fully enforced, it would give the Jumma community an electoral majority in the CHT by preventing non-permanent residents (i.e., Bengali settlers) from voting in CHT elections. This would ensure that the elected representatives for the CHT were mostly tribal members. Because the Accord granted the Circle Chiefs the authority to decide permanent residency status, the addition of clause 4 would have given tribal leaders a large degree of control over who would be eligible to vote in CHT elections.
In 1998, clause 4 was added to existing legislation as called for by the Accord. The phrase “he is a permanent resident of Hill District” was inserted into the Rangamati Hill District Council Act by Act IX of 1998. Although the change was made, the resulting new law was not enforced, or could not be enforced, for two main reasons. First, the changes in the CHT Accord were in contradiction to the Bangladeshi national constitution. Faced with this contradiction, government officials in the CHT allowed residents of a district to retain their voting rights under the Bangladesh constitution. According to clause 2 (d), of Article 122 of the Bangladesh Constitution and Section 4 of the Electoral Rolls Ordinance of 1982, “A person has the right to be included in the voter list of a constituency determined for parliamentary elections, if he/she is a resident of that constituency or considered to be a resident of that constituency by law” and “a person shall be considered to be a resident of that constituency where he/she usually or generally lives.”
The Parbatya Chattagram Jana Samhati Samiti (English: United People’s Party of the Chittagong Hill Tracts), or PCJSS, in their own publications admitted that the electoral changes called for by the CHT Accord were not in accordance with the Bangladesh constitution. The PCJSS insisted that in order to fully implement clause 4, government officials had to violate the national constitution and take away the voting rights of several hundred thousand Bengali settlers residing in the CHT, many in government sponsored camps. The government thus far had been unwilling or incapable of enforcing the new law.
The second reason why the new law was not enforced had to do with the fact that tribal authorities did not gain the level of control over the granting of permanent residency certificates in the CHT as they expected. In other words, implementing electoral reform in the CHT depended upon the successful implementation of citizenship reform. Citizenship reform, however, was not implemented and this resulted in thousands of Bengali settlers being issued permanent residency certificates by CHT Deputy Commissioners, which in turn, allowed them to be put on voter registration lists. The crafters of the 1997 Accord counted on gaining control over CHT citizenship qualifications as part of their plan to prevent Bengali settlers from voting, but Bengali settlers and government officials found ways of getting around the provision.1