One seat and wider message of accountability

Tarique Rahman returned from New York with the usual diplomatic luggage of a prime minister after a UN General Assembly week that had bilateral meetings, investment conversations, photographs with important people and communiques about cooperation.

According to his press wing, he packed 30 official engagements into four days, including meetings involving 11 countries and discussions ranging from investment and energy security to the Rohingya crisis.

Then he came home to a demolished health centre and a wrecked Youtuber’s studio. And a growing public relation crisis. Such is the government. Foreign policy may occupy the grand rooms, but domestic politics has an irritating habit of waiting at arrivals.

For the BNP, the destruction of the RADDA MCH-FP Centre in Mirpur was particularly awkward. This was not an obscure dispute over an abandoned shed. RADDA had spent nearly half a century providing primary healthcare, maternity and family-planning services to poorer residents. 

On the night of September 24-25, more than 200 masked men allegedly entered the premises, restrained guards, looted equipment, medicines and vaccines and brought in heavy machinery to demolish the facility.

Then came the politically poisonous detail. The name of BNP reserved-seat MP Ferdousi Ahmed Mishti began appearing in allegations surrounding the group claiming the property. Mishti denied involvement and no investigation has established that she participated in the demolition. 

But in politics, the distinction between criminal liability and political liability is often the difference between a courtroom and tomorrow morning’s front page. The BNP suddenly had a problem larger than one plot in Mirpur.

At roughly the same time, Salman Muqtadir’s BrownFish Studio was smashed up in ECB Chattar. Salman initially alleged that BNP-linked extortionists were responsible. Police subsequently offered a different account: their preliminary investigation pointed to a land dispute involving New Gini Properties and another claimant, with Salman’s rented studio caught in the middle rather than deliberately targeted. 

The home minister similarly said preliminary findings indicated a dispute over roughly 35 kathas of land. That distinction mattered legally. Politically, it mattered rather less.

The images were already out…broken furniture, smashed equipment, frightened employees, a popular content creator standing amid the wreckage. Beside them were pictures from Mirpur of a healthcare centre reduced to rubble.

Governments lose public-relations battles this way. Not necessarily because every allegation against them is true, but because several ugly events begin telling the same story before an investigation has had time to tell another one.

For a ruling party, that story is particularly dangerous: that people with connections can do as they please while everyone else waits for the police report.

This is why the decision on Mishti matters. On Thursday, Mishti was instructed to resign from parliament. The prime minister’s additional press secretary confirmed that she had been asked to give up her reserved seat.

It is a severe political sanction. It is also an unusual one.

Bangladesh has seen ministers forced from office before. In 2021, Sheikh Hasina ordered state minister Murad Hassan to resign within 24 hours after offensive remarks about women triggered widespread outrage. Murad left the government, but not parliament.

Abdul Latif Siddique provides a closer, though imperfect, precedent. After his controversial remarks about Hajj in 2014, the Awami League removed him from the cabinet and expelled him from the party. The party later sought the cancellation of his parliamentary membership. 

After months of political and legal wrangling, Latif announced in 2015 that he would resign and eventually vacated his Tangail-4 seat.

Mishti’s case is different. She has not been convicted of anything, and she denies involvement. The significance lies precisely there: the party has decided that holding public office carries a political standard separate from the eventual criminal investigation.

That can be healthy… provided it does not substitute for due process.

There is another reason the resignation carries weight. MPs are not government employees who can simply be dismissed. Article 67 of the Constitution provides that an MP may resign by submitting a signed resignation to the Speaker; the seat becomes vacant when the Speaker receives it.

So asking an MP to surrender a parliamentary seat is considerably more serious than removing a district committee member or issuing the familiar show-cause notice.

For the BNP, it also answers an uncomfortable question facing every party after it reaches office: what happens when the alleged troublemaker carries your own flag? Opposition politics makes accountability wonderfully inexpensive. Every scandal belongs to somebody else. Government is where the invoice arrives.

The temptation is therefore to protect the party first: deny, delay, announce a committee and hope that another outrage arrives quickly enough to bury the previous one. Bangladeshis are familiar with the genre.

The Mishti decision points in another direction. It says, at minimum, that proximity to the ruling party need not provide automatic political insurance.

That does not settle the RADDA case. Police must establish who organised the attack, who financed it, who operated the machinery, who benefited from taking possession of the land and whether political influence played any role. Mishti deserves the same presumption against unproven criminal guilt as anyone else.

Nor does her resignation repair a health centre.

But politics is partly about setting costs. If affiliation with the governing party reduces the cost of misconduct, indiscipline spreads rapidly. If embarrassment can cost even an MP her seat, the optic changes.

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Faisal Mahmud is the Managing Editor of Daily Waadaa