Portraits of President Shahabuddin were removed on Saturday night from various diplomatic missions abroad, allegedly because they were sending the wrong signal.
After the July Uprising, portraits of Sheikh Hasina and Sheikh Mujibur Rahman that had for years adorned the walls of public institutions were taken down.
"When we saw that there were no portraits in the ministry, it sent a signal. Therefore, the president's portrait was also removed a few months ago," a senior diplomat stationed in a Bangladesh mission abroad told UNB on the condition of anonymity.
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While it may have been designed to avoid sending the wrong signal, many were left questioning whether the move itself was meant to send a message.
There is no legal obligation for such portraits to be hung.
However, there appeared to be tension as Foreign Secretary Asad Alam Siam and ministry spokesperson Shah Asif Rahman sidestepped questions about the issue at a briefing on Sunday.
The same day, Environment Adviser Syeda Rizwana Hasan said she had only heard the news from media.
She added that she was unsure whether such removals carried any political message.
"If it were a government decision, it would have been in writing. I don't know whether the government made such a decision. It was not discussed in the advisory council. If it is a government decision, it will come up in the meeting."
The bigger picture:
If there is to be any upheaval around the president's office, the state would become engulfed by a constitutional crisis.
Under Articles 52, 53, and 54 of the Constitution, appointing someone else as president is not possible at this moment since parliament must be in session for this to happen.
In the president's absence, the speaker can also take over duties. However, since the parliament was dissolved, there is no speaker.
Other candidates have been mentioned as well, including the chief justice. However, this would drastically undermine the separation of powers between the judiciary and the state.
How deep does Bangladesh's money laundering iceberg go?
The National Board of Revenue's Central Intelligence Cell (CIC) has found assets worth Tk 40,000 crore built in five different countries using money laundered from Bangladesh.
The information was gathered through conducting searches in seven cities of five countries since January this year, CIC Director General Ahsan Habib told Chief Advisor Professor Muhammad Yunus.
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The scale of operations was made clear by the evidence, which included 352 passports belonging to nine countries, which were bought and paid for.
The CIC team personally visited almost all of the sites and photographed them, standing in front of lavish properties.
Ahsan Habib, the director general of the CIC, said that the people involved in this money laundering ring had installed accomplices to fudge the central bank's database control system during Sheikh Hasina's tenure.
They made a lot of information disappear, but the CIC is in the process of recovering all that deleted information.
CA Press Secretary Shafiqul Alam wrote about the findings on Facebook, saying: "For hours, as the images rolled on, it felt as though we were watching a James Bond movie… But soon, a heavy sadness settled over us. After all, these were assets built with the nation's stolen wealth."
The bigger picture
The interim government has committed to bringing back wealth that was looted by those who weaponised their political connections during the AL regime.
However, the director general of the CIC made one thing clear when he said, "What we have found so far is just the tip of the iceberg."
Indeed, money laundering was a hallmark of Awami League rule.
During the party's 15 years in power:
Illicit financial outflows averaged $16 billion annually, according to the White Paper on the State of the Economy, a document commissioned by the interim government.
The latest CIC findings, which cover Tk 40,000 crore, or about $3.3 billion, barely accounts for a fraction of the total: nearly $240 billion.
AK Enamul Haque, a member of the white paper committee, said in the 15 years preceding the July Uprising, over Tk 7,00,000 crore was spent on the Annual Development Programme (ADP), of which 40 percent was looted.
Since coming to power, the interim government has repeatedly taken efforts to recover laundered money, including targeting priority cases, seeking government support in other countries, and even considering a special law to target offenders.
The bottom line:
While the CIC's investigation and findings have uncovered a significant portion of laundered assets, getting those assets back remains a major hurdle.
CIC DG Habib noted that the process of realising Tk 10,000 crore in taxes and penalties from the identified taxpayers had already begun. But are those taxpayers still within the law enforcers' jurisdiction?
And what about the other $237 billion?
Why the current iteration of the "no vote" option falls flat
BNP Standing Committee member Nazrul Islam Khan said very few people choose the "no vote" option during polls.
"This no vote provision was there only in the 2008 election. But not many people chose it."
On 11 August, the Election Commission finalised the amended draft of the Representation of the People Order (RPO), reinstating the no vote option.
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Providing an option not to vote for any candidates gives people a way to voice their dissatisfaction, improves political accountability, and may even encourage voter turnout.
The no vote provision was first introduced by a caretaker government ahead of the 9th Parliamentary Election in 2008.
It was scrapped by the Awami League in December 2009, two months after it came to power.
Since the clause did not exist during the 10th parliamentary election in 2014 and major parties boycotted polls, AL won 154 uncontested seats.
According to Election Commission data, less than 1% of voters cast the no vote in most constituencies in 2008.
In Rangamati, the "no votes" received the highest percentage of valid votes at 12.43%. It was still not enough to trigger a do-over.
The Bigger Picture:
When the no vote option was introduced by the caretaker government in 2008, it stated that if 50% of people chose to mark down the no vote option, the election to that constituency would be cancelled and a re-election would be staged.
Importantly, the no vote option also appeared on all ballots.
Although the proposed system is much the same, it has one caveat that makes it significantly worse.
The EC wants to confine its use solely to constituencies that have a single candidate. It is hard to imagine a scenario, other than major boycotts, that would result in only one candidate running for office in a democracy, making this a strange call.
The bottom line
No vote options have been introduced before, and the statistics show that they did not have much of an impact. But this may be because the act of not voting for a candidate appears to have little impact, whether under the old system or the new. Unless people voicing their displeasure through such ballots is taken into account and layered with political accountability, such as the party offering up another candidate the public may be more receptive to, little will change, no vote or not.
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